Building Freedom Tools for Digital Money: Ian Rogers on Ledger's Strategy for Crypto Adoption

If not self-custody, why crypto? I just think that if you can't answer that question and you don't really understand crypto and you should just be celebrating Visa International and PayPal instead of being invested in crypto. Like if you really don't have an appreciation for self-custody, then why aren't you just as excited about Visa and PayPal as you are about cryptocurrency?

I'm doing good, man. How are you? Nice to see you.

I'm mostly in Paris. You know, I've been around a little bit. I was in the US for a bit seeing family. I'll make it back over there soon. So, I do make it back and forth a lot, but I'm mostly in Europe these days, and Ledger HQ is in Paris.

I'm from Indiana. I spent 20 years there. I moved to LA after college. I spent 20 years there between LA and San Francisco. Always living in LA and then for 15 years commuting to San Francisco for work and I loved it. I have no complaints. I love being from the Midwest. I think where I'm from in Indiana, it's a great place to be from. It's good people, nice people, hardworking, but I was really happy to escape personally as a skateboarder. Going to California was a dream. And then I studied computer science and being in California from 1995 till 2015 was a hell of a ride. Especially LA. When I got to LA, people were asking me, 'Why LA? I thought people like you were supposed to move to San Francisco.' But I moved to LA for the music business. And for all that time, I got to be this person. I think that LA people thought I was a tech person and San Francisco people thought I was an entertainment industry person. And I got to be just this bee that pollinates between the two worlds. I loved that role, but also I definitely felt that California is kind of a bubble. Being from Indiana, you can see the bubbleness, and I was pretty happy to get out of it. I didn't think it could happen. I didn't know who would hire me outside of California for what I do. I worked at places like Yahoo and Apple and you feel like those companies don't exist anywhere else. So when I got a call from LVMH to come to France, I was intrigued, partly because of the work, but also because of the opportunity to both get out of digital music (I also didn't think anybody would ever give me a job outside of digital music; I was a serial entrepreneur there) and to get out of that California bubble. And it's been great. I've loved it. It's given me a ton of perspective. I really recommend it. I think more and more people are doing that today than when I did it 10 years ago. It was like, 'What are you doing?' And now I have friends all the time that are moving to Europe and wanting to get out of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York. Some people moving from California to Texas or California to Florida. There's a lot of that going on. But I'm glad I did it. It's given me a lot of perspective.

I mean Europe is actually hard for skateboarding by the way. Like the streets are old. As soon as I moved to Paris, I had a friend coming to visit me. I was like, 'Will you please bring me some softer wheels?' But I found a way. There's a great halfpipe right near my apartment in Paris. And I'm over 50 now. I'm still skating.

Like I said I'm over 50. So I'm a runner. I've been running for the last 18 years, but I have a knee injury right now. So now I have a whole routine to rehab the knee, just try not to get old and fat, and try to work on some upper body. So I do a circuit and I row. I have a rowing machine. And I love to mountain bike as well. You can see the mountain bike behind me. And I have to say just this week I was like, I think I might be ready to run again. I don't want to do it too quickly, but I haven't run since June. I got to get back out there though. I'm itching.

That's smart. Jump roping works on your vertical leap. Here's my advice for anyone getting old like me. Just strengthen your quads, strengthen your hips. That's what happened to me. I used to do CrossFit and I was nice and strong. I was running marathons and doing CrossFit. That's what it's like to live in LA. You run marathons and you do CrossFit. But you move to Paris. You drink more wine, you sleep later, you're not getting up at 5:00 in the morning to do CrossFit anymore. Then you add to that age and I just got weak. I was still running. I could still put on the miles, but I didn't have the strength in my quads or my hips anymore. And I think that's what took the toll on my knee. So I've spent a lot of time trying to rebuild the strength in my quads and my hips. So my advice to anyone getting older and still wants to run: squats, wall sits, all that stuff with the elastic band for your hips. You'll have another 20 years.

