Yesterday my friends Baiju and Vlad at Robinhood announced their A round of funding to the public. Robinhood is a free brokerage app, yes, free, like completely free, as in no commissions. Baiju and Vlad both have backgrounds in high frequency trading, and degrees from Stanford. They are some of the brightest you will meet.

They are what I like to call, Economic Terrorists.

What is an economic terrorist? Think about the massive amount of power and influence that globalization and technology has given to transnational terrorists (the real scary kind). Think about the damage that a small group of disenchanted or brainwashed people can do to our society (9/11). Think about the tools they now have at their disposal and the speed at which they can gain a following ISIS. Terrorism isn’t about building new things, it’s about using asymmetric warfare to burn things down to the ground. Terrorists don’t have to win for others to lose, in many cases they aren’t trying to “win” anything. There’s a great line in the last Batman movie where Alfred says “some people just want to watch the world burn”.

Economic terrorism isn’t about watching the world burn, or hurting people, it’s about watching an inefficient industry burn to the ground, whether you win or not as the group who did it. Baiju and Vlad are economic terrorists, they are going to burn the brokerage industry to the ground whether they ever make a dollar or not. It’s my belief that they will by the way, there are so many other ancillary services and analytics that you can provide to an installed user base of millions of traders, they shouldn’t have a difficult time building a business.

But will it be the size E-Trade or Schwab? No. It might not even be the size of Interactive Brokers.

But who cares. They don’t own those businesses. They owe nothing to the industry. They can step in with their superior technology and willingness to burn it all down, so that they can give the consumer a much better deal and experience while building a business of their own.

I like to think of us at Estimize as economic terrorists of sort. Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, Capital IQ, Factset, all hide their estimates behind a terminal paywall for at least $1,500 per month. We made it free on the front end to view. Will we capture the $500M or so in revenue that TR generates from their estimates business, probably not, but it doesn’t matter if we destroy it along the way by making the whole industry more efficient and better for the consumer. We’re selling our data through our API and soon Excel plugin, and will be selling premium analytics and all sorts of other stuff on the front end. I don’t care if we burn this industry to the ground, because someone was going to do it eventually, whether it was us or not.

And that’s the point here. This economic terrorism is an inevitability. If you put technology and capital in the hands of enough people, someone will make every market more efficient. Jobs did it with music, Bezos did it with books. It’s all happening. And this economic terrorism is GREAT for consumers. The amount of goods and services you can access per dollar these days is skyrocketing. The public’s almost pornographic fixation on income disparity is so misguided, income is not the piece of the equation in quality of life that is the difference maker right now, it is the massive deflation in cost per good/service.

Baiju and Vlad are going to burn the brokerage industry to the ground, and everyone but a few very large companies is going to benefit.

Long live the economic terrorists.