If you’ve been in the industry for a while, you’ve probably heard of the name David Schwartz. Schwartz is Ripple’s Chief Technology Officer. He recently shared an email exchange between himself and Ripple founder Jed McCaleb that eventually landed him his job at the company.
Lead Software Engineer
In a tweet, Schwartz reveals that on September 17, 2011, he already applied as a Lead Software Engineer at Ripple. He also shared the email in which he introduced himself to the company. “I think I fit in exceptionally well with the company because of my specialized knowledge in crypto (it was 2011) and decades of C++ experience,” said Schwartz.
Jed McCaleb immediately responded positively to Schwartz’s message and asks him if he is ever in the “Bay Area”. Which is a popular region in San Francisco, USA. Schwartz has now been in the chair of CTO at Ripple for some time and has played a crucial role in the further development of the project.
Schwartz’s career
Schwartz originally started working at Ripple in the role of Chief Crypytographer about three months after the December 2011 emails. Seven years later, in 2018, he was promoted to Chief Technology Officer, his current position within the firm. Furthermore, Scwartz is also seen as one of the original architects of the XRP Ledger.
Jed McCaleb is long gone from the company. The founder of Ripple left the ship in 2013. We are now about 10 years later and he has already sold his 9 billion XRP tokens. He started selling after he left Ripple in 2013, but due to rules about his holdings, he was not allowed to sell everything right away.
These kinds of rules are often agreed upon with early investors or founders, so that they are prevented from suddenly dumping everything on the market. In this case, that was a good thing, because it seemed that McCaleb was intent on selling everything as quickly as possible.