Part IThe Story
The screens are on the eighth floor. They sit in a Renaissance Revival high-rise in San Francisco's Financial District, the sort of building whose stone ornament was meant to tell passersby that money inside was safe. Officers of the San Francisco Police Department watch a wall of them at what the city calls the Real-Time Investigation Center. The feeds show 911 dispatch calls. They draw on drones, license-plate readers, and a lattice of privately owned high-definition cameras sharp enough, as one reporter described the technology in 2020, to make out "the sticker on a cellphone, the make of a backpack, the color of someone's eyes." Arrests are coordinated from here, faster than they used to be.
The floor used to belong to Ripple. Chris Larsen, the company's co-founder, once sat there among his employees, flat-hierarchy style, at no particular remove from the people who wrote the code that moved his money. The man who paid for many of the cameras now feeding those screens is the same man. So is the man who, in 2001, put $1 million of his own money into a campaign to stop California's banks from selling your account balance, your phone number, and your Social Security number without asking you first. He did not change his mind about any of this. That is the strange part.
Nobody seems to know quite what to call him. Over thirty years he has been an online mortgage lender, a privacy crusader, a peer-to-peer lending evangelist who funded 450 strangers' loans personally, a crypto founder who for one Thursday in January 2018 was worth more on paper than Larry Page, a defendant in one of the most consequential securities cases of the decade, the victim of a nine-figure theft, a funder of Kamala Harris and of a Republican challenging Elizabeth Warren, and the most generous private patron of San Francisco's police since — well, possibly ever. A New York magazine writer called him "studiously unostentatious." He speaks evenly. He leaves appointments at precise moments in a black SUV. He has a phrase he repeats when he talks about money, about government, about his hometown, about almost anything: go, go, go.
Every one of his companies was built on a single conviction about the middle — the broker, the bank officer, the correspondent account, the eight-day wire — and the conviction was that the middle should not be there. What happens to a man like that when he becomes the middle is the question the eighth floor keeps asking.
By the Numbers
The Ledger of Chris Larsen
$59.9BPaper net worth on January 4, 2018, when XRP touched $3.84
5.19BXRP held personally, plus a 17% stake in Ripple, per Forbes in 2018
600,000Signatures gathered for California's financial privacy initiative
$18.9BConsumer loans sold by E-Loan from inception through May 2004
$125,035,150Civil penalty imposed on Ripple in SEC v. Ripple Labs, August 2024
283MXRP stolen from his personal wallets in January 2024
$40BRipple's valuation after a $500 million raise, November 2025
The Night Shift at SFO
His father fixed airplanes. He worked for United Airlines at San Francisco International Airport, on the night shift, which meant that while the Bay Area slept, a man named Larsen was inside the guts of machines that would carry other people somewhere else by morning. His mother was a freelance illustrator. The family had lived in San Francisco and then moved down the Peninsula to Cupertino, which in the 1960s and '70s was orchards and tract homes and not yet the name of a corporate campus.
Larsen has talked about this in a register he does not use much. "It was anger that motivated me in the early days," he told the podcaster Kevin Follonier in 2025. "Anger at the way my dad was treated... he was a super hardworking guy, but never seemed to get ahead." That is nearly the entire primary-source account of his childhood, and it is enough. A mechanic who never got ahead; a son who would spend three decades trying to figure out where, exactly, the getting-ahead had leaked away.
The crypto press has since supplied him with a more cinematic origin. In a widely syndicated 2025 newsletter profile, a fifteen-year-old Larsen runs a dent-repair business out of the family driveway; a customer's check bounces; a lesson about the financial system is learned. A Chinese translation of the same piece, circulating on crypto news sites, has him fixing bicycles. No source is cited for either version. It is the kind of story that wants to be true about a man like this — the boy who did the work and could not get paid — and it may be. But the anger he himself describes is not about a bounced check. It is about his father.
He started out practical. He enrolled at San José State in aeronautical engineering — "very nuts and bolts, because my dad worked as a mechanic at United Airlines" — and spent two years there before a study-abroad program in international business sent him to Denmark for a year. The students traveled across Europe and behind the Iron Curtain, looking at the continent, as he put it decades later, from a "How do you move society along?" perspective. He came back and transferred to San Francisco State, where the tuition was, by his recollection, "like $100 a semester." He graduated in 1984 with a degree in international business and accounting, majors he chose because they seemed like the kind of thing that led to a job.
San Francisco State in the early 1980s was a place where, he remembered, "somewhere there was a protest every single day, and that was kind of cool." Then the qualification, offered with what reads on the page as a shrug: "Maybe I should have done more protesting. But I was more of an observer back then."
An observer. Hold onto that word.
Chevron hired him as a financial auditor and sent him to Brazil, Ecuador, and Indonesia — three countries, three currencies, three banking systems, and an accountant's-eye view of what it actually costs to move a dollar across a border inside a multinational that could afford to pay for it. He went to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, graduating in 1991, and took a class from Jim Collins, who had not yet written the books that would make him a fixture of airport bookstores but was already teaching a doctrine Larsen would carry for the rest of his career. Collins told his students to approach risk strategically and to "cut the lifeboats." Burn the escape route. Make retreat impossible so that only forward remains.
In 2004, San Francisco State named Larsen its Alumnus of the Year. Standing before the graduating class, he gave advice that sounds less like a commencement platitude than a confession of method: "Keep your eyes open. Try to get angry when you see things that aren't right."
The observer, it turned out, had been taking notes.
Should She Keep the Baby?
In the early 1990s Larsen took a job at a mortgage lender in Palo Alto, and there he met Janina Pawlowski. Little survives in the public record about her early life, but the shape of her career compresses easily: she was a mortgage professional who looked at the industry she worked in and found it absurd, a woman who would co-found one of the first internet lenders in the country and then, at the moment of its greatest leverage, find herself on the cover of Forbes under a headline — "Should she keep the baby?" — that no one would have written about a man. In 1992 the two of them quit together to start a mortgage business of their own.
For four years it was a conventional brokerage. Then, in 1996, they turned it into a website. Both had been irritated by the same thing: the layers of agents and brokers between a borrower and a loan, each taking a commission for the privilege of standing in the way. The internet looked to them like a way to walk around those people. They raised $450,000 from friends and family and moved out of their small Palo Alto office to a cheaper site in Dublin, out past the hills where Silicon Valley rents did not reach.
It is worth pausing on the date. E-Loan was founded the year before Google.com was registered as a domain. The prevailing wisdom, Larsen recalled at Berkeley in 2020, was that "no one in their right mind would ever put financial data on the internet." He drew a principle from this that he has repeated, in nearly identical words, for years: "But if it's obvious, it's probably too late." And, more painfully: "The hardest thing is ignoring advice from people you respect. If they are saying it's a great idea, it is probably too late."