None of us escape it. No one gets out alive.

Yeah, that's a big topic. I'll try to make it brief. For your listeners that might have a hard time imagining, what you described about being in Silicon Valley in 2015 and talking about crypto, imagine being in Los Angeles in 1995 and talking about the internet. People weren't even upset about it. They were just like, 'What are you talking about?' And who gives a [expletive]? So it was maybe a bit of a creative eye, but I don't think so. I think I was much more naive and not at all opportunistic. I just loved music and loved technology and I had this blessing to put these two things together. I studied computer science. I graduated in '94 which was the time that Mosaic was coming out and Netscape started to exist. But it's not like you said 'go to my website' or download my mobile app. You had to start with 'there's this thing called the internet, and if you have a computer (which most people didn't) and you get a modem, and you get an ISP, and you get a slip/PPP connection, and you get this thing called a web browser, then you can download this ugly page in 30 seconds.' I think there is a parallel to the early days of crypto. People say 'Oh, it's too hard to use. This will never go anywhere.' Even in the beginning of the 2000s, people said you'll never be able to do video on the internet. These things always find a home. You just got to be there and try to sort through what's real and what's hype. All of these business ideas in the late '90s like home delivery in an hour and long-form video on the internet were a joke when the dot-com bubble burst, and now they're a part of everyday life. There are so many parallels to crypto in that. At the time, I was just like, 'I don't know, let's do this. It looks fun.' I was really surprised that anybody cared about it. I remember the first commercial website I saw was IBM.com. And for us it was like, 'Whoa, someone outside of academia might care about this.' I had no vision that this is going to be everywhere and change everything and you'll book your DMV appointment on the internet. It was utility. We were hanging out in Usenet talking about music, and then there was this new thing called the worldwide web and you could put things up and it was kind of cool. Anybody could see it. Before that you had to have FTP servers or gopher. It was just a new tool to get a job done. It's still that way even with AI coding today. There's all the hype, but you don't really know it until you sit down and do it and use it. You go, 'What is this good at? What is this not good at?' Same with blockchains. They're not good at everything. They're very good at issuance and applications that involve trading. If it doesn't involve those two things, you should probably use a SQL database. So you have to get into these applications and understand what they're good at. For me, being webmaster for BeastieBoys.com was timing and luck. I had this interest. I started doing it as a fan. I used to maintain the Beastie Boys frequently asked questions list on Usenet and then moved it to the web. Their manager called me, asked me if I wanted to do it for all of his bands. I said yes. He paid me $8.50 an hour which is more than I made washing dishes. I was like, 'I'll take it.' I had no opportunistic vision. Now I would, but I don't know what I would do differently. Probably nothing because it was so much fun. I definitely wasn't like, 'How does this make me rich?' That's a big difference between a 22-year-old in 1994 and a 22-year-old today. In 1994, if you asked me how to get rich, I was like 'I don't know. Get a job?' We have a completely different relationship to value today. A lot of 22-year-olds today, if you ask them how to get rich, they'll tell you something. It might not be right, but they have an answer. I just didn't have one.

I think we might have had the first web design company. I think that might be factual. I've never found somebody who got paid for web design before us.

I mean, when we started, I'm remembering right now, we had this thing called the Music Kitchen where we bundled together the artists we worked with. We didn't have a top-level domain; we were actually on the website of a newspaper from North Carolina because at the time it didn't seem efficient for everyone to have top-level domains. We were such engineers that we were like, 'If everybody had a top-level domain, how would you even navigate the internet? There should be some sort of hierarchy.' We weren't even thinking in terms of domains like nando.net. That's how early it was. But I'm super thankful. It gives me perspective because I have now seen how something goes from absolutely nothing to being a part of the fabric of every human's life. You can't convince me that that's not possible. When someone says to me, 'Oh, that'll never happen,' those words don't even pass through my ears. I have to go back to first principles and ask, 'Does this solve some kind of fundamental human problem?' If so, it's actually probably inevitable. I really believe in Christensen's idea that there are no new human problems; we just hire new technologies to solve old problems. Or as my friend Gabe from Mischief said, what humans do is eat, sleep, [expletive], and flex on their neighbor. So you have these fundamental human things and we hire new technologies to do those things. Everything will happen unless we don't have any use for it. There are a lot of solutions looking for problems, and those will never happen. You can't push that rock up the hill.

