Brad Garlinghouse


Bradley Kent "Brad" Garlinghouse is the CEO and on the Board of Directors of financial technology company Ripple Labs. He previously was the CEO and Chairman of Hightail. Before Hightail, he held executive positions at AOL and Yahoo!
He was born February 6, 1971 in Topeka, Kansas. Garlinghouse has a BA in economics from the University of Kansas and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Career

Garlinghouse had early stints at @Home Network and as a GP at @Ventures before joining Dialpad as CEO from 2000 - 2001. From 2003 - 2008, he served as Senior Vice President at Yahoo! where he ran its Homepage, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Messenger divisions. While at Yahoo! he penned an internal memo known as the "Peanut Butter Manifesto," calling for the company to focus on its core business, rather than spreading itself too thin, like peanut butter.
After Yahoo!, he served as a Senior Advisor at Silver Lake Partners, and then went on to be President of Consumer Applications at AOL from 2009 - 2011. He joined Hightail as CEO until September 2014. Leaving after a disgreement with the board regarding company direction
Garlinghouse previously held board positions at Animoto, Ancestry.com, OutMatch and Tonic for Health.

Ripple

Garlinghouse joined Ripple as COO in April 2015, reporting to then CEO and co-founder Chris Larsen. He was promoted to CEO in December 2016.
In December 2019, Garlinghouse announced that Ripple had raised a $200M series C funding round from Tetragon, SBI Ventures and Route 66 Ventures.

Controversies

In 2018 and 2019 Garlinghouse claimed on multiple occasions that the published error rate for SWIFT messaging was at least 6%. This was shown to be untrue by research published by the London School of Economics Business Review that showed Garlinghouse's claims were based on mis-reading of a paper published by SWIFT that did not refer to error rates in messaging.
Garlinghouse has been personally named in a group of class actions, notably Zakinov v. Ripple Labs Inc., running since 2018 that claim Garlinghouse and his employers, Ripple Labs Inc. have been in breach of various California and Federal securities laws.
In a 2020 an article in Financial Times Alphaville Garlinghouse was quoted as admitting that Ripple Labs would be loss making withough dependent sales of the XRP cryptocurrency.