No one at Ledger is here because they want to build the future bank. The only physical thing in the world that bridges the gap between the physical world and the digital world is your Ledger. Calling Pascal and saying, 'Dude, I think your company's going to be huge.' We're trying to get from 10 million people in secure self-custody to 100 million, and if anybody has a better idea, we're all ears. Whether we released Stax one year ago or release Stax now in Flex etc., these are still by far the best products in the industry and will be the best products in the industry for the next years. Most definitely said the plan: hard work, results, good living. Stacks came to market after 3 years. The moment we sit down, we say, 'Okay, we need Flex,' and it hits the market after 9 months. You could say this year is the worst year for cybercrime every year for the rest of your life and be correct. You don't need to check your facts on it; you'll be right. We know that unless you are seeing and verifying what it is you're signing on a secure screen, you can't be secure. Blind signing is like unsafe sex: it's fun even until it's not. Not self-custody? Why crypto? Could move to 2034. Where would Ledger be? Whenever you have a new technology, you have a gold rush, you have a bubble, the bubble pops, and then you get 30 years of sustained growth. You need protection, you need security. Only if you have security can you be free.
Hello and welcome to the Ledger podcast. I'm Mo, your host, and we are back with a new format of the podcast recording from a brand new Ledger Studio which is located in Ledger's 106 headquarters in Paris. Joining me today to celebrate Ledger's 10-year anniversary are Pascal Gauthier, Ledger CEO, and Ian Rogers, Ledger Chief Experience Officer. Let's dive in.
Ian, welcome to Ledger Studio.
Hey Mo, what's happening?
I mean, it's great, it's great to have you both here. It's the first podcast actually after a few formats, so this is the first time I've sat in a chair in this room. So let's, let's at the table like we're recording from our brand new studio at the 106 headquarters. Pascal, tell us a little bit about the story of the building and how it came to be Ledger headquarters. I knew you were pretty much involved in the project from the beginning.
Yeah, look, so as a company evolves, like you evolve in terms of how many people are working at the company. It's very simple, and real estate is always something that you have to sort of worry about: what kind of real estate for what moment, for what team. And Ledger started in 2014 with just 10 people, so the team at the time was working in the basement of a Bitcoin co-working house in Paris, and you just needed 15 seats. And today we have more than 600 employees; we reached 900 employees at some point back in '21, '22, I think. And so the scalability of your real estate and where you bring people is something that you always have in mind as a CEO. And then there was the event of 2021, you know, working from home and the COVID pandemic. And for me it was obvious that we were going to go back to the office for a few reasons, very practical reasons actually. I thought about the younger people working at the company, and I thought that for them it would be horrible to work from home forever because actually you go to work because you want to be part of a team, you want that team spirit, you want to meet with people. Your colleagues at some point become your friends, and that's how you build a life, right? It's different for older people maybe—like your life is settled, you have your family, you have your kids, etc., so you're sort of less excited to go to the office. But nevertheless, whether you're young or old, if you want to be part of something, to have a place to meet is very important. And finally, Ledger does hardware, and hardware you have to touch, and we build an experience, so you need to be close to people physically to be able to engage and see on the screen what's going to be the experience, the software experience around the hardware, etc., to design the product together. Something very important: it's not too dissimilar to what Apple did in Cupertino where they designed that big building. You have to be somewhere to build that hardware together. And back in 2021, I didn't believe the working from home forever, and so we decided to do that transaction and to get Sens, which is 10,000 square meters in the heart of Paris, in the Marais, and to make it a fantastic building, not only our headquarters but also a beacon for the crypto industry, not just in Paris, not just in Europe, but for everywhere in the world. But I want to turn to Ian because Ian and I thought about this together, especially about the nature of the building and why we wanted the headquarters the way we designed it. And I think Ian can do a much better job than I would to describe what this building is really about.
