Robinhood

Sea Group

Robinhood

Robinhood makes money in ways that don't involve charging users directly. The biggest revenue source is payment for order flow (PFOF) — when users place a trade, Robinhood routes it to market makers like Citadel Securities, who pay Robinhood for the right to execute the trade.

This generates hundreds of millions annually. Robinhood also earns interest on uninvested cash sitting in user accounts, margin lending (charging interest when users borrow money to trade), and Robinhood Gold — a $5/month subscription for larger instant deposits, professional research, and higher interest on cash.

Sea Group

Sea runs three distinct businesses under one roof, and the genius of the structure is how they feed each other.

Garena is the gaming division. It develops and publishes games — most famously Free Fire, which Sea built itself after years of just licensing other people's games.

Free Fire launched in 2017 and became a phenomenon in emerging markets. It's a battle royale game optimized for low-end Android devices and slow internet connections.

Exactly the phone most people in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and India actually own. Garena makes money through in-game purchases — skins, characters, seasonal passes.

At its peak, Free Fire had over 100 million daily active users.

Shopee is the e-commerce marketplace. It operates like a hybrid of Amazon and eBay — sellers list products, buyers purchase, Sea handles payments, logistics coordination, and marketing.

Shopee makes money through advertising, transaction fees, and value-added services for sellers. It's now the dominant e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and has a significant presence in Brazil.

SeaMoney is the fintech arm. It offers mobile wallets, digital payments, buy-now-pay-later, and banking services through MariBank in Singapore.

The pitch is simple: hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia are unbanked or underbanked. Give them a mobile wallet tied to their Shopee account and they'll use it for everything.

It's the super-app play, executed patiently.

Robinhood

Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt met as physics and math students at Stanford. After graduating, they moved to New York and started two fintech companies that sold trading software to hedge funds.

While building tools for Wall Street, they noticed something absurd: it cost brokerages essentially nothing to execute a trade electronically, but they were charging retail investors $7-10 per trade.

The math was simple. Electronic trading had driven costs to near zero, but brokerages kept the old pricing because customers didn't know better.

Tenev and Bhatt thought: what if we just charged zero? In 2013, they founded Robinhood with the explicit mission of democratizing finance — giving everyone access to the stock market with no commissions, no minimums, and a beautiful mobile app.

The app launched in 2014 with a waitlist that hit 1 million people before the product was even available. The pink-and-green design, the confetti animation when you made a trade, and the simplicity of the interface made investing feel approachable.

For millions of young Americans who had never bought a stock, Robinhood was the entry point.

Sea Group

Forrest Li moved from China to Singapore in 2005 to do his MBA at Stanford. He didn't go back.

In 2009, he founded Garena — which literally means 'Global Arena' — as an online gaming platform for Southeast Asia. The region was massively underserved.

Hundreds of millions of young, mobile-first users with low PC penetration but exploding smartphone adoption. Nobody was building for them.

Li saw that gap and went straight at it.

Garena started by licensing popular PC games — League of Legends, FIFA Online — and localizing them for markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. It was a straightforward licensing model, unglamorous, not the kind of thing that gets TechCrunch headlines.

But it worked. Garena quietly became the dominant gaming platform across Southeast Asia.

The company rebranded to Sea Limited in 2017 when it IPO'd on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $884 million. By then, Li had already launched Shopee in 2015 — an e-commerce marketplace — and SeaMoney, a digital payments and financial services arm, was taking shape.

Three businesses. One holding company.

The bet was that gaming would fund the others until they could stand on their own. That's exactly what happened.

Robinhood

Robinhood grew by making investing feel like a game. The app was designed to be addictive — swipe to trade, confetti for your first purchase, notifications about stock movements.

It was investing designed for the smartphone generation. Critics called it "gamification of finance." Users called it the first trading app that didn't feel like it was designed in 1997.

The referral program was massive. Both the referer and the new user got a free stock when someone signed up.

People were getting free shares of Apple or Ford just for downloading the app. It spread through college campuses like wildfire.

By 2020, the average Robinhood user was 31 years old — decades younger than the average brokerage customer.

Zero commissions forced the entire industry to follow. In October 2019, Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E-Trade, and Fidelity all dropped their trading commissions to zero within days of each other.

Robinhood had single-handedly destroyed the commission-based brokerage model that had existed for decades.

Sea Group

The counterintuitive move was using gaming to subsidize e-commerce. Most tech companies pick a lane.

Sea used Garena's cash flows — which were enormous when Free Fire was at its peak — to fund Shopee's aggressive, money-losing expansion. They didn't need to raise debt or dilute shareholders to burn cash in new markets.

The gaming division was basically an ATM.

Free Fire itself was a masterclass in product-market fit. Instead of porting a premium game to low-end markets and watching it fail, Sea built a battle royale game from scratch that ran on 1GB RAM Android phones with patchy 3G connections.

The game was optimized for exactly the hardware that 800 million people in emerging markets actually owned. Nobody else was doing that.

Shopee's growth hack was localization taken to an almost absurd degree. They didn't just translate the app.

They hired local teams in every market, ran country-specific campaigns, integrated local payment methods, and partnered with local logistics providers. In Brazil, they ran Shopee-branded motorbike delivery.

