Ep. 7 - M1 Finance CEO, Brian Barnes: Leveling the Playing Field

Brian Barnes is the CEO of M1 Finance, the #2 behind the commission-free trading platform, Robinhood. Listen as Brian takes us through his business, the industry and some fascinating lessons along the way. If you have found this valuable, please consider leaving us a review as it will help more people find it! Thanks you're awesome! You can find more information and content by going to these places: Website: https://www.investingcity.org YouTube: Investing City Twitter: investing_city Instagram: investing_city Or feel free to email us at service@investingcity.org If you would like $10 off/month on a Dynasty Membership, just email us with the keyword "Podcaster Elastimer" and we'll hook you up! (it had to be a strange yet memorable keyword right?!) Again, we really appreciate that you would take the time to listen. Hope it was valuable. Let us know if you have any questions! Below you will find our entire conversation transcripted for those with hearing problems or just if you like reading more than listening. Enjoy! Ryan Reeves 0:02 Let's start with a little bit of your background. So you went to Stanford undergrad and then you work for a consulting firm can you just tell us kind of about Stanford and what you wanted to do kind of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Brian Barnes 0:19 yeah for sure so in all actually just start the story a tad bit earlier that was raised in a family that was financially oriented a you know sort of expose me to the notion of investing in an early age give me access to a brokerage account and you know it was very young at the time sort of 1011 years old and it just immediately LaShawn as you know this is interesting fun engaging sir became a hobby of mine of investigating stocks placing a conviction bet on it and you know sometimes be right and sometimes being wrong sometimes very very wrong so you know, do that middle school high school into college did good. undergrad at Stanford where I majored in econ and math. And so sort of stayed in that financial realm. And, you know, when you're in Stanford for your, sort of, in the heart of Silicon Valley, seeing companies that didn't exist three years ago, there, you know, seemingly IPO and very egreigious sums of money. And so you can see a lot of ideas come to fruition in a pretty quick way, which got me interested in starting them one later down the line. But yeah, I did a stint as a equity researcher at a hedge fund and then worked in management consulting prior to starting at one. Ryan Reeves 1:35 Gotcha, that's awesome. So I wanted to talk about you latching on to investing. So is there a reason that you found investing really interesting or you found that you just had a natural knack for it? Or kind of what was that reason? Brian Barnes 1:50 Yeah, I think it's, you know, I think it's just a general intellectual curiosity and trying to understand what makes things, the way they do and the notion of investing or at least the, you know, I have ascribed to the long term value investing sort of mindset in that area is sort of just taking a company, figuring out, you know, what they do, what's their competitive advantage? How are their position in the marketplace? How do they have pricing, power circle, you know, aspects of how do they operate in this altar, complicated world? How do they navigate it? How do they create their niche, and, you know, to solidify their position in sort of understanding the fundamentals of business to do that, and then ascribing a you know, viewpoint of, Okay, what is that worth? And I think that's a very interesting intellectual problem to try to solve. And then you add the sort of entertainment value of there's money on the line. So if you're right, it pays off and you know so i think it's just a very interesting hobby to undertake that sort of test your intellectual prowess or to text as...