The site went live in 1997. Borrowers could shop for mortgages directly and skip the broker's fees; later came home equity and car loans. By 1998 the company was burning cash faster than it could fund operations, and Pawlowski, who had served as CEO for the first two years, offered to swap jobs with Larsen. She became president. He became chief executive. The following year he offered the CEO title back. She declined, and stayed president. Titles in this partnership were treated less as trophies than as tools — handed across the table to whoever could use them at the moment. Larsen would do something similar with Ripple nearly two decades later, and with much the same lack of ceremony.
Then came the fork in the road that defined the company.
In the fall of 1998, Intuit offered to buy E-Loan for $130 million. The two founders, who together held 40 percent of the company and had put another 20 percent into an employee stock plan, would each, by Forbes's count, walk away with $10 million in cash and $16 million in Intuit stock. For a mechanic's son and a mortgage broker who had started with $450,000 of their friends' money six years earlier, this was not an abstraction. It was the whole game, won.
Days before the deal closed, Yahoo's CEO, Timothy Koogle, pitched something else: $25 million for 23 percent of E-Loan's outstanding shares. Smaller payouts. No exit. But the founders would keep control, and E-Loan would remain E-Loan.
They took Yahoo.
Softbank and Sequoia came in behind it. E-Loan's 1998 revenue was $6.8 million. In late March 1999 the company filed to go public; it listed that June. In the first quarter of 1999 it processed $470 million of mortgage loans. In the third quarter it lost $13 million even as revenue tripled. By October it had about 350 employees, and for the year it processed some 5,000 loans — a quarter of the entire online mortgage market, more than any other internet lender. By February 2000, at the top of the bubble, its market value was estimated at $1 billion.
But the thing E-Loan is remembered for in the trade is smaller than any of those numbers, and in a way larger. Under Larsen, it became the first company to show consumers their FICO credit scores for free.
It is hard now, in an era when a dozen apps will display your credit score whether you want them to or not, to recover how radical that was. The score was the number. Lenders used it to decide what you deserved, and it was treated, essentially, as their property — a fact about you that you were not entitled to see. E-Loan handed it over. Larsen later described himself, in a phrase that has followed him ever since, as "radically pro-consumer." The open-access-to-credit-scores movement, which he is credited with pioneering, was in a sense the first full expression of his theory of the middle: that much of the intermediary's power rested not on what it did but on what it knew and you didn't.
He would go on to serve on the board of Credit Karma, a company whose entire business model was giving people that same number.
Six Hundred Thousand Signatures
In 2001, a California assemblywoman named Jackie Speier introduced a bill that would require banks and other financial companies to get a customer's permission — an affirmative opt-in — before sharing or selling personal information: bank balances, phone numbers, Social Security numbers. The bill was popular with the public. It died anyway, beaten in the legislature by members who sided with the industry.
What Larsen did next is the closest he has come to the protests he watched at San Francisco State.
He co-founded a coalition called Californians for Privacy Now and seeded it with $1 million of his own money. Then he went around the legislature entirely. The coalition gathered 600,000 signatures to put the measure directly before voters — nearly double the number required to qualify for the ballot. Combined with a lobbying campaign by Consumer Watchdog through 2002, the threat worked. The financial firms that had killed the bill now faced the prospect of a statewide referendum on whether they should be allowed to sell their customers' Social Security numbers, a referendum they were overwhelmingly likely to lose. They withdrew their opposition. Legislators followed. The bill passed in August 2003; the Sacramento Bee reported its signing on August 8.
It is a strange thing for the CEO of a publicly traded lender to have done. E-Loan was itself a financial services company. The industry he was fighting was, in the most literal sense, his own. He was not a privacy advocate who happened to run a business; he was a businessman who had decided that one of his industry's revenue streams was illegitimate and spent his own money to cut it off.
— Jackie Speier, on California's 2003 financial privacy lawWithout Chris Larsen, California's financial privacy law, which sets the standard for the rest of the nation, would never have become a reality.
He joined the board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He advised the Silicon Valley Community Foundation's policy committee against payday lending. The pattern was set: the intermediary as enemy, the consumer as client, and the ballot — or the threat of it — as a lever when the ordinary mechanisms of influence stalled.
Meanwhile E-Loan, having survived the crash that took down so many of its dot-com contemporaries, became a durable business. By May 2004 it had sold more than $18.9 billion in consumer loans and had been profitable for eight straight quarters. In early 2005 Larsen stepped down as CEO to start something new, staying on as chairman until the company was sold to Banco Popular later that year. E-Loan's old headquarters in Pleasanton is now occupied by Workday.
Twenty years later, the same man would spend a quarter of a million dollars backing a San Francisco ballot proposition that expanded the police department's use of surveillance cameras. The tool was the same — the ballot measure, the direct appeal over the heads of a cautious bureaucracy. The direction had, depending on whom you ask, either reversed completely or not changed at all.
The Hui and the Auction
Lyna Lam's family had escaped Cambodia. Her father, Quang Lam, led them out of a country undergoing war and genocide; they spent years in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before immigrating to the United States and settling in the Bay Area. Larsen, who married Lyna, speaks of his father-in-law with something close to reverence — a man who worked to give his family what the university literature about him calls, without irony, the American dream. Lyna's two sisters and several other relatives went to San Francisco State.
The Lams brought with them, among other things, a financial technology. It is called hui, a traditional Vietnamese form of group lending, and the Lam family practiced it in Asia and kept practicing it after they came to America. In a hui, a group of people pool money on a regular schedule; each round, one member takes the pot. It is credit without a bank. It is a lending market built entirely on trust between people who know each other, with no officer behind a desk deciding who deserves what.
Prosper, the company Larsen co-founded in 2005 with John Witchel, was inspired by it.
From 2006 to 2009, Prosper ran something like an eBay for personal loans. Borrowers posted requests. Lenders — ordinary people — bid on them, and the interest rate emerged from what amounted to a Dutch auction. Prosper published borrowers' credit grades, verified identities, and serviced the loans, routing payments back to the lenders. The middle, again, was compressed to almost nothing; what remained was a platform and the crowd.
Larsen did not merely build it. He used it. By 2008 he had personally funded 450 loans through the site, to homeowners, college students, people carrying credit card debt, and small entrepreneurs. The platform had facilitated more than $120 million in loans by then, averaging about $7,000 each. Fast Company put Prosper on its 2008 list of the year's most innovative companies.
The regulators had other ideas. The Securities and Exchange Commission looked at a platform that let ordinary people buy fractional interests in other people's debts and saw a securities offering. The lending rules of the era had been written for banks, not for software. In 2008 Prosper filed its first prospectus with the SEC and abandoned the auction, switching to preset rates calculated by formula from each borrower's credit risk. The crowd would still lend. It would no longer set the price.
It was Larsen's first long encounter with the SEC. It would not be his last.
In 2011, when the Occupy Wall Street movement put up its encampment in San Francisco, near Prosper's offices, the company's CEO publicly supported the protesters and raised money to feed them. The image is worth sitting with: a Stanford MBA running a venture-backed financial company — his investors included Jim Breyer, Tim Draper, the Omidyar Network, and Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris — buying dinner for the people camped outside demanding the end of the system that funded him. By year's end, Prosper had facilitated $271 million in loans and raised $74.5 million.