In Indonesia, they integrated with hundreds of local courier companies. The playbook was: be more local than the locals.

The final piece was the flywheel. A Garena user downloads Free Fire, spends money on in-game items using SeaMoney's wallet, then starts buying physical goods on Shopee with the same wallet.

Three products, one ecosystem, one user. That's the compounding effect Li was building toward from day one.

Robinhood

GameStop was the worst week in Robinhood's history. In January 2021, Reddit's r/WallStreetBets community drove GameStop stock from $20 to $483.

Millions of Robinhood users were buying. Then on January 28, Robinhood restricted buying of GameStop and several other meme stocks.

Users could only sell, not buy. The stock crashed.

The backlash was nuclear. Users accused Robinhood of siding with hedge funds against retail investors.

Vlad Tenev was dragged before Congress. The real reason was less sinister but equally damaging — Robinhood's clearinghouse (DTCC) demanded $3 billion in additional collateral due to the extreme volatility, and Robinhood didn't have it.

They had to raise $3.4 billion in emergency funding over a weekend. The company that built its brand on democratizing finance had restricted the most democratic stock trade in history.

The payment for order flow controversy never goes away. Critics argue that PFOF creates a conflict of interest — Robinhood profits by routing user trades to market makers rather than getting users the best possible price.

The SEC has considered banning PFOF entirely. If that happens, Robinhood loses its largest revenue source.

Post-IPO performance was brutal. Robinhood went public in July 2021 at $38 per share.

The stock briefly hit $70 on meme stock momentum, then cratered to under $8 by mid-2022 — a 90% decline. The company laid off 9% of staff in April 2022 and another 23% that August.

Sea Group

The post-pandemic collapse was brutal and nearly existential for the stock, if not the business. During COVID, Sea was the perfect story — gaming was up, e-commerce was up, digital payments were up.

The stock hit $372 in October 2021. Market cap touched $200 billion.

Sea was the most valuable company ever to come out of Southeast Asia.

Then the world opened back up. Free Fire's daily active users fell off a cliff as people left their homes again.

Garena had funded the empire, and now the empire's funding engine was broken. Sea lost its license to publish Free Fire in India after the Indian government banned Chinese-linked apps.

India had been a massive market. Gone overnight.

Sea responded by cutting costs aggressively — laying off staff, retreating from markets like France, Spain, Poland, and India where Shopee had expanded without yet reaching profitability. The stock fell from $372 to under $40 by early 2023.

A 90% drawdown. That's not a correction.

That's a reset.

The deeper challenge is structural. Shopee competes with Lazada (backed by Alibaba), TikTok Shop (which has exploded in Southeast Asia), and increasingly with Temu and Shein.

These are not small competitors. TikTok Shop in particular has disrupted the e-commerce landscape in Indonesia and Thailand faster than most analysts expected.

Sea has scale and local knowledge, but the fight for Southeast Asia's e-commerce market is far from over.

Robinhood

Robinhood is a stock, options, and crypto trading app. The core product lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, and options with zero commissions.

Robinhood Crypto adds trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Robinhood Gold is the premium tier — higher interest on cash, larger instant deposits, and Morningstar research reports.

Robinhood Cash Card is a debit card that earns cashback and rounds up purchases to invest spare change. Robinhood Retirement offers IRA accounts with a 1% match on contributions.

Robinhood Legend is their new desktop trading platform aimed at active traders.

Sea Group

Free Fire is the crown jewel — a mobile battle royale game with over 100 million daily active users at its peak, built specifically for low-end Android devices in emerging markets. It's been the most downloaded mobile game globally multiple times and remains dominant across Southeast Asia and Latin America despite declining from its COVID peak.

Shopee is Sea's e-commerce marketplace and the business with the highest long-term ceiling. It operates across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, and Brazil.

It's consistently ranked the most-visited e-commerce site in Southeast Asia. The app includes livestream shopping, local seller tools, Shopee Pay, and Shopee Food in select markets.

SeaMoney — now operating as the financial services umbrella — includes ShopeePay (mobile wallet integrated with the Shopee checkout), SeaBank (a licensed digital bank in the Philippines and Indonesia), and MariBank (a digital bank in Singapore). The pitch is financial inclusion for the underbanked, backed by transaction data from Shopee.

Robinhood

Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, NEA, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, D1 Capital

Sea Group

Sea went public in 2017 without needing a late-stage mega-round from the usual suspects. But it had institutional backing from early on.

Tencent is the most significant external shareholder — the Chinese gaming giant held a roughly 22% stake at various points, which gave Sea both credibility in gaming and a complicated geopolitical headache as anti-China sentiment grew in Southeast Asia and the U.S.

Naveen Tewari's General Atlantic and other growth equity funds participated in rounds before the IPO. Post-IPO, Sea attracted attention from large institutional investors including T.

Rowe Price, BlackRock, and various sovereign wealth funds drawn to the Southeast Asia growth story.

Masayoshi Son's SoftBank also took a stake — consistent with SoftBank's bet on emerging market consumer internet platforms. The Tencent relationship is the most interesting one because it's both a competitive asset (access to gaming IP and distribution) and a liability (political risk in markets sensitive to Chinese corporate influence).