Chris Larsen is a popular corporate executive and an angel investor. He is commonly known as the co-founder of CryptoCurrency Ripple (XRP). He is an entrepreneur who has invested in various tech-related startups in Silicon Valley. He made a huge profit from all his investments and counted on the list of billionaires.
Background and early life: Chris was born on 30th November 1960 in SanFrancisco, California. He is the son of an Airplane Mechanic who worked for United Airlines. For his course in International Business and Accounting, he enrolled at San Francisco State University. He completed his degree in 1984. In 1991 for his MBA degree, he went to Stanford Graduate School of business.
Larsen is married to Lyna Lam. They are parents of two children and live in The Highlands community in Seattle, Washington.
Career:
- Chris’s first job was at Chevron as an Auditor.
- He worked as a Mortgage lender but quit this job in 1992. The reason behind quitting his job was to start a Mortgage business with one of his colleagues Janina Pawlowski. America’s first online mortgage company was started by Chris Larsen. The name of the company was E-Loan. Larsen lead the company as CEO and Chairman and left his post in 1995. Later E-Loan was sold to Banco Popular. In the 2000s the market value of E-Loan was $1 billion.
- In 2006 he started his own lending farm Prosper Marketplace. This company took him to one of the prestigious positions in the peer-to-peer lending business. Before resigning in 2012 he served as Company’s CEO.
- OpenCoin, a tech company was co-founded by Larsen, and served the company as CEO. Side by side Chris was working on a revolutionary payment protocol named Ripple. The function of this was to allow direct and immediate movement of funds between parties.
- His startup OpenCoin was renamed Ripple Labs Inc. in September 2013
- Cryptocurrency XRP used by Chris became the second biggest crypto by market cap after Bitcoin.
- Ripple Labs has been placed on 4th rank in the list of the World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies Of 2015 In Money. The list was released by Fast Company. Ripple has also been named among the 50 smartest companies.
- Chris is an environmentalist so he suggested that Bitcoin should make its mining system more environmentally friendly. Despite criticism, he support his green campaign and also started the Larsen Lam Climate Change Foundation.
- Apart from being a businessman, and investor, he is active as a speaker and panelist at various industry events. Thus we see that Chris has a great experience in his working field and impacted many lives and the business industry too through his work.
Net Worth: Chris Larsen is very successful in his career and earned a good return from every business/ investment. Chris has a 17% stake in Ripple Labs and has a personal holding of 5.19 billion XRP. Today. his net worth is $3.3. billion.