On March 15, 2012, Larsen announced he was stepping down as CEO, staying on as chairman. Peter Renton, then a new fintech blogger whom Larsen had graciously answered in his first month on the beat, wrote later that he had been disappointed and had wondered what could be more important than driving Prosper forward.
Larsen's own verdict on Prosper, delivered fourteen years later over dinner with a group of founders, is unsparing. He spent eight years there. He should have walked away after two. Of everything in his career — he has been fired, he has come close to bankruptcy — that is what he names as his biggest regret. "Try to fail sooner, don't hang on too long," he said. "This is a very short life. You don't have any time to waste."
Cut the lifeboats, Collins had said. Larsen had cut them. What he had not learned, until Prosper, was that a man can also stay too long on a ship that is sinking slowly.
A Ledger With No Middle
Ryan Fugger was working on a local exchange trading system in Vancouver in 2004 when he conceived of something he called Ripple. The idea was almost utopian: a decentralized monetary system that would let individuals and communities create their own money, extending credit to one another through networks of trust. He built a first version, RipplePay.com. It was the hui again, more or less, rendered in software and set loose on the internet.
Jed McCaleb had a different résumé. He had created Mt. Gox, the bitcoin exchange that would later dissolve in disgrace — a fact that appears in nearly every sentence written about him, the way a prior conviction follows a name. In May 2011 he began working, with an engineer named David Schwartz, on a digital currency system that would verify transactions through consensus among network members rather than the energy-hungry mining that secured bitcoin. In August 2012, McCaleb brought in Larsen. Together they approached Fugger. After discussions with them and with longtime members of the Ripple community, Fugger handed over the reins.
The company was incorporated in September 2012 as NewCoin, renamed OpenCoin a month later, and renamed again, on September 26, 2013, as Ripple Labs. When its genesis ledger was created, it contained a single account, from which every other account would be derived. One hundred billion units of a native currency called XRP were created at that moment. The protocol said no more would ever be made.
What Larsen brought to it was a pitch he had been refining for twenty years. "I can physically travel to Europe faster than my payment settles from the U.S. to Europe using a wire service," he told an interviewer in 2015. Payments, he argued, were "pre-internet" — built country by country as closed loops, the financial equivalent of the era when AOL members could email only other AOL members. What the internet had done for information, Ripple would do for value. He called it the Internet of Value, and he has never stopped calling it that. In 2013, sitting in OpenCoin's office in downtown San Francisco, he put the ambition in a single line to a Stanford interviewer.
— Chris Larsen, to Stanford Graduate School of Business, September 2013The goal isn't just to rewire finance. It's to flatten finance.
His model, he said, was Charles Schwab, another Stanford GSB alumnus, who had blown up full-service brokerage in the 1970s.
The investors came quickly. An April 2013 angel round brought in Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Pantera, and others for $2.5 million; a May round added Google Ventures and IDG Capital for $3 million. MIT Technology Review named Ripple Labs one of its 50 Smartest Companies in 2014. That year XRP was the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, behind only bitcoin.
McCaleb did not stay. He left in what the New York Times would later call "an acrimonious divorce," keeping a large pile of XRP, and went on to found a competitor called Stellar. The co-founder who had written the code departed; the co-founder who knew how to talk to banks remained. That sorting turned out to be destiny.
Because the crucial decision of Ripple's life — the one that separated it from nearly everything else in crypto — was that Larsen decided to sell to the people he had spent his career trying to route around.
"We decided we wanted to be an enterprise-focused company," he said in 2025. "My last two companies were all consumer companies. What I like about enterprise is it's actually the polar opposite." Bitcoin's early culture talked about dismantling central banks. Ripple went to Sibos, SWIFT's flagship conference, and asked banks to buy its software. Larsen wrote op-eds for American Banker comparing their payment systems to CompuServe and AOL — insulting the customer in the customer's own trade paper, which takes a certain kind of confidence. The pitch was not that banks would disappear. It was that banks, plugged into Ripple, would become faster. "Financial institutions and networks using Ripple never have to touch digital currency," he explained in 2015. "They continue to deal in the fiat currencies they deal in today."
It took Ripple a while to absorb what that meant for its own conduct. On May 5, 2015, the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network fined the company $700,000 for "willful violation of the Bank Secrecy Act by acting as a money services business without registering with FinCEN" — the first civil enforcement action FinCEN ever brought against a virtual currency exchanger. Ripple agreed to route XRP activity through registered businesses. A year later, on June 13, 2016, its affiliate received one of New York's earliest BitLicenses. By 2018 Larsen was lecturing the industry from the keynote stage at Money20/20: "You can't break things in finance." And: "You can't just build that thing and worry about New York's Department of Financial Services later." He was speaking, at least partly, from experience.
By late 2016, Ripple had signed 15 of the world's 50 largest banks, including Standard Chartered, National Australia Bank, and Mizuho, and had set up a Japanese joint venture with SBI Holdings that had recruited 42 banks to a Ripple consortium. That September it raised $55 million in a Series B. Then Larsen did, again, the thing with the title.
In January 2017, he handed the CEO role to Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple's president and chief operating officer. Larsen was 56. "This has now been 20 years, I've got two young boys, I want to make sure I get the right balance on," he told American Banker. "I want to get the right balance with my 6-year-old and 9-year-old and make sure I'm part of that every step of the way." He would be executive chairman. "You can make smooth transitions like this when you're in a strong position," he said.
One analyst, David Bannister of Ovum, offered a cooler read in the same article: that Ripple now had to move from "well-funded startup" to serious infrastructure player, a transition that would bring challenges "Larsen might not have been the best person to navigate." Larsen, in a sense, agreed. He has since described himself as good at the chaotic, uncertain, early stage — "almost the reality suspension," he calls it, hacking a trail through wilderness — and bad at what comes after. "That's a discipline play. And if it's boring, you're not going to be good at it."
The boundaries he built around the handoff are, by the account of founders who dined with him in 2026, ruthless. Any email Larsen sends to Ripple employees copies Garlinghouse. No one can come to the co-founder to undo the CEO's decisions. "The CEO has to be seen as the person making decisions," he said.
It was 2017. Within a year, the token that banks did not need to touch would make him, for a few hours, one of the richest people on earth.
Fifty-Nine Billion Dollars for an Afternoon
It happened on a Thursday. January 4, 2018. XRP, which had traded around 25 cents in mid-December, touched $3.84. It had risen more than 35,000 percent in a year. Ripple the company held 61.3 billion of the 100 billion XRP in existence; Larsen personally held 5.19 billion tokens plus a 17 percent stake in the company. At that price, by Forbes's arithmetic, he was worth $59.9 billion — ahead of Larry Ellison, ahead of the Koch brothers, ahead of both Google founders, fifth on the list. The New York Times noted that he had, for a moment, passed Mark Zuckerberg.
