Vlad Tenev is the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood Markets Inc (HOOD), but his first venture into the financial markets was through a software company, Chronos Research, which he and Baiju Bhatt founded to build the technology and software to support fully-automated trading.

"We built the technology and licensed it to financial institutions who couldn't really compete," Vlad Tenev said in an interview on the "Earn Your Leisure" show. These were companies that were still executing trades at desks with phones, he explained.

As the company began to scale, Tenev and Bhatt realized they lacked passion for the end result that would come from the enterprise business they were building.

"Our customers were already rich. I mean, they were institutions, they had money," Tenev said. "And we were kind of helping them adapt to a new environment, giving them better technology, but what we really were after was building a consumer product and actually improving the lives of everyday people."

Inspired By Steve Jobs: Tenev recalled watching Apple Inc (AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs unveil new products at Apple events and he became inspired.

During the 2010 Apple event in which the company released the first iPad, Tenev took inspiration from the way Jobs presented a new consumer product.

"I still remember watching that keynote and just thinking like, how awesome it is to roll out a consumer product and to actually have everyday people wanting what you are building," Tenev said. "We wanted to do that and we saw an opportunity."

The opportunity was in creating a platform that didn't charge users fees for trades and having a user interface that was built to be used on a mobile device, he explained.

"When we got that idea, we knew it was a big idea."

The Robinhood co-founders were right. Today, Robinhood offers commission-free stock and crypto trading to more than 21 million monthly active users. The company that's "democratizing finance for all" reported quarterly revenue of $565 million in its most recent quarter, representing an increase of 131% year-over-year.

Photo: Tom Coates, Flickr