No, I think I've always been a bit early so I have to calibrate for that. I like to explore things when not too many people are exploring them and then try to figure out from first principles if there's something there. I also really like to look for things where I fundamentally believe in something. In the world of music, I love music and artists. I thought the system is inefficient. There's tons of music, and too much music I would like that I can't get to. It's fundamentally inefficient. I saw that the internet was going to correct some of that inefficiency and I wanted to do that. In terms of crypto, it was super obvious from the moment go. Of course the internet is going to have its own money. That seems really obvious. We've lived through the digitization of all information and now we're living through the digitization of all value. That's undeniable. That's why I dislike the moniker web3 because it makes it sound like web3 is somehow incremental to web2, but it's not. It's a completely separate revolution. It's probably bigger in terms of its impact on humanity, and also bigger in terms of its pitfalls. The digitization of all information was existential if you're a media company, but great for users. People loved Napster even though it was copyright infringement. It was joyous for consumers. Think about that relative to AI hate today. There are AI protests, yet the only people who protested Napster were Metallica. So the digitization of all value is existential because it's your life savings. You're either winning big or missing out. I can't help it; I want to dig into that. That's how I got involved with Ledger. I believe that Ledger was doing something fundamental. If not self-custody, why crypto? If you can't answer that question, you don't really understand crypto. You should be celebrating Visa and PayPal instead. If self-custody, then security. I saw what Ledger was doing as fundamental. I'm a bit of an idealist. I have zero interest in working at a bank or the Amazon of banks. There is much more to Ledger's mission from an idealistic perspective. It plays a very important role in the long term of this industry. To me, there is a through line in all of that: being on the frontier, trying to understand things from first principles. I just loved music and that made me think about value in a new way. AI makes me think about what it means to be a human being. I love approaching these problems.

Oh man. On my LinkedIn page in 2001, I wrote something like 'decentralizing that which was previously top down.' I grew up with skateboarding and punk rock. Do not like centralized gatekeepers who tell you what to listen to, watch, read. I've never had mainstream tastes. As an outsider, the internet always made sense. Anybody who made a zine with a magic marker and a photocopier in the '80s understood the internet day one. That's what Beastie Boys and I had in common. We both come from that world where you book your own life, publish yourself. The internet underground music archive started in 1993 was the first place people could post their music. I remember pacing around my apartment going 'this is going to change everything. This is going to remove the gatekeepers.' I went to IUMA and downloaded every song, which you could do in one night. I listened to all of them and they were all terrible. I thought, 'I guess if 99% of what record labels release is garbage, imagine the stuff they overlook.' I've never stopped wanting that. 'Power to the people' sounds naive, but it's more about efficiency. As an engineer, I don't want to change who tells you what to do; I want to build systems so we can choose as individuals. That's always been the drive. I loved Winamp. We made Winamp in the late '90s. It was an MP3 player. We weren't a record label or music service. We didn't tell you what to listen to. We just made a tool so you can listen to what you want. That appeals to me. With Beats Music, we made something for people who love music. I felt what was happening to culture with Spotify is that it all starts with a search. No it doesn't. It starts with culture, with a story of an artist or a song or a moment. It's not a spreadsheet that plays music. It has to touch us as human beings. Ledger is about choice across the board. Our goal is to support the broadest range of tokens. We have preferences but we don't impose that on anyone else. The whole point of freedom is that the individual can do their own research and make their own choices. Building tools for freedom is important.