Larsen said nothing. Neither did McCaleb, whose own XRP was worth around $20 billion that day. A Ripple spokesperson told CNBC the company had "nothing to add."
The commentary arrived without them. Much of the buying was happening in South Korea, where retail investors had piled into virtual currencies with names like Einsteinium and Byteball. "This is beyond insane," said Jeremy Gardner, who had worked at a crypto fund that had itself invested in Ripple. "There's absolutely nothing driving this rally except rampant FOMO, misinformation, and speculation." The analyst Ryan Selkis, asked why the price might keep rising anyway, answered with a sentence that deserves preservation: "Because this is crypto, and everyone in the industry is now slinging crack crypto cocaine to retail addicts."
The Times reporter Nathaniel Popper put his finger on the deeper problem in one dry paragraph. Ripple said it had signed more than 100 banks to use its technology. "But banks do not need to use Ripple tokens for Ripple's software to transfer dollars, euros and yen. That point appears to be lost on many small time investors who are buying Ripple tokens." The fund manager Ari Paul was blunter: he was not aware of banks using or planning to use XRP "at the scale of tens of billions of dollars necessary to support XRP's valuation." So far one company — a Mexican money-transfer business — had announced it would use the token.
There it was, the cleft that would run through the rest of Larsen's career. He had built, by his own careful design, a piece of enterprise software that worked without anyone needing to own his currency. His fortune was denominated in the currency.
The Times used a horticultural metaphor that has aged well: "If this is a tulip fever, the fever has spread to chrysanthemums and poppies."
Thirteen days later, XRP was trading near $1. Larsen's paper fortune was $15.8 billion. He had lost, CNBC calculated, $44 billion in under two weeks — on paper, which is the only place he had ever had it. When Forbes published its first-ever ranking of crypto fortunes, locking in prices from January 19, it put him at the top, with an estimated $7.5 billion to $8 billion. The editor Randall Lane explained why the magazine bothered: "Fortunes of this magnitude should never be allowed to lurk in the shadows."
Larsen, for his part, said something that spring to Peter Renton backstage at the LendIt conference that suggested he was not thinking in quarters, or even years. Ripple, he said, would be his last startup. He would keep championing the Internet of Value until it was real. On the main stage, he told the interviewer Jo Ann Barefoot that the world needed a global standard so you could send 50 cents to someone in another country — so that M-Pesa in Kenya could connect with Bank of America. Agree on that standard, he said, and there would be "a Cambrian explosion in economic development." Fifty cents. In a year when his net worth had swung by $44 billion, the number he kept reaching for was fifty cents.
That October, at Money20/20, he made a prediction: "Ninety percent of what we see today [in digital assets] won't exist in ten years time, but the other ten percent of it will change the world." Garlinghouse, that June, had predicted that "dozens" of banks would be using XRP by the end of 2019. It did not happen on that schedule. In February 2020, the Financial Times's Alphaville blog reported that MoneyGram — the largest public user of Ripple's XRP-based liquidity tool — had received a $50 million investment from Ripple before adopting it, got the software free, and was collecting an ongoing subsidy for using XRP: $8.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2019 alone. The same piece reported that Ripple depended on XRP sales to remain profitable.
The token that banks didn't need was being paid for, in effect, so that someone would use it.
Waiting Out the Government
On December 22, 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple Labs in the Southern District of New York, along with two individuals: Brad Garlinghouse and Christian A. Larsen. The agency alleged that Ripple had raised more than $1.3 billion through unregistered sales of XRP — that the token was, in law, a security — and that Larsen and Garlinghouse had aided and abetted the violation while also selling their own XRP illegally.
It was the second time in Larsen's career that the SEC had looked at a financial product he believed was a new kind of thing and declared it an old kind of thing. With Prosper, he had folded and filed a prospectus. This time, he fought.
The early skirmishes were revealing. In April 2021, Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn granted a motion by Larsen and Garlinghouse to quash the SEC's demands for their personal financial records beyond the XRP transactions they had agreed to hand over. The co-founder of Californians for Privacy Now had won a privacy ruling against the federal government, which has a certain symmetry.
On July 13, 2023, Judge Analisa Torres issued a split decision that the crypto industry treated as a landmark. She distinguished XRP itself from the circumstances of its sale. Ripple's direct sales to institutional buyers, she held, were unregistered investment contracts. But its programmatic sales on exchanges — where buyers had no idea whether they were buying from Ripple — were not, because those buyers couldn't reasonably expect profits from Ripple's efforts. And Larsen's and Garlinghouse's own exchange sales were not securities offerings either. In October 2023, the SEC dropped its remaining claims against the two men, with prejudice. Larsen was personally clear.
The company was not. On August 7, 2024, Torres imposed a civil penalty of $125,035,150 and enjoined Ripple from future violations. The SEC under Gary Gensler appealed, writing in a 2024 filing of "the egregiousness of Ripple's misconduct." Larsen, who had spent most of his public life as a soft-spoken analyst, went on CNBC that October and called Gensler, a man who had taught blockchain courses at MIT, "the worst public servant of all time."
By then, the politics around the case had shifted beneath it — partly because Ripple had shifted them. In December 2023, Ripple put $25 million into Fairshake, a super PAC that, with two affiliates, raised $78 million from the crypto industry. More than $10 million of Fairshake's spending went to opposing Katie Porter's bid for a California Senate seat; she lost in the March 2024 primary. That May, Garlinghouse announced another $25 million and pledged $25 million more every year "for as long as there are crypto naysayers slandering the industry." By June, Fairshake's candidates had won 33 of the 35 primaries it entered.
Larsen's personal giving tells a more scrambled story. In October 2024 he gave $1 million worth of XRP to Future Forward, the super PAC backing Kamala Harris, and around $1.9 million in total to her campaign directly and through PACs. He gave $1 million to Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, and nearly $7,000 to John Deaton, a Republican running against Elizabeth Warren, crypto's most prominent Senate critic. He had backed a pro-Biden PAC in 2020. In 2025 he gave $39,200 to Katie Porter's campaign for governor of California — the same Katie Porter that Fairshake had spent more than $10 million to defeat a year earlier — before, according to a December 2025 headline, backing a Republican in the same race.
After the 2024 election, the company gave $5 million to Donald Trump's inauguration. In 2025, its name appeared on the White House's list of donors to Trump's ballroom, the project for which the East Wing was demolished. Politico reported that Ripple had hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm close to the administration, and that Trump was angered to learn of it. In 2026, Ripple gave $48 million more to Fairshake and $1 million to support Deaton.
On August 7, 2025, the SEC and Ripple dismissed their respective appeals. The $125 million penalty stood — Torres had refused the parties' joint request to cut it to $50 million — but the possibility of something far worse, which one local outlet put at as much as $2 billion if the SEC had won on appeal, was gone. "That case should've never been brought," Larsen said by phone. "It was designed to destroy the industry, at a time when the government didn't understand the implications."
