Chris Larsen was the first in his family to go to college. His father was an aircraft mechanic, his mother a freelance illustrator, and the boy born in San Francisco in 1960 first planned to study aeronautics at San Jose State. Then he found business, moved to San Francisco State, and picked accounting because he thought it was practical.
He graduated in 1984 and took a job auditing Chevron operations in Brazil, Ecuador and Indonesia. Later he went to Stanford's business school, where, he has said, entrepreneur Jim Collins urged students to 'cut the lifeboats.' Larsen did. After his MBA in 1991 he co-founded the online lender E-Loan, which went public in 1999, then Prosper, a peer-to-peer lender.
Later he went to Stanford's business school, where, he has said, entrepreneur Jim Collins urged students to 'cut the lifeboats.' Larsen did.
What almost nobody remembers is how personal that second company was. By 2008 he had funded 450 loans on Prosper with his own money, backing the idea that strangers could lend to strangers. For a mechanic's son who had picked accounting for safety, it was a strange place to put his cash.
Ripple's own start was more tangled. In 2011 David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto began work on a ledger, and McCaleb opened a BitcoinTalk thread called 'Bitcoin without mining.' In September 2012 McCaleb, Britto and Larsen founded OpenCoin, which became Ripple Labs on September 26, 2013. One early decision shaped the next decade: 100 billion XRP tokens were created at inception, and the founders gave 80 billion to the company. That supply paid the bills. It also drew the regulator.
The trouble came in stages. In 2015 Ripple paid a $700,000 FinCEN penalty as an unregistered money services business. In December 2020 the SEC sued over XRP sales. A July 2023 ruling found institutional sales were unregistered securities offerings but exchange sales were not, a $125 million penalty followed in August 2024, and both sides dropped appeals on August 7, 2025. Forbes had called the company a 'crypto zombie' in 2024.
After that it moved fast, buying Rail for $200 million, Hidden Road for $1.25 billion and GTreasury for about $1 billion. In November 2025 it raised $500 million from Fortress, Citadel Securities and others at a $40 billion valuation, its first outside raise since 2019.
Larsen's wealth followed XRP up and down. Forbes put it at $59 billion in January 2018; by 2020 he was 319th on the Forbes 400, and he and Ripple gave $1 million each to five San Francisco food banks.
Larsen picked the practical major and then spent his career betting on the impractical one. What a founder takes from it: the choice that looks safe at twenty can still teach you how to stomach risk at fifty.