🗣️ Investor Talk #50: Leif Abraham

An exclusive interview with the Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Public.com

Sep 18, 2025

Welcome to Investor Talk — where we interview successful investors to uncover their journeys, strategies, and the lessons they've learned. Get inspired by real stories and gain valuable insights to sharpen your own investment approach.

For this 50th edition 🎉, we bring you an exclusive interview with Leif Abraham, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Public — one of the fastest-growing next-gen investing platforms. Leif shares more about Public, how he believes AI will shape the future of investing, and powerful lessons on long-term investing. Check out the full interview below 👇

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Name: Leif Abraham @leifthunder
Age: 39
Company: Public @public
Role: Co-Founder, Co-CEO
Residence/Country: New York, United States

Introduction

What inspired you to start Public, and what’s your background in investing?
Public was born out of the realization that most modern investing platforms were heavily focused on speculation — crypto-only players, CFD trading in Europe, options trading in the U.S. What was missing was the next-generation Schwab: a platform for people who want to build serious, long-term portfolios.

For me personally, I didn’t really start investing until after I was 30. That used to be the norm — people only started thinking about investing after marriage, kids, or an inheritance. Today, financial literacy starts earlier, technology makes onboarding seamless, and fractional assets make investing accessible. We saw an opportunity to build something for this new generation that wants to take investing seriously as a lifelong endeavor.

What is Public, and how does it stand out from other investing apps?
Public is built for those who take investing seriously — focusing on long-term wealth building, not just lottery-ticket trading. We give investors access to multiple asset classes, research tools, and features that help them build well-balanced portfolios.

Technology is what truly sets us apart. Many incumbents still suffer from outdated, clunky systems with frequent downtime. At Public, we focus on stability, security, and modern user experiences.

A good example is our new AI-powered tool called Generated Assets. It lets anyone turn an idea into an investable index — for example, you could create an index of ‘CEOs who do a lot of podcasts’ and instantly see the companies, performance backtests, and even an asset score showing the risks. It’s a way to build personalized, flexible portfolios that traditional ETFs can’t offer. This kind of innovation is how Public stands out from the crowd.

What’s the long-term vision of Public?
We believe AI will transform the investing experience. Traditionally, you either did everything yourself — charts, tables, full self-directed trading — or you handed everything over to a financial advisor. AI allows us to move from that binary world to a spectrum.

We call it guided investing: the platform becomes your sparring partner. You bring ideas, and AI helps you discover, test, and refine them. Tools like Generated Assets are just the beginning. Over the next five years, we want Public to be the place where AI doesn’t just support research but actively helps investors design and execute strategies, while still keeping them in control.

So the vision is to make investing more personalized, more intelligent, and more accessible — blending the best of self-directed investing with the guidance technology can provide.

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Strategy & Philosophy

What is your personal investing philosophy?
I’m fairly concentrated in my investments. Partly that’s because of my position as founder — much of my net worth is tied to my own company. But even in my stock portfolio, I focus on a few names.

The reason is simple: I only invest in what I truly understand. I have a strong background in technology, and I feel I can analyze tech companies better than most. Because of that understanding, I’m comfortable taking more concentrated positions and more risk. To me, concentration builds wealth, as long as you actually understand what you’re investing in.

What does “long-term investing” mean to you?
For me, long-term means at least five years, but often ten or more. In my buy-and-hold portfolio, which holds most of my liquid wealth, I don’t expect to sell any position for years unless the thesis changes.

At the same time, I do keep a separate short-term portfolio where I trade options and take riskier bets. That’s not about wealth building — it’s for learning and challenging myself. But my core approach is long-term compounding in companies I believe will grow steadily for decades.

Market & Trends

How do you see the current market?
Markets right now are in an early, exciting but also risky phase. A lot of money is going into building the infrastructure for the future, especially around AI, but mainstream adoption isn’t here yet. That creates a situation where sentiment can swing: first excitement, then doubt when the returns don’t show up immediately.

That’s part of the cycle. To me, this feels a lot like the early internet. There may still be a bubble phase, but the fundamentals are real this time — these companies already have revenues and efficiencies, unlike many dot-com firms back then.

For investors, the key is to stay focused on the long term, be prepared for volatility, and make sure you have cash on the sidelines to take advantage when markets dip. I don’t feel fear in those moments — my only concern is whether I have enough liquidity ready to buy.

Which trends do you believe will shape investing over the next 5–10 years?
At the highest level, I still believe in AI. It will reshape almost everything, and we’re only at the beginning. Today the focus is still on building infrastructure, but over the next decade AI will be integrated across industries from pharma to defense as adoption grows.

Beyond AI, I also see opportunity in Europe. As a German, I sense a cultural shift: less bureaucracy, faster execution, massive investment in infrastructure and defense. If that continues, it could spark a new wave of growth in the region.

So for the decade ahead, the combination of global AI adoption and a reinvigorated Europe are, in my view, two of the most important themes shaping the future of investing.

Mistakes & Learnings

What is the biggest investing mistake you have made?
I always lose money when I invest in things I don’t truly understand. Following someone else’s trade blindly — maybe after hearing a few sentences that sounded right — that’s when I lose. I rarely lose when I invest in areas I actually understand through experience and my own research. The mistakes always come when I act emotionally or just follow others.

If you could give one piece of advice to investors, what would it be?
Do the work. Take the time to truly dig into the research — even run your own spreadsheets on companies. It’s very easy to get excited and make wrong decisions based on anecdotal data, comments you’ve heard from others, or numbers you’ve picked up on CNBC. You might think you understand it because you can repeat those numbers out loud, but without doing the work yourself, that’s just false confidence.

Leif’s Favorites

📖 Favorite book: The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky

🎧 Favorite podcast: The Rundown created by Public @rundowndaily_

💬 Favorite quote: “Time in the market beats timing the market.” — Ken Fisher

👤 Favorite role model: Warren Buffett — not just for his performance, but because he shows how doing the right thing often leads to the best long-term results, focusing on strong leadership, treating employees well, and solid business ethics.

Where can we find more info about you?
You can learn more about Public by visiting public.com — sign up and get an account 😉. To follow me personally, connect with me on X: @leifthunder

That’s a wrap!
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