Ilya Beylin, a Seton Hall law professor, offered a more procedural reading. "One of the things you can do when you represent a company in a political space is you can wait until a more friendly administration comes in," he said. "Whether this is luck, or whether Ripple's counsel was really waiting for this outcome, we'll never know."
The same day the SEC dropped its appeal, Ripple announced it was acquiring Rail, a stablecoin payments firm, for $200 million. "We're looking for others," Larsen said. The company, he added, was now "on the offense."
He was not exaggerating. In October 2025 Ripple announced it would buy Hidden Road, a prime broker, for $1.25 billion, and GTreasury, a Chicago treasury-management company processing some $12.5 trillion in payments a year for clients including American Airlines and Subway, for about $1 billion. In November it raised $500 million from Citadel Securities affiliates, Fortress, Marshall Wace, and others at a $40 billion valuation. In March 2026, the SEC issued a formal interpretation naming XRP, alongside bitcoin and ether, as an example of a "digital commodity."
Eighteen months earlier, in April 2024, a Forbes writer had called Ripple a "crypto zombie," noting that the company had generated $583,000 in fees in 2023 and had $24 billion of XRP in escrow to sell. That was one reading of the business: a token-selling operation with software attached. The other reading was the one now visible on the acquisitions ledger — that Ripple had used its long winter to become, finally, what Larsen had said it would be in 2013. Plumbing for banks. A middle.
The Keys
On January 31, 2024, Larsen posted a short message on X: "Yesterday, there was unauthorized access to a few of my personal XRP accounts (not @Ripple) – we were quickly able to catch the problem and notify exchanges to freeze the affected addresses. Law enforcement is already involved."
The phrase "a few of my personal XRP accounts" was carrying a great deal of weight. Approximately 283 million XRP had been taken — around $150 million at the time. The crypto investigator who goes by ZachXBT tracked the funds in public as they were laundered across MEXC, Gate, Binance, Kraken, OKX, HTX, and HitBTC. Every hop was visible. This is the peculiar nature of a public ledger: nothing can be hidden, and nothing, once moved, can be called back.
For more than a year, Larsen did not say how it had happened. Then, in March 2025, federal prosecutors in the Northern District of California filed a forfeiture complaint seeking more than $23.6 million in seized crypto, and ZachXBT pointed out what it revealed. An associate who managed Larsen's wallets had stored the private keys in LastPass, the password manager breached in August and November of 2022. Following standard security protocol, the physical records of the keys had been destroyed after they were entered into the vault. The digital copy was the only copy. The digital copy was exposed.
There is no way to tell this without the irony doing the work. The man whose first act of public conscience was a $1 million fight to keep your Social Security number out of the hands of strangers lost nine figures because his secrets lived in someone else's database. By some later reckonings, the stolen XRP, at its subsequent price, would have been worth more than $700 million.
The keys had been burned so that no one could find them on paper. Someone found them anyway.
Go, Go, Go
In July 2020, Nellie Bowles of the New York Times wrote an article whose headline was a question: "Why Is a Tech Executive Installing Security Cameras Around San Francisco?" Her opening paragraph acknowledged how it sounded — "A soft-spoken cryptocurrency mogul is paying for a private network of high-definition security cameras around the city" — and then explained why, in a city with a decades-long anti-authority streak, he had found a receptive audience. Violent crime was not especially high. Property crime was constant. "Anyone who lives here knows you shouldn't leave anything — not a pile of change, not a scarf — in a parked car."
Larsen was 59. He had been building the network neighborhood by neighborhood for years, handing the cameras to local business associations and community groups rather than the police. Facial recognition was off-limits, he said. The goal was deterrence, in a city with a weak record of prosecuting petty crime. Of the smash-and-grab crews who broke into cars at Twin Peaks and on Lombard Street, he told Bowles: "They don't care if they're being seen." The police, she reported, gave him a frosty review.
Adam Lashinsky, who had written about E-Loan for Fortune two decades earlier, read Bowles's piece and wrote a column calling Larsen "a compelling character in a morality saga for our times." Then he delivered the verdict: "Vigilantism, technological or otherwise, is no more the correct solution than phony swamp draining or hollow corporate proclamations." What San Francisco needed, Lashinsky argued, borrowing a phrase from Anand Giridharadas, was "muscular government" — not a rich man doing the government's job because the government had failed.
Larsen's answer, delivered over the following six years, was to keep writing checks, larger ones, and to make the government his partner.
The pandemic hollowed San Francisco out. Downtown emptied; economists coined a phrase, "urban doom loop," that became a national shorthand for the city's apparent collapse; Ron DeSantis came to town and stood on a grim corner to record his horror for the cameras. Larsen and Ripple each gave $1 million to food banks. He gave money to small retailers and to a campaign to rehabilitate the city's image. And he started paying for things the city itself could not.
The receipts, as tallied by New York magazine and Mission Local, read like the budget of a small municipal department. Power-washing for merchant corridors in the Mission, Chinatown, and the Avenues: $3 million, through his nonprofit Avenue Greenlight. Street festivals and decorative security gates in the Tenderloin: $5 million. A bid to turn a gambling den into a community center: $2 million. A new rainbow flag for the Castro: $10,000. A drone program for the San Francisco Police Department: $9.4 million. A quarter of a million dollars for the proposition that expanded the department's surveillance powers. Around $1.3 million to the campaigns and ballot measures of Mayor London Breed.
None of this sorted neatly. In 2022, when San Francisco's progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin faced a recall driven by anger over crime, Larsen was the biggest individual donor to the committee opposing the recall, giving $100,000. Boudin lost, 55 to 45. The man funding police drones had tried to save the prosecutor accused of being soft on crime.
In 2024, the city elected Daniel Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir and former nonprofit CEO who took a $1 salary, professed admiration for Michael Bloomberg, and promised to reverse "the so-called doom-loop narrative" with public-private partnerships. In Lurie, Larsen found a mayor who did not regard private money as a reproach. The camera network now feeds the department's post-pandemic apparatus — combined with drones and license-plate readers, it helps make arrests faster — and those arrests are coordinated from the eighth floor of the building where Ripple used to be. His team calls the public-safety work his "legacy project."
He explains the urgency in the vocabulary he uses for everything. "A frustrating thing about San Francisco: Everything just takes forever because of the bureaucracy. So anything we can do is just go, go, go." He has no patience for philanthropy's slower rituals.
— Chris Larsen, to New York magazineI don't like that Giving Pledge thing at all. It's slow money. You make an announcement, but the money doesn't get out. So I think it's like, Go, go, go fast.
The same impatience runs through his views on the street. In 2025 he described watching people dying of overdoses on San Francisco sidewalks as a failure of what he regarded as performative compassion. "That person is going to die," he said. "And you're supposed to just step over them and not force them to get help? That is going to end."
