In brief
- AI could lead to more “single-person” companies, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said.
- Speaking at Bitcoin 2025, Tenev said that AI could enable more value to be created from minimal resources.
- He compared this to how Satoshi Nakamoto created the biggest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.
Robinhood boss Vlad Tenev said that artificial intelligence will lead to minimal staffing requirements in companies—and compared such hypothetical structures to how Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin.
Speaking at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, the payments entrepreneur said that AI-powered “single-person companies” would become the norm, along with tokenized assets.
The Robinhood CEO and co-founder alluded to Satoshi Nakamoto—Bitcoin’s mysterious, pseudonymous creator (or creators)—saying that the leading cryptocurrency was created by one person and now people can invest in it.
“I think you’ll have more single-person companies, and you have to imagine that they’ll be tokenized, and they’ll they’ll trade on blockchains—just like other assets,” he said. “So you’ll be able to essentially invest in a person or the economic activities of a project that is run by a single person.”
He added: “That’s Bitcoin, in a sense, right? It’s the personal brand of Satoshi Nakamoto, backed by technology.”
Satoshi Nakamoto released a white paper on a cryptography blog at the end of 2008 before mining the top cryptocurrency’s first block on the distributed ledger known as a blockchain in 2009. He then disappeared and no one knows who—or where—he (or she) is.
But Nakamoto’s creation spawned a multi-trillion crypto industry, with countless more subsequent digital coins aiming to do just what Bitcoin promised it would do—and more.
And the technology that Nakamoto created has now lots of other use cases—many mainstream—other than payments. For example, Walmart has used blockchain to track its food supply chain to increase safety, tokens are used to represent unique artwork and video game items, and major banks have deployed it for their own financial products.
Talk that AI will streamline businesses has been a hot topic for years now, and many are predicting it could lead to huge job losses.
But Tenev sounded more upbeat about how it would help entrepreneurs. “One of the things that AI is making possible is more and more value being created with fewer and fewer resources,” he said.
Robinhood is a trading platform that allows its users to buy and sell stocks, commodities and cryptocurrencies. The app has expanded its crypto arm in recent years, offering more and more digital tokens for trading—including meme coins.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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