Episode 49: Yoni Assia - Co-Founder and CEO of eToro

**Amir Fischer** (0:00)
This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, a social investment platform with over 35 million users and more than a trillion dollars in facilitated volume. Yoni grew up in Tel Aviv, served in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and launched eToro in 2007 with his brother Ronen. The platform pioneered social trading, giving ordinary people the ability to automatically copy successful investors. In 2010, eToro launched CopyTrader. In 2012, Yoni was co-offering papers on blockchain alongside Vitalik Buterin, before Ethereum even existed. Today, eToro is valued at over $2.5 billion and has been a driving force behind legacy brokers eliminating commissions. In our conversation, we covered the philosophy behind social trading, building with his brother for nearly two decades, his early work in crypto, and his view on the future. If you enjoy this episode, please follow the podcast and rate it 5 stars on Spotify. Subscribe on YouTube and share it to anyone who you think might find it valuable. I really enjoy speaking to Yoni and I hope you guys enjoy listening. Thank you. Yoni, thanks for joining me. Really appreciate it.

**Yoni Assia** (1:05)
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

**Amir Fischer** (1:07)
Well, I want to start where I always do, the beginning. Your father, if I'm correct, founded a company called Magic Software. Your mother runs a copyright law firm. Your dad would stop the car outside the bank to look at stock quotes when you were growing up and discuss them with you. Very interested. Tell me about growing up in that household. What was Yoni like?

**Yoni Assia** (1:27)
So, as you know, I started the company together with my older brother. So it's always interesting to get like the perspectives of two brothers who grew in the same place where I totally admired my father and his work and joined. I think I started doing presentations for Magic Software when I was very young, like PowerPoints and CAD and 3D stuff. I started programming on Magic when I was very young. And like I always knew I wanted to be CEO, founder and build a company. My brother went into art. So I did masters in computer sciences. My brother did eventually masters in the Royal College of Art and Industrial Design. And like our perspective was very different growing in the household, where I thought that business was super, super interesting trying to replicate it. And sometimes Ronen actually saw sort of the stress and how intimidating business is. And that actually led to the invention eventually of Vitoro, because he used to tell me, I have an accountant hobby since I was 13 He used to look at what I do and say, like, you're sitting with multiple screens, charts, excels, you bring the paper with the stock quotes every evening. And I look at what you do, and it just looks the most horrible user experience. And that's sort of where it clicked. And we said, okay, let's build an investment platform, a trading platform where we simplify the user experience and make it easier to open the global markets for everyone to trade and invest in a simple and transparent way.

**Amir Fischer** (3:10)
And you told me you were kind of doing this kind of stuff from the age of even 13 What were those early experiences like doing your teenage years, kind of getting into business and being entrepreneurial?

**Yoni Assia** (3:23)
No, so 13 was less entrepreneurial. It was more about when I started trading. And I remember like my first stock trade, I always say like three big aha moments, now four big aha moments, but now maybe accelerating my aha moments, but was like figuring out the internet very young, right? So I was not born into the internet. And then I remember like downloading Simpsons episodes in text back in the 90s. I feel so old now.
And then my first trade, when I did it, and I realized like I just clicked something on the internet and it changed the price of the stock. And I was like, whoa, I'm like, you know, a young kid with access to, you know, a very small account. But when I swipe the bid, bid ask in the book, it actually changes the price in the stock market. So that for me was like an aha moment of how everything is connected in capital markets and the money markets. And then the third of fourth would come much later on, which is Bitcoin, at early beginnings in 2010 And now absolutely mind blown by AI and just playing with my open claw the entire last week, which is quite crazy.