He has never run for office. He once told Kara Swisher he would rather vomit blood out of his eyeballs. He does not need to. In 2026 he gave $2 million to a committee fighting a proposed California wealth tax. He gave $3.5 million to Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate who wanted federal regulation of artificial intelligence — a race that turned into a proxy war between political groups aligned with OpenAI and Anthropic. Bores lost the June 23 primary to Micah Lasher. In September, Swisher, interviewing Larsen live at Pier 27, described him as "one of the tech bros fighting other tech bros," a man who "shifts in ways that I find more sensible" than the Silicon Valley figures who drifted right.
He calls Silicon Valley's "fetish for disruption" self-indulgent and "Trump-like." He has given more than $120 million through the Lam-Larsen climate foundation, $2 million to study how oil and gas companies might transition out of oil and gas, and, in March 2022, a reported $5 million to a Greenpeace-backed campaign — "Change the Code, not the Climate" — urging bitcoin to abandon energy-intensive mining. Bitcoiners were not grateful. CoinDesk's David Z. Morris called it "proof of chutzpah," describing Larsen as striding "away from the wreckage of Ripple, bags full to bursting," telling the coin he had failed to replace how to live.
And the cameras keep multiplying. Many now belong to Flock, the license-plate-reader company. In September 2026, Business Insider published a story whose headline reported that the billionaire funding San Francisco's Flock cameras was getting pushback from his own Gen Z son — one of the two boys whose childhood he had stepped down as CEO, nine years earlier, to be present for.
Names on Buildings
In April 2019, San Francisco State announced a $25 million gift from Larsen, Lyna Lam, and Rippleworks, the foundation Larsen co-founded in 2015 with Doug Galen, a Stanford lecturer who shared his belief that entrepreneurs are everywhere but opportunity is not. A large part of it was paid in XRP — the first digital-asset gift in the university's history, and one of the largest ever made to an American university in that form. The California State University renamed the school the Lam Family College of Business.
The name was Larsen's suggestion. Not Larsen. Lam — in honor of Quang Lam, the father-in-law who led his family out of Cambodia, through the camps in Thailand and the Philippines, to the Bay Area. Thirty-seven percent of San Francisco State's students are the first in their families to attend college. Larsen was one of them. In 2006 he told the alumni magazine, when asked whether an Ivy League degree mattered: "Most people who go to SF State weren't born with a silver spoon in their mouth." Graduates of state schools, he said, "need to believe in themselves because there's plenty of competition out there — people who want to tell you that they're better."
There is, it happens, a Chris Larsen House on the National Register of Historic Places. It stands at 4215 Main Street in Elk Horn, Iowa, and it has nothing to do with him — no documented relation at all. It was built in 1908 by another Chris Larsen, a Danish immigrant who came to America in 1890 at twenty and bought the lot in July 1907 for $17. He ran an implement store and then a drugstore, and sat on Elk Horn's first city council. The 1910 census found him in the house with his wife, Amanda, their three sons, and eight boarders: a German immigrant, two Danes, and five Iowa-born children of Danish parents — an elevator manager, a pump dealer, a railroad laborer, a salesman, a house painter, a carpenter. The house is listed for what it tells about Danish immigration into Shelby and Audubon counties. One finds it, inevitably, while searching for the other Chris Larsen, and it is hard not to linger: a merchant with a common Danish name, a town government he helped make, a house full of strangers paying rent, the whole arrangement of credit and trust and belonging that a small immigrant community builds for itself when no one else will.
The other Chris Larsen — the one who spent a year in Denmark at twenty, who married into a family that lent money to one another through the hui, who named a college for a refugee — has told students at the school that bears that name how to think about failure. "If you fail in America, particularly here in the Bay Area, it's like a badge of honor," he said in February 2023. "If you fail with honor and grace and treating people right, people remember that." And how to think about starting: "When you start a business, look for a problem that you can solve... If you're not solving a problem, then what's the point?"
He no longer lets the anger drive. "Eventually, you have to recognise it," he said of the fury about his father that powered the early companies. "You can't let anger drive the car. Let it sit in the back seat, be grateful for what it got you, but it can't be in control anymore." He swims. He spends time with his kids. He is in his mid-sixties. The Grateful Dead's "Ripple" — Robert Hunter's lyric, Reach out your hand if your cup be empty / If your cup is full, may it be again — was offered by one alumni-magazine interviewer as his credo, and he has not objected.
On the eighth floor of the old Ripple offices, where he used to sit among his engineers, the dispatch calls scroll up the wall of screens, each new line pushing the last one higher — a broken window, a stolen backpack, a car on Lombard Street. Somewhere in the city a feed resolves the make of a bag, the color of someone's eyes. Somewhere a car is parked with nothing on the seat. Not a scarf. Not a pile of change.
Part IIThe Playbook
Larsen's career resists the usual extraction. He is not a single-company founder whose genius can be reverse-engineered from one decisive bet; he is a serial insurgent whose methods evolved — sometimes reversed — across three distinct eras of financial technology, plus a fourth act in civic power that may outlast all of them. What follows are twelve principles drawn from that record. Several cut against the received wisdom of Silicon Valley. A few are cautionary. All are grounded in what he actually did, not what he has been credited with in hagiography.
The principles
- 1.Attack the fee, not the industry.
- 2.Hand the customer the number the institution hides.
- 3.Price control above the cash-out.
- 4.Use the credible threat, not the fight.
- 5.Treat titles as tools.
- 6.Set a kill date for your own company.
- 7.Sell to the people you are replacing.
- 8.Make compliance the product.
- 9.Know which asset the market is pricing.
- 10.Survive long enough for the rules to change, then move the same day.
- 11.Fund where government is slow, and expect to be called a vigilante.
- 12.Let anger ride in the back seat.
L
Three Companies, One Thesis
Each venture attacked a different intermediary, with a different customer and a different regulatory fate.
| Company | The middle it attacked | Customer | Regulatory outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-Loan (1996–2005) | Mortgage brokers and agent commissions | Consumer | IPO in 1999; $18.9B in loans by 2004; sold to Banco Popular |
| Prosper (2005–2012) | The bank as sole lender and price-setter | Consumer | Risk SEC forced end of auction model in 2008 |
| Ripple (2012– ) | Correspondent banking and slow cross-border wires | Enterprise | Mixed FinCEN fine 2015; SEC suit 2020–2025; $125M penalty |
Principle 1
Attack the fee, not the industry
The Stanford GSB writer who profiled Larsen in 2013 identified "the common thread" in a single phrase: "knocking out financial intermediaries, and their fees, as much as possible." Note what this is not. Larsen never set out to abolish mortgage lending, consumer credit, or banking. E-Loan was a mortgage lender. Prosper was a lender. Ripple sells to banks. The target in each case was narrower — the broker's commission, the bank's monopoly on pricing a personal loan, the $20 domestic wire fee and the 3 percent currency conversion charge.
