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 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 release 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: plan, hard work, results, good living. Stax coming to market has been three years in the making. The moment we sit down, we say okay we need Flex, and it hits the market in nine 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 until it's not. Not self-custody? Why crypto? Could we 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 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. In this, Ian, welcome to Ledger Studio.
Hey Mo, what's happening? I mean, it's great to have you both here. It's the first podcast actually after the few formats, so this is the first time I've sat in a chair in this room. So let's sit 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 know you were pretty much involved in the project from the beginning.
Yeah, look. So, as a company evolves, 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 and what kind of real estate for what moment, for what team. And Ledger starts in 14 with just 10 people, so the team at the time was working in the basement of Bitcoin in a coin 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. Then there was the event of 21, 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 very practical reasons. 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 you go to work to be part of a team, you want that team spirit, you want to meet with people, your colleagues become your friends, and that's how you build a life. For older people, your life is settled, you have your family, so you're less excited to go to the office. But nevertheless, if you want to be part of something, having 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 engage and see on the screen what's going to be the experience, 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 21, I didn't believe in working from home forever, so we decided to do that transaction to get this stamp, which is 10,000 square meters in the heart of Paris, and to make it a fantastic building, not only our headquarters but also a beacon for the crypto industry not just in Paris or Europe but 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. I think Ian can do a much better job than I would to describe what this building is really about.
Yeah, well, first of all I agree with you on the 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. Even two offices, you end up factionalized. You remember the San Francisco people saying, 'Those LA guys don't get it.' But you know, we're all on the same team. 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. So for us, being in Paris and having a place to gather is really special. I've been working here for nine years now, and it's totally different than working in Silicon Valley. 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 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 search, and they end up on ledger.com. 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 also 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 in 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 few days, but if you look at what's going to go on the rest of the year: hackathons, meetups, a viewing party for the Satoshi documentary. There's really 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. 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 represents that. One final note: 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. People rely on us for a very large percentage of the total crypto market cap. We take that seriously. Growing from where we are today into a much larger company is our ambition, and this building is an expression of that ambition.
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 us 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 lightbulb 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.
So look, at the time it was 14, and back then there weren't many crypto projects, so just to meet 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 Kaiko; it works really well today. It's a data provider, one of the top data providers, a category leader in its space. When I built Kaiko, it was 2014, I took over in 2017. In 2014, I was 99% sure that I would crash my company; that's what usually happens with startups. It's not a miracle that Kaiko is still alive, but it's a good achievement. All the competitors we had between 14 and 17 are pretty much all dead; now we have a new set of competitors. To be resilient in this market has been extremely difficult. Because I was almost certain to fail and I knew nothing about anything—I didn't know anything about finance, crypto, I'm not a developer—I thought I would 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. For me, the two gaps I saw were data and security. You don't have a financial market without data, so that was obvious. Security was also obvious because I tried to play with Bitcoin right away and I asked, 'Where do I put my private keys?' It was one of the big questions. First I started with Zapo, which was a VIRS? That's how I got into Bitcoin. I bought Bitcoins from Zapo, I kept them with Zapo for a while, but then he was in custody. So then I went to blockchain.com, and I was just like, 'I'm going to lose that for sure.' It was a software wallet, but I felt like I would lose something because you still had the onboarding issue of the 24 words. It didn't seem secure enough, and now I know why it's not secure enough, but at the time I didn't know. I got that feeling. Then I met the team at Ledger, and they pitched me that chip and pin technology that we would adapt to Bitcoin and hardware wallets. For me, 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. What also made sense is that suddenly you would have something physical that you could hold where your private keys would be. By extension, you say your Bitcoins are on your Ledger, but 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. Having it physically was super interesting. When you think about it in the world of crypto today, the only physical thing in the world that bridges the gap between the physical world and digital world is your Ledger. That's another reason it makes sense for us to have this building. We are all about the physical instantiation of crypto. So that's why I invested in Ledger. Those guys were super knowledgeable, so I knew that I would learn with them everything that I know today. I owe a lot to Ledger and the founding team for everything that I know today and to be maybe now a little dangerous when I talk about crypto. I had no clue before, and it took me time to really understand the game. I invested in 2014, but 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.' Yeah, and Ian, you came to Paris in 2015 if I'm not mistaken.
Well, the first time I heard about Bitcoin was through our friend Parker Brooks back in 2009. But I actually didn't own any crypto. My background is digital music, so 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 in 2009, 2010. But by 2014, I was like, 'Wait, it's actually getting sufficient scale for the kind of game theory to be in.' I still didn't own any crypto, but 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. So I started there. When I moved here to Paris working for LVMH, I met a lot of people, 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. I met Pascal over a dinner, and we had 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. A former colleague at Yahoo put us together, and he was a good matchmaker. 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 had 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 also to meet Eric and others. Pascal has a restaurant here in Paris, and we spent a lot of nights there. We both like snow, so we spend a lot of time skiing and 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 just knew it was crazy and I wanted to stop looking at the chart and not 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.' He said, 'Okay, well why do you, after four years of being my friend, finally get the joke?' I said because Ledger is this low beta on crypto. There are a lot of narratives and communities in 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. What I remembered is that I'm old; I started building on the internet in 1990, and I remember the late '90s when Microsoft was trying to kill Netscape and AOL bought Netscape, and Cisco sitting on the side going, 'We're good. There's going to be more internet tomorrow.' I realized that Ledger had that same position. There are going to be a lot of battles of why crypto, who brings people in, what's the application, etc., but at the end of the day, if not self-custody, why crypto? And if self-custody, then security. It's not even just self-custody; if crypto, then custody. If you have permissionless money, someone has to have custody of it. Whether it's a trusted custodian or secure self-custody, those are the two businesses Ledger is in: secure custody on the enterprise side and secure custody for individuals. There are only two options for storing your crypto: trusted custodian or secure self-custody. Everything else is super dangerous. You can't have an untrusted custodian and you can't have insecure self-custody. So I looked at Ledger and said, 'Those are the two worlds you play in.' Whether someone trusts 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 that 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 our good friend Tony Fidel and I spent a lot of time in 2020; our families were pot families. We just worked ourselves up to say, 'Wait a minute, 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. That was when I came to Pascal that summer and said, because we'd 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 good timing actually happened.