Well, first of all, I agree with you on going back to work. When COVID hit in 2020, I was at LVMH, and LVMH actually went back to work very quickly; it's part of the culture there. And I understand, I have a very particular experience with remote work. When we did Winamp back in the late '90s, we were completely remote, and then many times after. I actually spent a lot of time managing teams between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and even with two offices, you end up kind of factionalized—like, 'Remember the San Francisco people? Those LA guys don't get it,' you're like, 'Wait, we're all on the same team.' And what I saw over time is that full remote is definitely possible, but partial remote is incredibly difficult. Those people on the outside, good luck with mobility when you're that one person in Montana doing your job from there. So for us, being in Paris and having a place to gather is a really special place. I've been working here for nine years now, and it's totally different than working in Silicon Valley. For somebody who's American, I understand completely why someone doesn't want to commute from San Francisco to Cupertino; that's a very different thing. I came here on my skateboard today, through Paris in one of the coolest parts of town, and definitely the coolest building in this neighborhood, partly because it's the tallest building in the Marais, so you have this incredible view from this building. But what Pascal was alluding to is making this a place that's not just for us, but for the whole community. So much of what we are doing in the world of digital assets is teaching people, onboarding, bringing new people into the space, to Ledger, to various blockchains, digital art. There's so much to learn coming into the space. Ledger Academy, which Mo is in charge of, is incredibly successful because people have questions, they turn to Google, and they end up on ledger.com. And this is the physical instantiation of that. We really want this to be a place where someone could walk in off the street and buy a Ledger and get something special that they couldn't get in the town where they live, and of course talk to us if they have questions. Our customer care team answers them all day online, and they could easily be answering those for people walking the building as well. But even more importantly, really having this be a hub for the whole community. We have a couple of events over the next couple of days, but if you look at what's going on the rest of the year, hackathons, meetups, a viewing party for the Satoshi documentary. There's so much that can and will happen here, whether it's community events like a morning run or a hackathon. What we're trying to build overall is a community of communities, and it means a lot to us that we get to play that role in such a special place. I'm pretty happy to be in Paris. There's a different thing—I've been in LA, I've been in San Francisco, and this is a really different thing. And the office where the Ledger offices are represents that. One final note: I think ultimately it's about ambition and expression of ambition. Ledger is a global company; we are not a small French crypto company. We actually are a global company who people rely on for a very large percentage of the total crypto market cap. So we take that seriously, and growing from where we are today into a much larger company is our ambition, and this building is an expression of that.
Yeah, I love that. And it's also happening at a pivotal moment for the history of the company. It's Ledger's 10-year anniversary. Having a building like this, I've been bringing people into the building for the past three months, and it's true that everyone feels that it's such an exciting thing for Paris and for them as well because they see what they could do with Ledger inside such a building. But let's take a few steps back and talk about how you two met and how that relationship unfolded into becoming what it is today, basically building the future vision of Ledger. And just before we do that, Pascal, you are involved with the story of Ledger since almost the beginning as a seed investor. Maybe tell us about the first time you heard about Ledger and what was that light bulb moment where you're like, 'Okay, that's an interesting project,' because back then crypto wasn't necessarily a thing. So tell us a little bit about this, and then we'll get into the story of how you two met and everything that unfolded afterwards.
Look, at the time it was 2014, and so back then there weren't many crypto projects to start with, so just to meet with one was interesting. I had decided for myself to invest time and money into Bitcoin and the space that would be built around Bitcoin. I did my own company called KAI; it works really well today. It's a data provider, one of the top data providers, arguably a category leader in its space. It is now the... I was CEO. When I built KAI, it was 2014, ARM took over in 2017, and in 2014 I was 99% sure that I would crash my company. That's usually what happens with startups anyway. And quite frankly, it is not a miracle that KAI is still alive, but it's a good achievement. All the competitors we had with KAI between 2014 and 2017 are pretty much all dead; we have a new set of competitors now, but being resilient in this market has been extremely difficult. So because I was almost certain to fail and I knew nothing about anything—I didn't know anything about finance, I didn't know anything about crypto, I'm not a developer, etc.