This precision is a strategic advantage. An insurgent who declares war on an entire industry invites a unified response and a regulatory immune reaction. An insurgent who targets a specific fee can recruit parts of the industry as allies, since one firm's toll is often another firm's cost. Larsen's career is a sequence of surgical strikes on tolls, not a crusade against institutions — which is why he could, without contradiction, buy dinner for Occupy protesters and pitch his software at SWIFT's conference.
Tactic: Write down the single fee your product eliminates and the party that currently collects it; if you cannot name both in one sentence, your target is too diffuse.
Principle 2
Hand the customer the number the institution hides
E-Loan's most enduring contribution was not its loan volume but a single decision: to become the first company to show consumers their FICO scores for free. The score had been treated as the lender's private instrument — a fact about the borrower that the borrower could not see. By surrendering it, E-Loan converted an information asymmetry into a trust asset, and helped spawn an open-access movement that ultimately produced entire companies, Credit Karma among them, on whose board Larsen later sat.
The principle generalizes. In nearly every intermediated market, some fraction of the incumbent's power rests not on the service it performs but on the information it withholds. Prosper repeated the move by publishing borrowers' credit grades to lenders. The privacy campaign was the inverse expression of the same instinct — fighting to keep the institution from monetizing information that belonged to the customer. In both directions, the question is who owns the number.
Tactic: Identify the one piece of data your customers most want and your competitors most guard, and give it away as your opening move.
Principle 3
Price control above the cash-out
In the fall of 1998, Intuit offered $130 million for E-Loan, which would have given each founder $10 million in cash and $16 million in stock. Days before closing, Yahoo offered $25 million for 23 percent. Larsen and Pawlowski took the smaller, riskier deal because it let them keep control and keep the brand. Within eighteen months, the company was public and valued at roughly $1 billion.
The lesson is not "always reject acquisitions" — the dot-com valuations that vindicated the decision could have evaporated, and for many companies did. The lesson is subtler: a founder's leverage peaks at the moment a credible buyer appears, and that leverage can be spent on liquidity or on optionality. Larsen spent it on optionality, using the competing bid to secure capital without surrendering the steering wheel. The Collins doctrine of cutting the lifeboats operates here in practice: the cash-out was a lifeboat, and he declined to board it.
Tactic: When an acquisition offer arrives, use it to source a minority strategic investment at the implied valuation before deciding whether to sell.
Principle 4
Use the credible threat, not the fight
When the financial industry killed Jackie Speier's privacy bill in 2001, Larsen did not lobby harder. He changed the venue. Californians for Privacy Now gathered 600,000 signatures — almost twice what was needed for the ballot — and the industry, facing a public vote it would almost certainly lose, withdrew its opposition. The bill passed in 2003 without the referendum ever being held.
The key word is almost twice. Barely qualifying would have invited a fight. Overwhelming qualification signaled an unwinnable one. Larsen understood that the purpose of the ballot measure was to make the legislative concession the cheaper option for his opponents. He has used the ballot as an instrument ever since — most recently in San Francisco's 2024 surveillance proposition and the 2026 fight over a state wealth tax — and the method has remained constant even as the causes have shifted in ways that unsettle his old allies.
Tactic: When an incumbent blocks you through a gatekeeper, build an alternative path to a decision so overwhelming that yielding becomes their least costly move.
Principle 5
Treat titles as tools
Larsen has swapped the CEO title three times in ways that would be unusual for most founders. At E-Loan in 1998, Pawlowski handed it to him; in 1999 he offered it back and she declined. At Ripple in January 2017, he gave it to Brad Garlinghouse, citing his young children and his own diagnosis of his skills: good at "the completely uncertain part," bad at the "discipline play" that follows.
What distinguishes the Ripple handoff is its enforcement. Every email Larsen sends to Ripple employees copies Garlinghouse. No employee can come to the co-founder to reverse the CEO's decisions. "The CEO has to be seen as the person making decisions," Larsen said. Most founder-to-successor transitions fail not because the successor is wrong but because the founder remains an alternative court of appeal. Larsen closed that court on day one, and the partnership has lasted nearly a decade.
T
The Handoffs
How Larsen has moved authority across three decades.
1998
Pawlowski offers to swap; Larsen becomes E-Loan CEO, she becomes president.
1999
Larsen offers the CEO role back; Pawlowski elects to remain president.
2005
Steps down as E-Loan CEO to start Prosper; remains chairman through the sale.
2012
Resigns as Prosper CEO on March 15; co-founds OpenCoin that September.
2017
Hands Ripple CEO role to Garlinghouse; becomes executive chairman with hard boundaries.
Tactic: If you step back from a role, publicly eliminate every informal channel through which people could route around your successor — starting with your own inbox.
Principle 6
Set a kill date for your own company
Larsen's most candid admission is not about Ripple's lawsuit or his lost billions. It is that he stayed at Prosper for eight years when he should have left after two. "Try to fail sooner, don't hang on too long," he told a group of founders in 2026. "This is a very short life. You don't have any time to waste." The insight one attendee drew from it is precise: investors can always recapitalize a company; a founder cannot recapitalize time.
This sits in tension with his other advice — the Stockdale Paradox he cited at Berkeley, "facing the brutal facts, but always having faith that it is going to work out." The resolution is that faith in a mission is not the same as faith in a particular vehicle. Larsen's mission, removing financial intermediaries, survived Prosper's diminished ambitions intact; it simply needed a different company. The regret is the cost of confusing the two.
Tactic: At founding, write down the specific conditions under which you would leave, date the document, and reread it every year without editing it.
Principle 7
Sell to the people you are replacing
Ripple's foundational strategic choice, made in an industry whose early rhetoric was about dismantling central banks, was to sell to banks. "Working within the system," Larsen said at Money20/20 in 2018. "A big part of stopping this fetish for disruption is getting involved in the industry... Work with banks. By working with the system, you are automatically confronted by what the concerns are."
This is the principle that most cleanly distinguishes Ripple from the crypto field, and the one that produced its real assets: 15 of the world's 50 largest banks signed by 2016, a 42-bank consortium in Japan, a board including New York's former top financial regulator and a former director of the National Economic Council, and ultimately the platform from which Ripple acquired a $12.5-trillion-a-year treasury business. It also carried a cost, explored in Principle 9: once banks could use the software without the token, the token's value depended on something other than the business.
R
Disrupt vs. Integrate
The crypto consensus of the early 2010s, and the Larsen alternative.
| Prevailing crypto posture | Ripple's posture |
|---|---|
| Replace banks with a new currency everyone adopts. | Upgrade banks' plumbing; let them keep transacting in fiat. |
| Regulators are adversaries to be outrun. | Licensing and regulatory relationships are core work. |
| Consumer and retail adoption first. | Enterprise first: "the polar opposite" of consumer. |
| Move fast and break things. | "You can't break things in finance." |
Tactic: List the three incumbents most threatened by your product and design a version of it each could buy without admitting defeat.