Good timing actually because we have been discussing this for a while and there was an opportunity to join in 18, which would have been wrong because it was too early and we went through reorganization cycle etc. Also, things happen for a good reason. In 18 or before 21, 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 21 in a position where 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 21. Ian joined in January, and in June we announced the 400 million plus round. So we did the fundraise together. It was pretty fun and fast. 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 telling the story and then building 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 not everything in the phone. So when FTX happened in 22, people suddenly had the 'aha' moment and said, 'Okay, that's why.' If even FTX, which seemed like the darling of the industry with top investors, could go wrong, you realize you can't really trust your coins with FTX. So who can you trust? And by the way, if not self-custody, why crypto? It hit people. But still today, Ledger is evolving a lot. We just launched a few things like the key ring protocol and keys etc. So, Mo, we're 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 websites and your data. 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. You have to deliver on your vision for it to become true and for people to see it. I've been doing this now for five years as CEO, and with Ian since 21, and only now we're starting to see what Ian and I were pitching at the beginning of 21, almost at the end of 24. So it took us some years to go from where we were to where we are. Ian made a clear impact because he started in 21; 18 would have been too soon, 23 would have been too late. Timing is everything.
The company's changed so much in the past four years. 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's as it's a software company.
Yeah, the other way around. Software as it is hardware. I think that really is part of the evolution that we pitched in 21, and it's really come true. If you look back at 21, the Nano X was our topline product, and now we have Stax and Flex that are above that with big beautiful secure screens. We're trying to make a big improvement in the user experience, and when people touch the device and see the screen, it's hard to go back to that small screen. But also services inside Ledger Live were pretty nascent at the time. When I joined, there was one buy integration and that was really it. It took us months just to be able to buy in the US; I don't think that happened until 22. We're still working on it. But now you have the ability to buy, swap, earn yield through staking, we have a credit card that's super successful. That's pointing out the differences between when I started in 21 and today. Also, the only place basically apart from a few very small resellers that you could buy a Ledger in early 21 was ledger.com, and today we have great partnerships with Best Buy in the US, MediaMarkt in Germany, JB Hi-Fi in Australia, and others. These things take a long time. This year is Bitcoin's 15th year, Ledger is 10 years old, Pascal's been CEO for five, we closed that Series C four years ago, and as Pascal said, a lot of that vision is just coming to the fore. Building hardware is really difficult. Please go watch our Road to Stax video because no matter what you think about Ledger or crypto, it's a great story about the hard thing about hard things and hardware.
But the sad story is, when I joined Ledger I was 38 and now I'm 48. That's a sad part for me. But look, what we're doing at Ledger is next level in terms of complexity. Before Ledger, I did a company called Criteo, which listed on NASDAQ in 2013 for two to three billion dollars, had 2500 employees, billions in revenue, was everywhere in the world. It was one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe for a long time in tech. That was an amazing achievement, but it was software only. For me to go from software only to hardware was first an accident. It made sense early stage, but now to be the CEO of a hardware company – and not just hardware because you need the hardware, the operating system, and the software. You have three layers of technology that very few companies actually master. Think about tech in this world: how many companies have hardware, operating system, and software? You have Microsoft, Apple, Google is trying. How many have operating systems? Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Linux but Linux is not a company. So basically three companies in the world with an operating system. Right now, we have the most secure operating system in the world to interact with crypto. That's going to be very important in the future. I would say that the market is not behind us; whatever happened in the past 10 years is nothing compared to what's going to happen in the next 10 years, and Ledger is ideally positioned to capture market share because we are the category leader in what we do, and what we do is very difficult to build. The difference since I've been CEO: no disrespect to the past, but you go from being a startup to being a grownup, from a small project that is really a test to an industrial company with industrial partners and the ability to deliver millions of products to millions of consumers all around the planet. We always talk about technology, but you can also think of Ledger from an operational standpoint. Our ability to deliver products everywhere in the world is amazing. To have a website where you can order from everywhere is amazing. We pay our taxes everywhere. The operational layer supporting Ledger as a business is crazy difficult. I've built several companies, invested in a bunch, been on the board of a lot, and I've never seen a company as complex as Ledger in terms of everything we need to do and master to be in business. If you're bad at marketing and communication, you're not in business. If you're bad at shipping, you're not in business. If you're bad at building products, you're not in business. If you don't have the good software components, you're not in business. All of these things have to work in combination to have a good business, which is what makes Ledger super hard. What we've done in the past five years is to really execute against this because the idea was always the same, but execution is extremely hard. To put together a world-class team to execute on that challenge is my job, and I'm happy with the job I've done. People always compliment me on my recruitment of Ian, like 'How could you recruit Ian?' I'm like, 'Well, we have the same vision and we like working together, so it wasn't particularly difficult.' We wanted to work together. People always see the fact that someone works for someone, but I don't see it like that. People work with other people. Nobody in this room has to be here; we could do many other things. We only are here because we want to be here and we want to participate in the same thing and work together. Ian, Mo, Seb, Ariel – we have a very strong team. Again, I'm not saying it myself, it's...
