Key Takeaways
- Ian Rogers has spent his profession on the intersection of tech and tradition.
- He beforehand led Apple Music and is now driving safety and AI technique at $1.5 billion safety startup Ledger.
- Ledger protects digital personal property, like Bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies, utilizing safe {hardware} chips much like these in bank cards.
He helped construct the soundtrack of the web age, turned a scrappy MP3 participant right into a Yahoo acquisition, bought Beats to Apple and helped launch Apple Music.
Now, Ian Rogers is betting that the subsequent nice client platform is just not music, however safety in your cash and identification. 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 pc science within the early Nineties, proper as the online took off. “It was a good time to check pc science as a result of after I began, it was kind of like rocket science to folks, after which by the tip, folks had been making an attempt AOL,” he tells Entrepreneur. “I used to be there on the very starting of the online and made a number of the first web sites.”
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 bought 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: Folks purchase an ecosystem. “If you purchase an iPhone, you’re not shopping for a bit of {hardware},” he says. “You’re shopping for blue bubbles as a substitute of inexperienced bubbles; you’re shopping for AirDrop; you’re shopping for FaceTime. That’s a part of the expertise of being an Apple consumer versus being an Android consumer.”
Apple’s genius was creating an built-in expertise that “simply works,” from the iPod within the early 2000s by to the fashionable 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 in the course of 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 know-how utilized in bank 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, often called personal keys, wanted to entry and transfer cryptocurrency. The units maintain these delicate keys fully offline, so hackers can’t entry them.
The corporate’s newest piece of {hardware}, the $179 NanoGen 5, claims “to guard your property and identification.” Ledger has bought greater than eight million units.
At the moment, Rogers’ title is chief human company officer; he pushed for the change as Ledger doubled down on AI safety. “AI safety is a prime three downside for humanity for the time being,” he says. “What I spotted is that that’s not about AI; it’s truly about people. The job right here is retaining people safe and in management.”
Recommendation for founders
Rogers says that if he had been 25 years previous right now, he would study to handle AI brokers.
“We’ll all develop into the managers of AI brokers,” he says. “The identical means that we’re all type of data peddlers right now, we’re having an intelligence revolution that’s truly 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. “Due to this fact, the identical means that all of us have computer systems on our desks right now, we’ll all be having brokers on our desks tomorrow,” Rogers says. “And so, if I had been 25 years previous, I’d be constructing abilities at managing brokers. Interval.”
How do you truly do this? Rogers’ recommendation is to get your arms soiled with the instruments, simply as he did with internet applied sciences within the 90s and 2000s.
For founders, his hard-won lesson is about market choice and ache factors.
“I believe the principle factor I’ve gotten mistaken in my profession is sizing the market relative to my very own private curiosity,” he admits. “There’s a joke that each school scholar 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 actual ache. “You discover the ache, and then you definately make a painkiller. You don’t make a painkiller after which go searching for ache,” he says.
Key Takeaways
- Ian Rogers has spent his profession on the intersection of tech and tradition.
- He beforehand led Apple Music and is now driving safety and AI technique at $1.5 billion safety startup Ledger.
- Ledger protects digital personal property, like Bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies, utilizing safe {hardware} chips much like these in bank cards.
He helped construct the soundtrack of the web age, turned a scrappy MP3 participant right into a Yahoo acquisition, bought Beats to Apple and helped launch Apple Music.
Now, Ian Rogers is betting that the subsequent nice client platform is just not music, however safety in your cash and identification. 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 pc science within the early Nineties, proper as the online took off. “It was a good time to check pc science as a result of after I began, it was kind of like rocket science to folks, after which by the tip, folks had been making an attempt AOL,” he tells Entrepreneur. “I used to be there on the very starting of the online and made a number of the first web sites.”