—I thought, 'Okay, I will also invest in other companies to associate myself with other teams and try to understand the space.' Investing money is a way to get those meetings and get closer to people that otherwise you wouldn't get close to because you have no business dealings with them. So for me, the two gaps—and there were many other gaps—but the two gaps I saw and thought were important were data and security. I don't think you have a financial market without data, so that was an obvious one. And security also was obvious because I tried to play with Bitcoin right away and I was like, 'Okay, where do I put my private keys?' It was one of the big questions. What was it like back then? Where were private keys being put? First, I started with ZAPO which was VIRS; that's how I got into Bitcoin. I bought Bitcoins from ZAPO basically, I kept them with ZAPO for a while, but then they were in custody, and I thought, 'Okay, so then I went to blockchain.com and I was just like, 'Wow, I'm going to lose that for sure.' That was a paper wallet? No, it was blockchain.com the way it exists today was like a software wallet, but I don't know, it felt like I would lose something because you still had that onboarding issue of the 24 words. It didn't seem secure enough, and for some reason I say at the time because now I know why it's not secure enough, but at the time I didn't know, but I got that feeling. Then I met with the team at Ledger, and they pitched me that chip and PIN technology that we would adapt to Bitcoin and hardware wallet. For me, obviously biased because chip and PIN is a French invention, but I was always told that this is the most secure way of protecting secrets, so to me it made sense. And what also made sense is that suddenly you would have something physical that you could hold where your private keys would be. So by extension you say, 'My bitcoins are on my Ledger'—your bitcoins are not on your Ledger, they're on the blockchain, your private key to control your address is on your Ledger, but by proxy you say 'my bitcoin is on my Ledger.' The fact that you would have it physically, I thought was super interesting. Actually, when you think about it, if you look at the world of crypto today, the only physical thing in the world that bridges the gap between the physical world and the digital world is your Ledger. What another reason it makes sense for us to have this building? We are all about the physical instantiation of crypto. So that's that. And so in the end, that's why I invested in Ledger. And also those guys were super knowledgeable, so I knew that I would learn from them. Everything that I know today, I owe a lot to Ledger and the founding team to know everything that I know today and to be, maybe now, a little dangerous when I talk about crypto. Honestly, I had no clue before, and it took me time to really understand the game. I invested in 2014; I have to say that I was comfortable taking the CEO job when it was given to me by the founding team and the board only in 2019. Before that, I was not comfortable; I didn't know enough. I needed to put in five years of hard work to be in a comfortable position to say, 'Okay, now I know how to do this.'
And Ian, you came to Paris in 2015 if I'm not mistaken?
Well, the first time I heard about Bitcoin was through Parker Brooks, our friend Parker Brooks, back in 2009. But I really thought, okay, this... My background is digital music, having lived through Napster, Nutella, LimeWire, BearShare, Kazaa. I thought, 'This technology threatens state sovereignty, and while they can't shut down the technology, they can put the companies who deal in it out of business.' That was my hot take back in 2009, 2010. But by 2014, I was like, 'Wait, it's actually getting sufficient scale for the game theory to be in play.' I still didn't own any crypto. The first thing I did in crypto was to buy the O'Reilly book 'Building Bitcoin' because I'm a geek and I love O'Reilly books. I think O'Reilly books are a great way to get into anything, so I started there. When I moved here to Paris working for LVMH, I met a lot of people, and most of them were pretty boring, frankly. There are a lot of people who want to meet you when you're the new guy in town, they all want something from you. And I met Pascal over dinner, and we had really nothing at all to do with crypto. I just thought he was far more interesting than anyone I'd met since I got to Paris. It was a former colleague at Yahoo who put us together, and he was a good matchmaker, it turned out. We just became friends. Pascal helped me with my crypto journey, and I was able to ask all the dumb questions. He told me he just invested in this young company called Ledger, and I was like, 'Why do we need special hardware? Isn't this all just going to be on our phones eventually?' I had a chance to not only meet Pascal but to meet Eric, LC, Nio, Baka. Pascal has a restaurant here in Paris; we spent a lot of nights there. Pascal and I both like the snow, so we spend a lot of time skiing, snowboarding together. But it was 2017 and really 2018 where I got conviction on Ledger, because I saw everything that happened with the ICO bubble. I actually sold my cost basis at the top because it felt like doom madness to me. I was like, 'I don't know, I just know that this is crazy, and I want to be in a position where I stop looking at the chart and I don't care anymore.' It turned out to be a great move because then I was objective, I wasn't pumping my own bags. I was just sort of like, 'What is this really?' And where I came away from that was calling Pascal and saying, 'Dude, I think your company's going to be huge.' And he was like, 'Okay, well why do you finally, after four years of being my friend, why do you finally get the joke?' And I said, 'Well, because Ledger is this low beta on crypto. There are a lot of narratives and a lot of communities in the world of crypto. Pascal and I both believe deeply in the Bitcoin narrative, but the ICO bubble