We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Deon Yesudas. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Deon below.

Deon, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

Euphoria wasn’t born in a boardroom. It was born in the frustration of a teenager staring at a screen, trying to make sense of a financial world that wasn’t built for him.

Every resource said the same thing in the same way: walls of text, dry quizzes, jargon written for adults who already knew what they were doing. Nothing was designed for how our generation thinks, learns, or moves. And the more I looked around, the more I realized I wasn’t alone. My friends were hitting the same wall. My classmates were tuning out the same content. The problem wasn’t that teens didn’t care about money. The problem was that nobody had ever made it worth caring about.

So I found two co-founders who felt exactly what I felt, and we stopped waiting for someone else to fix it.

We built Euphoria around a simple but powerful belief: there is a massive difference between reading about investing and actually thinking like an investor. One gives you information. The other gives you instincts. So we combined both, wrapping real financial education inside games that put you in the market, with real-time data, real consequences, and real lessons that stick.

It wasn’t a smooth road. We were teenagers trying to build something that professionals had never quite gotten right. But we leaned on everyone willing to help: friends who believed in us, a business teacher who pushed us further than we expected, and eventually a CFP-backed firm that certified our curriculum, because we refused to build something that was just cool. We needed it to be credible.

Euphoria exists because we lived the problem firsthand. And we were just stubborn enough to actually solve it.

Deon, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Deon Yesudas. I am 16 years old, a rising junior at Emerson High School in McKinney, Texas, and the co-founder of Euphoria, a financial education platform built specifically for teenagers.

I was not always an entrepreneur. Honestly, business was never really on my radar until last year, when I took my first business class and something just clicked. It opened my eyes to a world I had never seriously considered, and from that point forward, I could not stop thinking about problems worth solving.

The one that stuck was personal. Like a lot of teenagers, I was trying to figure out investing and kept running into the same dead ends: articles written for adults, jargon that assumed prior knowledge, and learning formats that felt more like homework than anything actually engaging. I looked around and saw my friends struggling with the exact same thing. That frustration became the foundation for Euphoria.

Euphoria is an all-in-one investing education platform that combines gamified lessons, real-time paper trading, and AI-powered tools into one seamless experience, built for the way Gen Z actually learns. We are currently in beta, and we have already done our first pilot with friends and family to test and sharpen the product.

What sets us apart is credibility paired with accessibility. We partnered with a wealth management firm to get our curriculum CFP-certified, because we never wanted Euphoria to just be fun. We wanted it to be trustworthy. That combination, a product teenagers actually want to use backed by lessons professionals actually stand behind, is what we are building toward.

I am most proud of three things: the app and games we have developed from the ground up, the partnerships we have built to make the content credible, and the pitch competitions we have won along the way, which have shown us that this idea resonates far beyond our friend group.

I am 16, I am just getting started, and I am building something I genuinely believe the world needs. That is really all there is to it.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

The most honest answer to this question takes me back to last year, watching my friends board a flight to Florida for DECA’s International Career Development Conference while I stayed home.

I hadn’t made it. And that stung in a way that’s hard to describe, because this wasn’t just a competition to me. Personal Financial Literacy is the exact subject that inspired me to build Euphoria. It is what I care about more than almost anything. Not qualifying felt like failing at the thing I was supposed to be best at.

I had two choices. Walk away from it, or come back harder.

While everyone around me was on break, I was studying. Eight hours a day, every day, drilling through insurance and taxes, two of the most dense and unglamorous corners of personal finance, until I knew them cold. No audience, no applause, just me and the material. Personal Financial Literacy is one of the most competitive events in all of DECA, and I knew that going in. But I refused to switch to something easier just to improve my odds. If I was going to prove something, it had to be in this event.

This year, I qualified. Not just for State, but for ICDC, placing top 10 in all of Texas and earning a spot on the international stage.

The difference between last year and this year was not talent. It was the decision I made while I was sitting at home in that disappointment, that this year would be different, and then actually doing the work to make sure it was.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

The one that stuck with me most is Atomic Habits by James Clear.

There is a line in that book that completely reframed how I think about everything: you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Before I read that, I was operating like most people do, setting big goals and hoping motivation would carry me there. What I didn’t have was a system.

That idea changed how I approached DECA. My goal was to qualify for ICDC. But a goal alone didn’t get me there the year before. What got me there this time was building a system: eight hours a day, every day over break, working through insurance and taxes until the concepts were second nature. Not because I felt like it every morning, but because I had built a process that didn’t depend on how I felt.

It changed how I approach Euphoria too. Building a startup as a teenager with a full course load, DECA, and everything else pulling at your time means motivation will fail you constantly. What keeps things moving is having systems in place that make progress happen regardless of energy or mood.

Atomic Habits taught me that the goal is almost beside the point. Build the right system, stay consistent, and the results take care of themselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://euphoriainv.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deca.deonyesudas/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deonyesudas
• Twitter: https://x.com/deon_yj
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/deon_yj/