Brad Garlinghouse

Bradley Garlinghouse is a venture capitalist, CEO and member of the board of directors of financial technology company Ripple Labs. He is the former CEO and chairman of Hightail (formerly YouSendIt). Prior to Hightail, he held executive positions at AOL and Yahoo!

Bradley Garlinghouse was born on February 6, 1971 in Topeka, Kansas, USA. He studied at the University of Kansas, where he received a bachelor’s degree in economics. Mr. Garlinghouse received his Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Harvard Business School, graduating in 1997. It is noteworthy that another representative of Ripple Labs, Chris Larsen, studied at this educational institution. Since then, he has been working as a professional.

Career

According to Brad’s LinkedIn profile, his career started in 1999 at Ventures, where he was a partner. A year later, Garlinghouse was promoted to CEO at Dialpad Communications, a messaging platform.

In 2003, Garlinghouse started working at Yahoo, where he was eventually promoted to vice president. Unlike his previous jobs, Brad worked at Yahoo for almost 6 years. In February 2009, he became an advisor to Silver Lake Partners, a company that invests in new technologies. He worked for this company for 8 months.

From 2009 to 2011, Garlinghouse was President of Applications and Commerce at AOL. Since then, in addition to his core business, he has served on the boards of such companies as Animoto, Tonic Health, and Ancestry.com, among others. Brad joined Hightail as CEO and held this position until September 2014. After a disagreement with the board of directors over the company’s direction, he resigned shortly afterward.

Garlinghouse is currently an active venture capitalist in more than 40 companies, including Pure Storage, an AI startup, Diffbot, and Indigo.

Ripple Labs

Garlinghouse joined Ripple as Chief Operating Officer in April 2015. In December 2016, he was promoted to CEO.

In December 2019, Garlinghouse announced that Ripple had raised a $ 200 million Series C funding round from Tetragon, SBI Ventures, and Route 66 Ventures. In 2020, Garlinghouse admitted that Ripple Labs would have lost money if it had not received proceeds from the sale of the cryptocurrency XRP.

In 2018 and 2019, Garlinghouse repeatedly claimed that the published error rate for SWIFT messaging was at least 6%. This turned out to be untrue thanks to a study published by the London Business Review. It showed that Garlinghouse’s claims were based on a misreading of an article from SWIFT, which made no mention of the error rate for messaging.

Ripple CEO’s speech at WEF 2020

Garlinghouse has been named in class action lawsuits that have been ongoing since 2018 alleging that he and his employers, Ripple Labs Inc. violated various federal and California state securities laws. He was also a participant in the Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement LLC v. Ripple Labs Inc. case, which was administratively dismissed in connection with case 18−6753.

Garlinghouse «doesn't really believe» in decentralized cryptocurrencies, so he believes that they will all be «lost» in the end, and bitcoin will be among them. Because Ripple Labs is funded by banks, Brad is a frequent guest at the World Economic Forum. During one of his speeches at the WEF, he said that his company does not compete with Ethereum (ETH), which was created by Vitalik Buterin.

Garlinghouse at WEF 2022