taught us that there were going to be many other narratives. And what I remembered is I'm old; I lived through building on the internet in 1990, and I remember the late '90s when Microsoft was trying to kill Netscape and AOL bought Netscape, and you had Cisco just sitting on the side going, 'We're good, there's going to be more internet tomorrow, whoever wins that battle over there.' I realized that Ledger had that same position: there are going to be a lot of battles, but at the end of the day, if not self-custody, why crypto? And if self-custody, then security. And it's not even just self-custody. If crypto, then custody. If you have permissionless money, someone has to have custody of the permissionless money. So whether it's a trusted custodian or secure self-custody, those are the two businesses that Ledger is in: secure custody on the enterprise side and secure custody for individuals. There are only two options for storing your crypto: there is trusted custodian, and then there is secure self-custody. Everything else is super dangerous. You can't have an untrusted custodian, and you can't have unsecure or insecure self-custody. So to me, I looked at Ledger and said, 'Wait a minute, those are the two worlds you play in.' Whether it's somebody trusting the custody of their coins to someone else, security matters a hell of a lot. How much does the average custodian user know about the security of their custodian? I can promise you the FTX customers knew exactly zero, and we found out later. Pascal tried to convince Sam that security matters in the Bahamas once. But in any case, if crypto, then enterprise security or consumer security is paramount; it's not optional. So that was the realization I had in 2018. But then it was 2020, and then it kind of ties together another thread: our good friend Tony Fidel and I spent a lot of time in 2020. Our families were pod families if people know what that means, and we just worked ourselves up. We were like, 'Okay, you've got two trillion of stimulus in the US, a trillion in Europe, the technology is here—this goes.' And we were right. About a cycle, for sure. And for me, that was when I came to Pascal. I remember that summer coming to you and saying, because we've been talking for two years about it, 'All right, I'm ready. I've been five years at LVMH, I see what's going to go on, and I like to be on the frontier.' So that's how that happened.
Good timing actually, because we had been discussing this for a while, and there was an opportunity to join in 2018 which would have been wrong because it was too early, and we went through reorganization cycles, etc. Things happened for a good reason. In 2018 or before 2021, there wasn't enough room for someone like Ian to deliver his full potential because we were still in the trenches. We had to build some of the building blocks that Ledger didn't really have in order to get then in 2021 in a position where now Ian could come and help the company with so many things, including the storytelling around the company, raising the big round that we raised in 2021. It was Ian that was—what, 400 million plus that we announced in June 2021. So Ian joined in January, and in June we announced this, so we did the fundraise sort of together. It was pretty fun, actually. Fun and fast. But it was 16 hours a day of sitting on Zoom calls talking to people around the world, but we got pretty good at it. It was a great trial by fire for me because it was like telling the story, and then it was like, 'Okay, time to go build the story.' But it was difficult because even though Ian is really good at telling stories, and I'm not too bad, we have a very good duo, it was very hard to convince people because they still didn't see why a piece of hardware would become anything and why finally not everything in the phone. I mean, that question. And so when FTX happened in 2022, people suddenly—it was the aha moment for a lot of people to say, 'Ah, okay, that's why.' If even FTX, which seemed to be the darling of the industry where top investors had invested, nothing could go wrong, and suddenly you realize you can't really trust your coins with FTX. So who can you trust your coins with? And by the way, if not self-custody, why crypto? And suddenly it hit people. But still today, Ledger is evolving a lot. We just launched a few things like the Keyring protocol and Ledger Key, etc., so cryptographic security. Now, we are not moving away from cryptocurrency; cryptocurrency is at the heart of what we do, but now Ledger is much more of a security device for your everyday cyber security, protecting your access to your websites and protecting your data, etc. So now people start to see the bigger vision that we've been pitching for years. But it's hard to see if it's not there. People understand and believe what they see, not so much what you tell them. That is okay; you have to actually deliver on your vision in order for the vision to become true and for people to see it. But we've been doing this—I've been doing this now for five years as CEO, and with Ian since 2021, and only now we're starting to see what Ian and I were pitching at the beginning of 2021, almost at the end of 2024. So it took us some years to go from where we were to where we are. And again, Ian made a clear impact because he started in 2021. 2018 would have been too soon, 2023 would have been too late, so timing is everything.
The company's changed so much in the past four years, and I want to take even a couple of steps back to talk about the building blocks of that change. So we're talking about 2020, 2021, we only had the Nano S, the Nano X, and Ledger Live was just in its first stepping stones. Today, Ledger is as much a hardware company as it is a software company.
