In mid-July of 2021, Pascal Gauthier made a call to the 29-year-old who’d wowed investors and the media by building a big trading platform at warp speed, and emerged as the crypto field’s most charismatic lobbyist: Sam Bankman-Fried.
“I wanted to learn what his secret sauce was, to grow his business so quickly,” recalls Gauthier, CEO of Ledger, a leading purveyor of hardware wallets for securely storing digital currencies. (You can read more about that torrid growth and the documents showing how Bankman-Fried sold his vision to VCs here.) But as their conversation progressed, Gauthier became startled. SBF was describing a model for scaling an enterprise that, in retrospect, contradicted everything Gauthier had learned in over two decades as a successful, serial entrepreneur. “It all sounded like a classic recipe for disaster,” he recalls. “I was wondering, ‘He’s a myth; he’s backed by the best investors; he’s got a valuation in the tens of billions. What don’t I understand?’ But it looked like he was building a great business, and we thought it was great to partner with them.”
