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He helped build the soundtrack of the internet age, turned a scrappy MP3 player into a Yahoo acquisition, sold Beats to Apple and helped launch Apple Music.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, Ian Rogers<\/a> is betting that the next great consumer platform is not music, but security for your money and identity. He\u2019s building the future from rural Italy as chief human agency officer at the $1.5 billion security startup Ledger.<\/p>\n Rogers grew up in Indiana and discovered computer science in the early 1990s, right as the web took off. \u201cIt was a great time to study computer science because when I started, it was sort of like rocket science to people, and then by the end, people were trying AOL,\u201d he tells Entrepreneur<\/em>. \u201cI was there at the very beginning of the web and made some of the first websites.\u201d<\/p>\n That curiosity quickly collided with music. He dropped out of grad school to go on tour with a band, which took him to California. There, he helped build a popular MP3 player that he sold to AOL in 1999, then another music application that Yahoo acquired. Rogers went on to run Yahoo Music from 2003 to 2008.\u00a0<\/p>\n He then built Beats Music and sold it to Apple in 2014. He joined Apple as senior director of Apple Music, overseeing the launch of the music streaming service in 2015.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rogers still feels a personal connection to that product. When he met his now-wife, she questioned his loyalty to Apple Music over Spotify. His answer about why he chose Apple Music was simple: \u201cBecause I built it.\u201d<\/p>\n Rogers\u2019 time at Apple continues to shape how he thinks about products. <\/p>\n From Apple, Rogers brought a simple, powerful lesson: People buy an ecosystem. \u201cWhen you buy an iPhone, you\u2019re not buying a piece of hardware,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re buying blue bubbles instead of green bubbles; you\u2019re buying AirDrop; you\u2019re buying FaceTime. That\u2019s part of the experience of being an Apple user versus being an Android user.\u201d<\/p>\n Apple\u2019s genius was creating an integrated experience that \u201cjust works,\u201d from the iPod in the early 2000s through to the modern iPhone, Rogers explains.\u00a0<\/p>\n After Apple, Rogers moved to Paris to serve as the chief digital officer of LVMH, helping take a traditionally offline luxury group from 3% ecommerce in 2015 to 100% online during the pandemic.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nicolas Bacca, Eric Larcheveque and Joel Pobeda founded Ledger in 2014, and Rogers came on board in 2021 as its chief experience officer. Ledger was last valued at $1.5 billion<\/a> in 2021.<\/p>\n The Paris-based company was founded on a simple premise: The same secure chip technology used in credit cards and passports could be used to protect digital assets. To that end, the startup makes physical hardware crypto wallets that store the digital passwords, known as private keys, needed to access and move cryptocurrency. The devices keep these sensitive keys completely offline, so hackers cannot access them.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company\u2019s latest piece of hardware, the $179 NanoGen 5<\/a>, claims \u201cto protect your assets and identity.\u201d\u00a0Ledger has sold more than eight million devices.<\/p>\n Today, Rogers\u2019 title is chief human agency officer<\/a>; he pushed for the change as Ledger doubled down on AI security. \u201cAI security is a top three problem for humanity at the moment,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat I realized is that that\u2019s not about AI; it\u2019s actually about humans. The job here is keeping humans secure and in control.\u201d<\/p>\n Rogers says that if he were 25 years old today, he would learn to manage AI agents.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe will all become the managers of AI agents,\u201d he says. \u201cThe same way that we\u2019re all kind of information peddlers today, we\u2019re having an intelligence revolution that is actually computers taking actions on our behalf.\u201d<\/p>\n In his view, humans will be \u201cend to end\u201d by starting processes and validating results, while agents handle the \u201cmiddle to middle\u201d work. \u201cTherefore, the same way that we all have computers on our desks today, we will all be having agents on our desks tomorrow,\u201d Rogers\u00a0says. \u201cAnd so, if I were 25 years old, I would be building skills at managing agents. Period.\u201d<\/p>\n How do you actually do that? Rogers\u2019 advice is to get your hands dirty with the tools, just as he did with web technologies in the 90s and 2000s.<\/p>\n For founders, his hard-won lesson is about market selection and pain points.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the main thing I\u2019ve gotten wrong in my career is sizing the market relative to my own personal interest,\u201d he admits. \u201cThere\u2019s a joke that every college student has a business idea that\u2019s about either music or bars, because that\u2019s what they know.\u201d<\/p>\n What impresses him now are founders who dig deep into pressing, unsexy problems, like logistics and insurance, and uncover real pain. \u201cYou find the pain, and then you make a painkiller. You don\u2019t make a painkiller and then go looking for pain,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n He helped build the soundtrack of the internet age, turned a scrappy MP3 player into a Yahoo acquisition, sold Beats to Apple and helped launch Apple Music.\u00a0<\/p>\nFrom Indiana to Apple Music<\/h2>\n
Why Ledger exists<\/h2>\n
Advice for founders<\/h2>\n
Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n
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