So, Pascal, thank you, and pleasure. That's how I started the interview with Tony as well, and I mean it. These interviews for me are super personal because I moved here to Paris seven years ago. I made basically four friends — Hedvig, Bri, you, and Tony. And here we are now releasing Ledger Stacks with two of literally my four friends in Paris. So thank you for everything and thank you for being with us here today. For the listeners, you've been involved with Ledger since its inception. You were the first person to write a check to Ledger for investment, and you've been CEO since 2019. Is that correct?
And why Ledger? Why did you write that first check to Ledger?
So first of all, thanks back at you. It's a pleasure. In business there are many concepts, and some people say you should never work with friends. I always was strongly in disagreement with this. I think working with friends is great, especially when your friends are really good. So it's a pleasure we all share mutually to work together. But especially with you, since you joined early '21, the impact is super visible, making my life a lot easier and helping me make the why of Ledger possible. So that's a thank you and also a segue to why Ledger.
Well, and it's also more fun, right? That was one of my promises to you in the beginning — we're going to have fun. Pascal and I are both work hard, play hard kind of people, so that's maybe why we work well together too.
Yeah, having fun is key and life is short, so you might as well work with people that you love. So the why of Ledger for me was very clear from the beginning, but it was just a concept, and then with time it becomes a business. I met with the Ledger team end of '14, beginning of '15, and they pitched me a very simple story about security and using chip and PIN technology to secure crypto secrets. I'm French, so a little biased — the French invented chip and PIN, and we've been told since we were kids that this was the most secure technology. And it is. So it was just after the Mt. Gox incident, and for me, when I was just starting my journey into crypto, it was obvious that endpoint security was the main issue. Crypto has been designed for self-custody, for peer-to-peer exchange between users, and so it seemed ludicrous that you would risk losing assets at any point when you make a transaction. This wouldn't scale. Security would be paramount. And meeting the team at the time — Eric Larchevêque and the rest of the founders — they were all extraordinary people. The reason I joined crypto was to work with extraordinary people. I thought this was where the trailblazers would be. The Ledger team was crazy genius, doing things not many people would do anywhere else. They found someone almost as crazy as they were. My decision was taken in five minutes. They were surprised because they were pitching so hard and nobody wanted to invest — hardware, crypto, terrible investments. But for me, I was like, sure, I love it. Here's 200,000, but I want a board seat. Eric was too happy to take my money and give me the board seat. I didn't know I was leading the round, but apparently I did. Eric told me years later, 'Oh, by the way, you were the lead in the founding round.' Because I took my decision very quickly, and I looked so convinced that people thought I knew something they didn't. But I knew nothing. I just knew endpoint security would be important, chip and PIN was the right technology, and they had a great team. So let's go. That's how you build businesses — you need to take risks.
And so you started as a board member at this new French company building hardware. Ultimately you became president and then CEO. I'm curious about that journey. Ledger's been around for seven years and a lot's happened in crypto. Ledger, in my view, has had an incredibly steady hand. If I'm not wrong, the prospectus you said yes to and the mission of the company today would basically say the same thing — security and self-custody of crypto and digital assets. Or do I have that wrong? Has a lot changed? And I'm also curious what it was like to be on the board of a crypto company over seven years through many cycles.
That's a big question, and I apologize in advance for the monologue. Still on the why — there were different steps in Ledger's journey, and some were more operational, trying to figure out if there was something there. Once you have that, then you can work on the real why. Not every company starts with a why. At the board of Ledger for the first two years, the question was: are hardware wallets really a thing? Every board meeting questioned that business model. Until somewhere in 2016 when the Nano came out and we started to see light, and definitely in the bull run of '17, it became clear. Even after '17 when the market went bear, the question popped up again. To this date you still have naysayers, probably a little less after FTX. It's very difficult to bring a business from zero to where we are, and it will be very difficult to take it from where we are to where we want to be. The why also comes with execution. At first you're just trying to figure out if there's something, and today, probably more than ever, the why starts to make sense. And the why of Ledger is really freedom. This is why I got into crypto — financial freedom for everyone, Bitcoin. But then I understood this would never happen without Ledger. If you want to be self-sovereign, own your crypto, own your identity, switch from Web2 where you've been dispossessed from your digital life and gain possession again, be digitally sovereign — there aren't many options but Ledger. So the why becomes so much more important. We have a job to do, customers to serve, the world to free. It's not just business, and it has to be business — we're a for-profit company. But the for-profit fuels the why, invests in R&D, the Donjon, all of it. It costs a lot, but it's all for the users. We are a company with a mission — to secure the world, make Web3 easy to use, but also to make people free.
When I was talking to Charles, something incredibly interesting came out about the original architecture. You mentioned chip and PIN — it's been used successfully for tens of years to protect the secrets of banks and governments in credit cards and passports. What Ledger does is use the same security model and chips to protect the secrets of individuals. I think it's interesting that at the very heart of the company is that freedom and the shift from banks and governments to individuals. Is that what you mean when you talk about securing freedom and ownership of individuals?
Yeah, 100%. The motto of Ledger for a long time has been 'Vérifiez' — don't trust, verify. We took the ethos of Bitcoin and the cypherpunk narrative of being your own bank, your own sovereign individual, as a reaction to the 2008 crisis. Nothing is too big to fail. You shouldn't trust centralized propositions, and it's all the more true today with FTX going under. Lehman Brothers, Mt. Gox, FTX — every seven years you get a reminder not to trust your digital life with anyone. Why trust third parties when they can fail on their own, get hacked? So trust yourself. But to trust yourself, you need the right tools. This is the future we're building. Is Ledger perfect today? No. We have a lot of work to do. Security is strong, but we need to improve UX and UI. But this is the future — own your stuff, protect yourself, be self-sovereign. Before FTX, people questioned this. With FTX, people are like, okay, now I think we get it.
