Social media changed everything from news consumption to shopping. Now, Dub thinks it can do the same for investing through an influencer-driven marketplace where users can follow the trades of top investors with a few taps. Think of it as TikTok meets Wall Street.
Founded by 23-year-old Steven Wang — a Harvard drop-out who began investing in second grade with his parents’ blessing – Dub is betting the future of investing isn’t about picking stocks but instead picking people. The app allows users to follow the strategies of traders, hedge funds, and even those mimicking high-profile politicians. Instead of making individual trade decisions, Dub users can copy entire portfolios.
The concept has struck a chord. Dub has already surpassed 800,000 downloads and raised $17 million in seed funding – with a new round seemingly in the works. Less clear is whether Dub can avoid the pitfalls of previous fintech startups.
Inspired by Gamestop
Retail investing has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. The days of $7 trading commissions and clunky brokerage interfaces were blown apart roughly a decade ago by mobile-first platforms like Robinhood that invited people to trade for free. At the same time, social media is reshaping how people, and particularly members of Gen Z, make financial decisions.
As a Harvard student during the pandemic — one who was trading from his dorm room “because you couldn’t really do anything at school” — Wang came to believe these two trends, retail investing and influencer-driven decision-making, were on a collision course. Between the Gamestop saga, Elon Musk’s ability to “move the Dogecoin and Bitcoin markets with every tweet,” and people’s willingness to “really follow ideas and individuals to a whole new level,” Wang decided to drop out in 2021 and start building Dub.
Right now, the platform’s average user is between 30 and 35, says Wang, though New York-based Dub is clearly finding its way in front of an even younger audience. In recent weeks, this editor’s 15-year-old has asked more than once about “investing like Nancy Pelosi” after marinating in Dub ads on Instagram.
Pelosi isn’t personally trading on Dub; it’s just a trader on the platform mirroring her disclosed moves. Still, the idea has caught fire. “Nancy Pelosi is up 123% on Dub with real capital,” says Wang, “and we’ve made our customers millions of dollars since that portfolio was launched on the platform.”
Dub isn’t free. Wang was determined to generate revenue from the outset, and Dub does that today through a $10-per-month subscription model. Wang says further that some “top” portfolios on the platform charge management fees and Dub takes a 25% cut of those fees.
In the meantime, Dub has scaled in part through organic growth. “Creators who are good traders on the app are incentivized to bring their audience,” says Wang. Dub is also investing aggressively in advertising, leaning heavily into Meta ads in particular to acquire users, including on Instagram. “We’ve been really lucky where I think the broader American population really believes there are other people out there that have an edge over them when it comes to the investing world,” says Wang.
Fighting words
The question now is whether Dub will follow a similar path as other fast-growing fintech startups, many of which have found themselves in the crosshairs of regulators. Robinhood disrupted finance by making trading free, but it also faced regulatory scrutiny ahead of its 2021 IPO, ultimately ditching a feature that showered users with digital confetti every time they made a trade.
Dub says it’s keen to avoid the same mistakes. The company spent more than two years working with FINRA and the SEC before launching, ensuring its model complied with financial regulations. “We didn’t just navigate regulation at Dub — we embraced it,” Wang says. (Like Robinhood, Dub is a fully licensed broker-dealer.)
A big distinction, argues Wang, is that Dub is designed to educate users, not just encourage blind speculation. The platform displays risk scores, risk-adjusted returns, and portfolio stability metrics to help investors make informed decisions, he says.
He suggests it’s safer for investors than Robinhood. Says Wang: “I have a lot of respect for what [CEO] Vlad [Tenev] has done in making trading free. But at the end of the day, making it super easy to trade without expert guidance, without education, is really just gambling for the broader population.”
To underscore his point, Wang points to the decision of Robinhood — along with Coinbase and other exchanges — to make the meme coin TRUMP available for customers ahead of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. While it initially surged in price, its price has plummeted since. Says Wang, “I think fundamentally the incentives are just misaligned between these big platforms that are public companies now that need to make money” and that “generally” their customers have “probably lost money.”
(Worth noting: in a separate, recent conversation with Robinhood’s Tenev about Dub, Tenev proposed to TechCrunch that copy trading could become of greater interest to regulators, and that Dub may not yet be under the “magnifying glass” because of its comparatively smaller size.)
Either way, not everyone is sold on Dub’s vision. The biggest knock against such platforms, says critics, is that stock picking underperforms passive investing over the long run, with studies showing that most actively managed funds fail to beat the S&P 500.
It’s a criticism with which Wang is familiar — and on which he’s quick to push back. For one thing, he argues that many such studies are “cherry-picked.” (“I bet a lot of those are sponsored by the passive investing index companies,” he says.)
Further, says Wang, there’s a reason that actively managed hedge funds like Citadel are thriving. “If you look at what the ultra wealthy can do, they’re giving their money to Ken Griffin of Citadel, [because] they’re consistently putting up non-correlated returns year after year after year,” he says.
If one more broadly “looks at the growth of the hedge fund space and the asset management space,” continues Wang, “there’s a reason why it’s growing. It’s because they are making money for their customers.”
