The Future of Finance and Technology

Chris Larsen (B.S., '84) 
Co-Founder and Executive Chairman 
Ripple

Alum Chris Larsen is Executive Chairman of Ripple's board of directors. He is the Co-Founder and former CEO of Ripple, a blockchain company he co-founded in 2012. Chris is a pioneer in blockchain and cryptocurrency technology, creating a global decentralized network called RippleNet that uses the digital asset, XRP, to facilitate payments across borders and financial networks. Prior to Ripple, Chris co-founded and served as CEO of Prosper, the first peer-to-peer lending marketplace, and E-LOAN, a publicly-traded online lender that helped democratize lending and finance. During his tenure at E-LOAN, he pioneered the open access to credit scores movement by making E-LOAN the first company to show consumers their FICO scores. 

In 2019, San Francisco State University received the largest digital donation ever to a U.S. university courtesy of Chris, his wife Lyna Lam, and Rippleworks, the nonprofit organization he co-launched in 2015. The donation established the Lam Family College of Business as a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship.

Chris earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting and Business Administration from San Francisco State University.

June Ou
Co-Founder and COO
Figure Technologies

June Ou is a co-founder and a Board Director for Figure Technology Solutions. She was the President of Figure Markets Holding Inc. and in this capacity, Ms. Ou was responsible for the marketplace, as well as all of product and engineering, data and analytics and company human resources. Ms. Ou, previously as co-founder and President of Figure Technology Solutions, built the 190+ person Figure product and engineering team from employee one and spearheaded the company’s strategy and development of cutting-edge technology solutions in lending, payments and exchanges. She also led the development and subsequent open-source release of Provenance Blockchain. Under her leadership, Figure has pioneered production use cases in on-chain payments, bilateral asset exchanges, artificial intelligence for credit and marketing and non-parametric FICO-less underwriting. As of November 2023, Figure has enabled $32 billion real-world asset tokenization on Provenance Blockchain using technology built by June and her teams.

Before Figure, Ms. Ou was the Chief Technology Officer of SoFi. In this capacity, Ms. Ou was responsible for product, engineering, and data and analytics. Ms. Ou built the product and engineering team from less than five employees when she started in 2013 to over 300 when she left in 2017. She was responsible for bringing award winning lending, banking and investment solutions to market that helped drive SoFi’s rapid growth and profitability. Ms. Ou helped implement one of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence applications for customer pricing, helping to push company lending contribution margins to best-in-class levels. Before SoFi, Ms. Ou held a variety of technical and management roles as co-founder and CEO of CCO Solutions, VP of Engineering at Finaplex and Senior Director of Advanced Technology at Metamor. 

Ms. Ou holds a Master’s in Management from Stanford University, a Master’s in Applied Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has worked in both the US and Taiwan and is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

Ms. Ou is a strong proponent of distributed workforces. She runs her Figure teams across 30 different states, optimizing on talent and communication. She is also an outspoken advocate for women in technology, with female representation in her product and engineering teams at 2-3X of industry average for financial technology.