The Legend
Every financial giant's story starts somewhere. Robinhood's begins, as the story goes, in a closet — where the Tenev family is said to have kept its savings stored not in a bank, but as copper pots and pans, a hedge against local hyperinflation.
"The Original Store of Wealth" is a personal family story told by Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, in multiple interviews. As a young child, Vlad lived with his extended family in 1990s Bulgaria. After the fall of communism, his country faced economic turmoil — high inflation starting in the early 1990s, building into hyperinflation around 1997, one of the most extreme cases of local currency devaluation in the world at the time.
Vlad's grandfather was a doctor for the Bulgarian maritime forces based in Varna, with connections at the port among people involved in importing and exporting goods. During this period of hyperinflation, instead of holding on to devaluing cash or checks, he swapped his salary and pension for copper cookware.
Copper was seen as a more reliable asset for its durability and usefulness — and, most importantly, it served as a tangible store of value as the national currency collapsed around a young Vlad and his family.
In multiple interviews, Robinhood's co-founder describes how his grandfather stockpiled so many copper pots in the closet that any time the door was opened, they would fall out, clanging loudly to the floor.
"He [his grandfather] didn't have anything like Robinhood, he didn't have any way to invest in stocks. So he had this closet in his apartment where you just open the door and copper cookware would fall out……That was the store of value."
— Vlad Tenev, 2025Copper cookware was Robinhood before Robinhood, and Vlad himself has joked about tokenizing it:
If you look closely, he even has a framed picture of copper pots hanging in his office.