Principle 8
Make compliance the product
It is tempting to recast Ripple's regulatory posture as foresight. The record is more instructive than that. In May 2015, Ripple paid a $700,000 FinCEN penalty for operating as an unregistered money services business — the first such action against a virtual currency exchanger. The company changed course, routed XRP activity through registered businesses, and within thirteen months held one of New York's earliest BitLicenses. By 2018, Larsen was warning the industry that "you can't just build that thing and worry about New York's Department of Financial Services later."
The deeper point is that in regulated markets, the license is not overhead; it is part of what the customer buys. Banks could not buy Ripple's software without trusting Ripple's compliance, which made the licensing work a sales asset as much as a legal one. Larsen learned this at Prosper, paid for it at Ripple, and has preached it since. The fine was the tuition.
Tactic: Assign your earliest compliance hire to the sales team's pipeline review, so that regulatory status is treated as a feature customers evaluate rather than a cost you absorb.
Principle 9
Know which asset the market is pricing
On January 4, 2018, Larsen was worth $59.9 billion on paper. Thirteen days later, $15.8 billion. The New York Times identified the problem in a single sentence: banks did not need Ripple's token to use Ripple's software, and "that point appears to be lost on many small time investors." Ripple the company and XRP the token were two different assets, with two different demand curves — one driven by enterprise sales, the other, that winter, by South Korean retail speculation.
The confusion cost the company dearly. It produced the MoneyGram arrangement in which Ripple effectively paid a partner to use the token. It produced the SEC case, whose core question was whether XRP buyers were betting on Ripple's efforts. And it produced the "crypto zombie" critique of 2024. Judge Torres's 2023 ruling, separating the asset from the circumstances of its sale, was in a sense a legal formalization of the distinction the market had failed to make. Any founder whose company issues a secondary asset — tokens, points, credits, equity in a subsidiary — faces a version of this gap.
Tactic: Maintain two separate models — one for what your customers pay you for, one for what drives the price of any asset you issue — and never let a forecast from one stand in for the other.
Principle 10
Survive long enough for the rules to change, then move the same day
The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020. Ripple did not settle. It won a personal-records ruling in 2021, a split summary judgment in 2023, the dismissal of claims against Larsen and Garlinghouse that October, and finally, in August 2025, under a different administration, the end of the appeals. The law professor Ilya Beylin noted that waiting for a friendlier government is a recognized strategy, whether or not it was Ripple's plan.
What followed is the more instructive half. The same day the SEC dropped its appeal, Ripple announced the $200 million Rail acquisition. Within three months came Hidden Road at $1.25 billion, GTreasury at about $1 billion, and a $500 million raise at a $40 billion valuation. The company had clearly prepared its offense during the defense. Larsen's word was exact: "on the offense." Endurance is only half the strategy; the other half is having the deals ready for the moment endurance pays off.
Tactic: During any existential fight, keep a fully diligenced list of acquisitions or launches you would execute within one week of a favorable outcome.
Principle 11
Fund where government is slow, and expect to be called a vigilante
Larsen's civic spending in San Francisco — $9.4 million for police drones, $5 million in the Tenderloin, $3 million for power-washing, hundreds of cameras — is governed by a theory of speed. "Everything just takes forever because of the bureaucracy. So anything we can do is just go, go, go." He dismisses the Giving Pledge as "slow money." He funds the thing, now, and lets the institution catch up.
The method has costs, and Larsen has absorbed them openly. Adam Lashinsky called it vigilantism. Civil liberties advocates have objected to the Flock cameras. The police were initially cool to him. And by 2026 the criticism reached his own family. The lesson is not that private money should not fill public gaps — Mayor Lurie's administration was built on the opposite premise — but that the founder who does so becomes, unavoidably, a political actor, and must accept scrutiny that a mere donor escapes. Larsen's partial answer, keeping facial recognition off-limits and routing cameras through neighborhood groups, is an attempt to build legitimacy into the design.
Tactic: When funding a public function privately, publish your own restrictions on its use before anyone asks, so that critics argue with your limits rather than your motives.
Principle 12
Let anger ride in the back seat
Larsen is unusually explicit that anger built his career — anger at a hardworking father who never got ahead, distilled into a commencement instruction in 2004: "Try to get angry when you see things that aren't right." And he is equally explicit that anger had to be demoted. "You can't let anger drive the car. Let it sit in the back seat, be grateful for what it got you, but it can't be in control anymore."
This is a useful model of founder psychology because it neither romanticizes the chip on the shoulder nor pretends it away. Grievance supplies energy and a clear enemy, which is exactly what an insurgent needs at zero. It is a poor guide for a company that has become infrastructure, negotiates with regulators, and partners with the incumbents it once despised. Larsen's arc — from Occupy dinners to bank partnerships to a public-private alliance with the police — is legible as a long renegotiation of where the anger sits.
Tactic: Name the specific grievance that drives you, then once a year ask whether it is still choosing your fights or merely funding your stamina.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Chris Larsen, keynote at Money20/20 USA, October 2018There is a 'techlash' going on, for sure. Silicon Valley has missed the boat. They've moved fast and broke things and didn't worry about the consequences. This is where FinTech has struggled. Pure code is one thing, but it has to also be compliant and regulated.
— Chris Larsen, UC Berkeley Silicon Valley Innovation Week, 2020The hardest thing is ignoring advice from people you respect. If they are saying it's a great idea, it is probably too late.
— Chris Larsen, at dinner with founders hosted by Icons, March 2026There's a feeling of fear, like I shouldn't do this. And then there's a feeling of being scared, but like you just know. All three companies, I felt scared, didn't sleep, especially when you didn't have money in the early days.
— Chris Larsen, on the founding anger, When Shift Happens podcast, 2025You can't let anger drive the car. Let it sit in the back seat, be grateful for what it got you, but it can't be in control anymore.
— Chris Larsen, to San Francisco State students, February 2023If you fail in America, particularly here in the Bay Area, it's like a badge of honor. It makes you stronger for the next time.
Maxims
- Name the toll. Every durable financial company Larsen built began by identifying a specific fee and the specific party collecting it.
- Give away the hidden number. The data an incumbent guards most closely is often the most powerful thing a challenger can hand the customer for free.
- Spend leverage on control. A competing offer is most valuable not as an exit but as a way to raise capital without surrendering the wheel.
- Win by making surrender cheaper. Six hundred thousand signatures worked because they made the industry's concession less costly than its resistance.
- Close the back channel. A handoff succeeds only when the founder stops being an alternative court of appeal.
- Leave before the ship settles. You can recapitalize a company; you cannot recapitalize the six years you stayed too long.
- Sell to the incumbent. The fastest route into a regulated system is through the institutions it already trusts.
- License before you scale. In finance, compliance is not overhead; it is part of what the customer is buying.
- Separate the business from the asset. When your software works without your token, the market will eventually notice, and so will the regulator.
- Fund fast, then defend your limits. Private money can outrun public bureaucracy, but only self-imposed restraint makes it legitimate.
