Interesting interview today in Israeli business website Globes with CFD broker Plus500 co-founder and Managing Director Alon Gonen. Plus500 is arguably one of the most successful forex startups from Retail Forex’s golden age of new firm creation in the late 2000’s, having successfully gone public on the London Stock Exchange (LON:PLUS) with a market cap of about $1 billion, and quarterly revenues topping $50 million.
All that with just over 60 employees.
As the interview is titled We want to make Plus500 much bigger, clearly Gonen and his team have even larger plans for the company.
Interesting notes in the interview include:
- The source of the initial capital invested in Plus500 by Gonen came from Interlogic, Gonen’s first company, which operates the Play65 backgammon website. He got $10 million from selling it in 2007.
- Gonen met the other five founders of Plus500 in high school, or later at the Technion (Israel’s leading sciences-focused University).
- Plus500 has only just over 60 employees. This is due, among other things, to the company’s high level of automation, and to a careful selection of programmers.
The complete interview can be seen on Globes’ website.