All right. So, we are gathered here today because we've just announced the launch of Ledger Stacks, which is the next step in Ledger's hardware journey. I think it's really important to discuss the crypto experience that Ledger Stacks brings and the evolution it comes with from Ledger. But I want to do that by starting with you. We happen to be two Midwesterners in Paris, further away than most, I would say, than we thought we would be. You've had this career where technology has always fueled the evolution of how culture shows up in daily life. From Beastie Boys to Winamp to Beats Music to Apple to LVMH, technology becomes this distribution for culture. The medium changes, but not the need for technology to change how we use it as we become a more global world with the internet. I'd love to hear more about you and how you came to be with us today.
Well, I think I just got lucky. I was a kid who loved music and I guess loved culture, because along with music comes all kinds of other things, from horror comics to horror movies, I guess, and skateboarding. One thing that's important in my story is that I was always a lover of niche culture. I grew up in a small town in Indiana where we didn't even have a record store, yet I loved these things that were impossible to get even when you drove an hour to the record store. So what I had to do was go near Notre Dame, the university, and buy a copy of Maximum Rock and Roll and then take it home and mail order to get what I wanted. That was in the '80s. So in 1990, '91, when I got to university and I got online — this is pre-web, but there were internet communities then that are really in so many ways no different from Reddit or Discord today — that was where I met people who liked the same music as me for the first time. The internet to me was really just this place to get what I wanted, which I wasn't finding around me.
And then I think that led me to a whole bunch of opportunities. I studied computer science in the early '90s, and it was really very difficult to stay in grad school in the mid '90s because there were so many jobs you could get outside of the university. But I was lucky and just sort of fell into this slipstream of digital music from the very beginning, when it was science fiction all the way through to the iPhone. What I became inadvertently with that was a student of how the internet is changing culture, and more broadly how technology changes culture, because you're always looking for patterns. You're looking for, first, is this similar to the pattern I saw last year, and then now that I'm older, how is what we're seeing in crypto similar to what we saw in the evolution of the internet? It encourages you to read more, and especially being part of the music business, I was always struck by the fact that we pretended like the music business had been around forever, but really it had only been around for a few decades. We always wanted to go back to when things were better, but then you gain some perspective and realize none of these things are divine — these are all just industries that were created by people who came not too long before us. Maybe change is actually the constant.
So I think that's how I ended up here — loving culture, loving music, loving skateboarding, studying computer science, and then being lucky enough to put those two things together. The way I look at it, we're all crazy in our own way, and I've been really lucky that the way that I'm crazy is valuable to someone. I love culture, I love technology, and I've managed to put those things together into a career, which I mean, I never even had any aspirations of having a career, to be honest. But thankfully I have passions, and those passions have intersected with something that has become at least somewhat professional.
We've joked before about how you don't believe in religion, but you do believe in music. Maybe you're actually a product of scarcity, right? Within music, there are genres, and people could call some genres niche or small, but that actually could still be millions of people excited by a topic or by an item. It's almost as if your career has brought you to respect and understand that the amalgamation of things that are deemed small is actually larger than the sum of parts that most people recognize. So you're primed to understand what a digital asset could be, right? How could you take music and go from the way you think about the collection of music to the introduction of digital assets?
I think there's definitely something to that. I've been super lucky in that if I was somebody who loved mass culture, I think the internet would have been totally scary. I knew a lot of those people as the music business was going from a $30 billion industry to a $15 billion industry. They just wanted it to go back to the days of the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. That was never my goal. My goal was actually to have people who love things that are niche have a more perfect marketplace in a way. I think there is something really interesting in what you're saying about scarcity being some inadvertent theme, because I've always said — I remember when I saw Steve Caballero, who's a skateboarder, wearing a Misfits t-shirt. I think it took me two years after that to find an actual Misfits album, and not for lack of looking.
But I think it's hard to imagine those days, when the entire world isn't at your fingertips, when you didn't just ask a question and immediately pick up your phone and type it into Google or YouTube and find the answer. You actually had to go record store to record store asking people for these sorts of things. Now come all the way full circle on Discogs.com. And by the way, the Misfits were a very unpopular band. That's why they were so hard to find. They were not a mass market product by any means in the '80s. But now I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago and I saw the Misfits skull on the Sunset Strip because I think they were playing a Halloween show at some casino.
A couple years ago on Discogs, the most expensive album sold that year was a Misfits 7-inch that had sold for more than $10,000. That notion of — again, the way I frame what I've lived through is the internet is this revolution of information, where information went from being locked behind gatekeepers — whether that was FM radio or cable television or newspapers or magazine companies — there were media gatekeepers, and unless you owned some spectrum you didn't get access to talk to people. That went to being completely unlocked. That's what the internet did fundamentally — anyone can go register a domain and say, I can be as big as Yahoo. That's what the internet was all about.
Now I think we're into a separate revolution, and that's a revolution of value. And I think you're right — there's something about that combination of growing up wanting scarce information for scarce goods that puts you in a position to understand first a revolution of information, which ultimately leads to 6.5 billion smartphones on the planet. So you have 6.5 billion people who have powerful computers with high-speed internet connections in their pockets, and that creates this network of connectivity where information can travel but also value can travel. That's where we've landed.
A couple years ago, certainly during the pandemic but even a bit before, I started to realize that we were spending a lot of our time and attention in these borderless online worlds, yet we are voting for our governments in these fundamentally geographic political regimes. The idea of democracy is you draw a line around some people on the earth and then you get the people inside of that circle to elect somebody who represents their ideals. I started to realize that was increasingly difficult. Go back to Elkhart County, Indiana — as rich or poor and more ethnically diverse than it was when I was growing up. But also, we live, we spend our time and attention in these parallel universes, in this borderless world. The one you and I are in right now, the one we're talking in right now. We're not in the same physical location, yet we are collaborating.
Of course, those worlds are going to have their own economies. So we'll have not only the ability to interact in the way that we're doing right now over TCP/IP, but we're also going to have the ability to transfer value over this, and that will be outside of the government system. It'll be a digital system.
I think you're hitting on a really important point there, because the revolution of information came about and before that, everything that you learned and that you knew as true was completely told to you. Experimentation and exploration was a small fraction of what you could actually expect from life. And then when you actually got the internet, we had to adapt to it, and therefore hardware had to adapt to it, which meant the utility adapted around it as well. Suddenly individuals had the ability to have a different form of information than someone sitting next to you. You could look at your feed and see a completely different world around you than I could in mine. We have this fracture, which you've talked a lot about, is sort of how we see ourselves as tribes. I think it's important to explain that a little bit, because it's also important to explain what value could mean. To your point, in a borderless world it could mean we are interested in a DAO or an NFT project that gives us value over something we find interesting, but it could also mean in the future that the way we tie the value of our identity and our history is also separate from that physical place, because now we've revolutionized information. So in this next phase, how should someone listening actually contextualize that today?
