Interview with Pierce Crosby of TradingView
In our January interview we caught up with Pierce Crosby, General Manager of TradingView, one of the fastest growing and most exciting fintech companies in the world. Prior to joining TradingView in May of 2019, Pierce spent five years at StockTwits in a number of leadership roles, including director of business development and revenue strategy.
TradingView was founded in 2011 by three Russian serial entrepreneurs: Stan Bokov, Denis Globa and Constantin Ivanov. The founders had previously worked together creating the award winning MultiCharts trading platform.
TradingView is a financial platform that enables traders and investors to analyze, discuss and trade markets all in one place. Users have access to free cutting-edge charts and analysis and can publish their ideas and communicate in real time. The web based-platform is built in HTML5 and requires no installation.
Today, TradingView has grown to be the world’s largest community of traders and investors, with 10 million monthly active users from over 150 countries. Additionally, 40,000 publishers, brokerages, and fintech companies use their technologies and tools across the financial web. The TradingView team has grown to over 200 people globally.
Before we jump into the interview questions, let’s briefly cover some of the milestones in the history of TradingView.
In 2013, TradingView won a place in the Techstars Chicago accelerator program, one of only ten selected out of over nine hundred applicants. TradingView received $18K in seed funding and had the opportunity to work with top tech industry mentors.
After graduating from TechStars, TradingView was able to secure $3.7M in financing from Irish Angels, TechStars, iTech Capital, and a number of leading angel investors. The company made a major leap forward in May 2018 when it raised $37M in Series B funding. The round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Jump Capital and DRW Venture Capital, an arm of the global trading firm DRW.
In April of 2019, TradingView announced the acquisition of TradeIT, a company that built an API infrastructure that enables live multi-broker trading on apps and websites. TradeIT co-founders Nathan Richardson and Betsy Eisenberg had previously led the development of Yahoo! Finance.
In December of 2019, TradingView began working closer with brokerage firms, with the launch of Top Brokers. The product aims to increase financial transparency, trust and accountability between brokerage firms and investors within the TradingView ecosystem. Verified users who have a confirmed account with a specific brokerage firm can leave reviews. Meanwhile brokers are able to engage existing customers and those looking for a brokerage solution.
TradingView recently moved its headquarters from New York to London. Can you tell us about why you chose London?
Sure thing, and thanks for having me. It’s important to note that we have always had a strong presence in both countries, and the “move” is really a cosmetic one. We will continue to scale our teams on both sides of the pond.
From its early days TradingView has had a global perspective. As part of its worldwide coverage, TradingView has subdomains for different countries, where people communicate and publish ideas in the local language. Which regions are in focus for expansion in 2020?
From a hiring perspective, we’re focused on the US and UK, but our community growth is global and organic, so we don’t limit where we can grow. Today, we host over 20 different language sites, and if we see demand for a new language, we’ll launch it. The US and UK may be strategic for centralizing operations, but tomorrow we may wake up and Brazil is growing at a couple 100 percent per month! We have to be vigilant across the board so we’re ready for these markets to scale.
While millions of traders are using your platform each month, you are also reportedly working on offering services to financial institutions such as banks and brokers so that they can integrate your technology into their platforms. Can you talk about your expansion into working with financial institutions?
It’s a great area of expansion for us and we’re really happy with the progress we’ve made in such a short period of time. TradingView.com has always provided individual investors access to advanced trading and charting tools, but very few people know just how broad a spectrum of tools we have under our belt to offer the financial services industry. Trading firms, brokerages and asset managers have been the early adopters, but now, we’re working with banking partners, corporates, as well as a broad spectrum of media companies.
TradingView currently has premium membership plans and a limited number of ads on the platform. Can you tell us more about the revenue model of TradingView moving forward?
We can’t talk too much about the details of each business line, but it’s important to know that our mission is – and has always been – providing value for the individual investor. If you continue to “wow” your customers, every single day, then revenue is a byproduct of your success.
While eToro is a brokerage firm, it is also a giant in the world of social trading and has raised over $200 million in funding. Can you share your reflections on this company and its rapid growth?
Both companies have been absolute rocket ships in terms of user growth, and we admire their hard work. It’s not easy building an international community, and you have to respect those who have made big strides like eToro. Stan [Bokov] might be best to reflect on “Ten years at TradingView”, but from my vantage, it’s been great to watch such hard work yield the results these guys have produced. Also, I have to say, success is never a straight line up and to the right.
On the Bad Crypto Podcast, Stan actually bounced around the idea of a TradingView digital coin, that could be used as an internal currency. Any chance we will one day see a crypto product from TradingView?
We have an internal product wish list that’s more than ten years long. Where crypto products fall on the priority side of things, I can’t really say.
TradingView covers a broad variety of global markets including stocks, bonds, forex, cryptocurrencies and futures. Can we anticipate additional expansion into markets such as options?
Likewise, options is on a product list, but can’t say too much about timing.
TradingView has a very intuitive and user-friendly interface. Can you talk about your approach to user experience and how you plan to continue developing it?
Well thanks for the compliment and glad it works for you. As mentioned above, everything we do at TradingView ties back to the community. From partnerships, to new datasets, to new UX, tools, and analytics; everything has to serve the users. We realize there’s a lot of things that just don’t exist in the market today, and a lot of our recent analysis has been around “is this actually something people want? Or does this not exist for a reason?”
In my view, a major part of TradingView’s success in attracting a huge audience was by delivering an outstanding product for free, something that you normally would expect to pay for. In this way, it seems like creating value for the user has been your highest priority. In closing, can you tell us a little more about your core values and goals as a company?
Sure thing. And you’re definitely reiterating a lot of what I’ve said above, which is great. So yeah, to close it out, we’re growing like crazy, but not losing track of what counts. TradingView is always going in the corner of the little guy, and the more tools and features we can offer to individual investors – for free – we’ll do it. We’ll bend over backwards to do it if we have to. I do yoga now, so that’s actually easier, but yeah, anyway, we are kind of insane about user needs. As a company, if your actions are always reflective of “what is good for the community” then you can do no wrong. That’s the ethos at TradingView.