I have to say, even for myself, when FTX launched a custodial NFT site last year, I was thinking, man, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some of these guys will scale and have a centralized value prop — not really crypto, but like America Online, easier for newbies. But I think it's incredible that you and the Ledger team have stuck so true to those north stars. There were probably lots of places where there was a shiny object you could have chased — nearer-term revenue. The fact that the board had the resolve to stick through is really commendable. I want to turn to the product now. Ledger has core values built on freedom, but execution is everything. We have a hardware roadmap, just announced Ledger Stacks. We've got Ledger Live and Connect, the developer platform, and services built on top — buy, sell, swap, stake, lend, credit card, all from self-custody. We have the NFT business connected to Ledger Enterprise, which deserves its own episode. How do you think about what should Ledger do and what isn't Ledger's business? A lot we do, a lot we don't. How do you decide what's in and what's out?
That's a billion-dollar question. When you run your business, you have to understand what's your most precious asset, where you have a clear differentiator, where you have an edge. When I was looking for a new career after my previous company — CTO, listed on NASDAQ in 2013 — I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew a few things. I wanted to work from France, on something very international with high scalability, hundred-billion-dollar valuation, and have an edge doing it in France. Ledger is exactly the consequence of that scorecard. We're in France, we have the best hardware engineers, the best crypto engineers — it's all about the people. Luck is part of business. Without you, without Tony, without the diversity of our team in Paris, this wouldn't be possible. It was very lucky you were hanging in Paris and we became friends.
We both like to ski, we both like to drink — yeah, luck happens this way.
Luck happens this way, but it's also network. You create your luck and seize opportunities. I tried to get you and Tony in the business for three years before you joined. I tried hard, and thank God I succeeded. The recipe to build great businesses is: ambition first — very important. Resilience second. Then perfect execution. When you joined, I had a communication problem with the team. They didn't really understand what I meant by shooting for a hundred billion. Building big businesses is about knowing it's possible. People who've done it know it's possible; people who haven't always question it. You and I both know it's possible — we've met people who built hundred-billion-dollar businesses. Will we fail? Ninety percent chance. But there's a ten percent chance we make it, and we'll do everything to be in that ten percent. Ambition is key because every decision is based on it. If your ambition is to compete with Apple, you don't hire the same people as if you're running a small family business in Corsica. Resilience — from 2014 to now, all the bull and bear cycles — it's a roller coaster. For me, it's not about money. I want to build something, and there's no such thing as an overnight sensation. Everything is hard work, hours, long time, outworking everyone. Resilience is key, but not to be mistaken with stubbornness. If you're wrong, admit it quickly. But if you're solving a problem, put in the time. All overnight sensation stories are wrong. You can tell the Billie Eilish story — it's a great one.
I'll tell it quickly. I had the pleasure of introducing Steve Berman — if anyone's an Eminem fan, you know who he is — he runs Interscope Records, a great human being and a friend. He was involved in Billie Eilish. There was mutual interest between Dior and Louis Vuitton in meeting Billie, so I made the introduction. Steve would introduce the project by saying, 'We've got this little overnight sensation we've been working on for three years.' Anytime you think something happened overnight, it's because you weren't paying attention to the first seven years. Even the iPod — our memory is it was an overnight sensation, but Apple was a ten-dollar stock with less than two percent market share. The iPod didn't work on Windows. It took two or three years to become the iPod we remember. Even overnight sensations of recent memory are not what you think.
100%. I love that Billie Eilish story. Everything is about hard work and resilience. When people look at Ledger today and say nice things, I always remind everyone: it was hard, it took time, and we're not anywhere yet. It's not the time to be complacent. It's the time to work hard, serve our customers, do the right things. Ledger has a very strong responsibility in this market, especially given everything that's happened. We owe our users to work twice harder now. Perfect execution is very hard because first you have to know what you don't know — one of the biggest tricks in business. The trick is figuring out what you don't know and finding someone who knows it well. Perfect execution is all about people. Not AI, not BI, not robots — people. You need the best to win, and the best team. The Last Dance, Michael Jordan — you see the team, the organization, how they win. You want your model to prevail because you want to make people free. Security is freedom for everyone's digital future. A CEO is nothing without the organization. I only look good if my team is amazing. You don't hire Ian Rogers or work with Tony Fadell to tell them what to do — you hire them so they tell you what you don't know. That's where I take the most pleasure, learning from my team.
This is a perfect segue into the story of Stacks from your perspective. I hadn't even joined the company yet, just said I was going to, trying to extract myself from LVMH. We had a dinner and lunch with Tony. He tells this story in his episode too — I encourage listeners to check that out. From our perspective, he told us our baby was ugly. He said, 'You've got the iPod Shuffle and you're working on the iPod Touch, but you're really missing the iPod Nano, which by the way was the hit.' If you don't fill that hole, you're not only missing an opportunity but opening yourself up to competition. It hurts when someone tells you your baby is ugly, but we had to make a lot of changes to accommodate a challenging new idea and welcomed new ways of working. I'm curious — the story from your perspective.
