Chris Larsen
Chris Larsen is a commercial director and informal investor, co-founder of several technology startups, as well as Ripple Labs.
He was born in 1960 in San Francisco, California, USA. Chris did not move to other cities to get his education and lived with his family while studying. His father worked at the local San Francisco airport as an airplane mechanic, and his mother was an illustrator.
Larsen completed his high school education at a local school in his hometown and then entered the University of California, San Francisco. There he studied international business and accounting. Larsen received his bachelor’s degree in 1984, after which he began his career.
For the next 5 years after graduation, Chris Larsen studied MBA at Stanford Business School, graduating in 1991.
Chris Larsen’s career
Larsen started his career as a student, but his first official job was with the energy company Chevron. While working for this company, Chris was engaged in accounting for the branches in Brazil, Ecuador, and Indonesia.
Later on, Chris started working as an assistant for a mortgage lender, and a year later he quit and started his own business in the mortgage lending industry. After 4 years in the industry, Larsen and his colleague realized that they needed to move online, so in 1997 they created the E-loan website. In a short period of time, this site became the leader in its industry in the United States.
Larsen’s company was noticed by large investors, who each time offered to buy out a portion of the shares. Intuit had the best chance of getting the shares, offering to buy a majority stake for $ 130 million. However, later the situation changed and Larsen sold 23% of his company’s shares to the CEO of Yahoo for $ 25,000,000. A year after the deal, E-Loan processed 5,000 applications for mortgage loans, which at that time accounted for about a quarter of the market.
At the beginning of 2000, the value of the company, whose CEO was Chris Larsen, exceeded $ 1,000,000,000. After that, the company did not lose its leadership in the industry. Chris headed the company until it was completely sold to Banco Popular in 2005.
Larsen described himself as a «radical pro-consumer» and in the early 2000s became an advocate for financial privacy in California. In 2001, Assemblywoman Jackie Speier put forward a bill that would have made it illegal for financial services companies to share or sell their customers' personal information without their permission. Although the bill had public support, it was not passed due to pro-business legislators. In response, Larsen co-founded the Californians for Privacy Coalition, helped fund the project with $ 1 million of his own money, and led a signature drive in support of Speier’s bill. The signatures collected, combined with lobbying by Consumer Watchdog, led to the bill’s passage in August 2003.
The next step in Chris Larsen’s career was the creation of the Prosper Marketplace online platform. At the time, this project was unique on the market. It brought together lenders and borrowers who issued online loans to each other, and the platform provided a guarantee of repayment and payment splitting.
Similar to E-loan, Prosper Marketplace had Chris Larsen as its CEO from 2005 to 2012. At the initial stage, Chris lent to the platform’s borrowers with his own money. In total, he provided the necessary funds to about 450 people. At the time, the average loan amount disbursed through Prosper Marketplace was $ 7,000.
In 2008, $ 120 million worth of loans were issued through Prosper Marketplace, and 3 years later the amount increased to $ 271 million. At one time, investors such as Tim Draper, Jim Breyer, and others were lenders to this platform.
After a series of questions from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Chris Larsen left the CEO position and started working on the OpenCoin project.
Chris Larsen and Ripple Labs
Having gained enough experience working for various financial and credit organizations, Chris Larsen wanted to create something revolutionary in the payments industry. Later, he met Ryan Fugger, who was developing Ripple, a new payments platform.
Seeing the potential in the technology that Fugger was working on, Chris decided to become part of the platform, creating a unique product that could send gold, currency, and oil through one interface. Larsen invested in the project at its initial stage and became its head after OpenCoin was renamed Ripple Labs. It was Larsen who became the engine behind the promotion of this platform, as he began to promote it to banking institutions.
Today, Ripple Labs is developing rapidly and is being tested by the world’s largest banks. In 2014, XRP (the platform’s internal coin) was the 2nd largest in terms of capitalization after bitcoin (it managed to win back this position from the ETH coin created by Vitalik Buterin), and Chris Larsen was the richest person in the cryptocurrency industry. In 2017, when the price of XRP broke through the $ 3 mark, Forbes estimated Larsen’s wealth at $ 59 billion, making him the fifth richest person in the world, leaving Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg behind. In 2021, his fortune was estimated at $ 4.3 billion, which is the 665th position in the Forbes world ranking.
In April 2019, Larsen donated $ 25 million in XRP to the University of California, San Francisco’s business school. At the time, it was the largest donation to the university in the form of digital assets.
From left to right: Doug Galen, Chris Larsen, Quang Lam, Lina Lam and University President Lynn Mahoney
Chris Larsen has a Twitter account with over 35,000 followers. He is quite active in discussions with his followers and posts news about changes in Ripple Labs.
Other information
In addition to his active participation in all the projects mentioned above, Chris Larsen is a member of the board of directors or an advisor to Credit Karma; Electronic Privacy Information Center; Oportun.
He is also a frequent speaker at conferences on finance and blockchain. Larsen is a member of the Young Presidents' Organization and has served as an advisor to the political committee of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Chris Larsen is married to Lina Lem, and the couple has two sons.
