Apple, LVMH Exec Left for a Startup That Protects Your Data

He helped construct the soundtrack of the web age, turned a scrappy MP3 player right into a Yahoo acquisition, bought Beats to Apple and helped launch Apple Music. 

Now, Ian Rogers is betting that the following nice shopper platform isn’t music, however safety on your cash and id. He’s constructing the longer term from rural Italy as chief human company officer on the $1.5 billion safety startup Ledger.

From Indiana to Apple Music

Rogers grew up in Indiana and found laptop science within the early Nineteen Nineties, proper as the online took off. “It was a good time to check laptop science as a result of once I began, it was type of like rocket science to individuals, after which by the tip, individuals had been attempting AOL,” he tells Entrepreneur. “I used to be there on the very starting of the online and made a few of the first websites.”

That curiosity shortly collided with music. He dropped out of grad college to go on tour with a band, which took him to California. There, he helped construct a preferred MP3 participant that he sold to AOL in 1999, then one other music utility that Yahoo acquired. Rogers went on to run Yahoo Music from 2003 to 2008. 

He then constructed Beats Music and bought it to Apple in 2014. He joined Apple as senior director of Apple Music, overseeing the launch of the music streaming service in 2015. 

Rogers nonetheless feels a private connection to that product. When he met his now-wife, she questioned his loyalty to Apple Music over Spotify. His reply about why he selected Apple Music was easy: “As a result of I constructed it.”

Rogers’ time at Apple continues to form how he thinks about merchandise.

From Apple, Rogers introduced a easy, highly effective lesson: Individuals purchase an ecosystem. “While you purchase an iPhone, you’re not shopping for a bit of {hardware},” he says. “You’re shopping for blue bubbles as an alternative of inexperienced bubbles; you’re shopping for AirDrop; you’re shopping for FaceTime. That’s a part of the expertise of being an Apple person versus being an Android person.”

Apple’s genius was creating an built-in expertise that “simply works,” from the iPod within the early 2000s by to the modern iPhone, Rogers explains. 

After Apple, Rogers moved to Paris to function the chief digital officer of LVMH, serving to take a historically offline luxurious group from 3% ecommerce in 2015 to 100% on-line through the pandemic. 

Why Ledger exists

Nicolas Bacca, Eric Larcheveque and Joel Pobeda based Ledger in 2014, and Rogers got here on board in 2021 as its chief expertise officer. Ledger was final valued at $1.5 billion in 2021.

The Paris-based firm was based on a easy premise: The identical safe chip expertise utilized in credit cards and passports might be used to guard digital property. To that finish, the startup makes bodily {hardware} crypto wallets that retailer the digital passwords, referred to as non-public keys, wanted to entry and transfer cryptocurrency. The units hold these delicate keys utterly offline, so hackers can not entry them. 

The corporate’s newest piece of {hardware}, the $179 NanoGen 5, claims “to guard your property and id.” Ledger has bought more than eight million units.

Right this moment, Rogers’ title is chief human agency officer; he pushed for the change as Ledger doubled down on AI safety. “AI safety is a high three drawback for humanity in the intervening time,” he says. “What I spotted is that that’s not about AI; it’s really about people. The job right here is protecting people safe and in management.”

Recommendation for founders

Rogers says that if he had been 25 years old immediately, he would be taught to manage AI agents. 

“We are going to all develop into the managers of AI brokers,” he says. “The identical means that we’re all sort of info peddlers immediately, we’re having an intelligence revolution that’s really computer systems taking actions on our behalf.”

In his view, people will likely be “finish to finish” by beginning processes and validating outcomes, whereas brokers deal with the “center to center” work. “Subsequently, the identical means that all of us have computer systems on our desks immediately, we’ll all be having brokers on our desks tomorrow,” Rogers says. “And so, if I were 25 years old, I’d be constructing abilities at managing brokers. Interval.”

How do you really do this? Rogers’ recommendation is to get your fingers soiled with the instruments, simply as he did with web technologies within the 90s and 2000s.

For founders, his hard-won lesson is about market choice and ache factors.

“I believe the primary factor I’ve gotten incorrect in my profession is sizing the market relative to my very own private curiosity,” he admits. “There’s a joke that every college student has a enterprise concept that’s about both music or bars, as a result of that’s what they know.”

What impresses him now are founders who dig deep into urgent, unsexy issues, like logistics and insurance coverage, and uncover real pain. “You discover the ache, and you then make a painkiller. You don’t make a painkiller after which go searching for ache,” he says. 

He helped construct the soundtrack of the web age, turned a scrappy MP3 player right into a Yahoo acquisition, bought Beats to Apple and helped launch Apple Music. 

Now, Ian Rogers is betting that the following nice shopper platform isn’t music, however safety on your cash and id. He’s constructing the longer term from rural Italy as chief human company officer on the $1.5 billion safety startup Ledger.

From Indiana to Apple Music

Rogers grew up in Indiana and found laptop science within the early Nineteen Nineties, proper as the online took off. “It was a good time to check laptop science as a result of once I began, it was type of like rocket science to individuals, after which by the tip, individuals had been attempting AOL,” he tells Entrepreneur. “I used to be there on the very starting of the online and made a few of the first websites.”