The Three Women Running Ripple

Everyone in this space can name Brad Garlinghouse. Most can name David Schwartz. Ask the average XRP holder who runs the rest of the company and you get silence.

That’s a mistake, and it’s a big one.

Because three of the most consequential seats at Ripple — the ones that decide what the company builds, who it hires, and what the world hears about it — are held by women whose names barely register outside the building. They don’t post price predictions. They don’t fight on the timeline. They just run the machine.

Here’s who they are.

Monica Long — President

She was employee number ten.

Monica Long joined Ripple in 2013, when the company had roughly ten people and the phrase “blockchain payments” got you laughed out of most rooms. She was the first marketing and communications hire. There was no marketing department. She was the marketing department.

Before that: corporate communications at Intuit, then public relations for fintech startups including Prosper — the peer-to-peer lender that was trying to route around banks before anyone called it DeFi. A BA from UC Berkeley. In other words, she was already working on the problem of dragging financial services somewhere new before Ripple existed.

What followed inside Ripple is one of the more remarkable climbs in crypto. SVP of Marketing and Design. Then General Manager of RippleX in August 2020 — the division that builds on the XRP Ledger and funds the developers who extend it. Then, in June 2022, she took RippleNet as well, meaning she was simultaneously running both the developer platform and the commercial payments network.

On 27 January 2023, Ripple named her President.

Read that date carefully. January 2023. The SEC case was still live. Torres wouldn’t rule until July. The company was in the middle of the fight of its life — and that is the moment they handed her the presidency.

“Her deep knowledge of crypto paired with her determination, creativity and ability to think out of the box has made her one of the most respected leaders in the industry.”

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO

Long’s own words: “I’m incredibly honored to take on the role of President at Ripple as we expand deeper into crypto-enabled services like liquidity, settlement and custody.”

Liquidity. Settlement. Custody. That sentence is the whole roadmap, stated in public, eighteen months before most of the market worked out what Ripple was actually building. Everyone was watching the courtroom. She was telling you where the company was going.

She is also Executive Sponsor of Women at Ripple, and was named among the Bay Area’s Most Influential Women in Business in 2020.

Twelve years. Employee ten to President. Through a bear market, a lawsuit that was designed to kill the company, and out the other side.

Kiersten Hollars — SVP, Corporate Marketing and Communications

If Monica Long built the narrative when nobody was listening, Kiersten Hollars runs it now that everyone is.

Hollars is SVP of Corporate Marketing and Communications, and her CV reads like a tour of the last two decades of Silicon Valley: communications roles at Oracle, Salesforce, Yahoo!, AOL and Hightail. In 2012 she became a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, advising portfolio companies on marketing strategy. She’s led agency teams for Ancestry, Dropbox and Stitch Fix.

And crucially — before she ever joined Ripple, she spent three years as a partner at The Hatch Agency working with Ripple, building and growing its communications programme from the outside.

That detail matters. She wasn’t parachuted in. She’d already been shaping how Ripple speaks for years before she took the seat formally. Continuity of voice, across the single most hostile media stretch any crypto company has endured.

Because think about what that job actually was. For years, “Ripple” appeared in headlines almost exclusively as a defendant. The same outlets that now run respectful coverage of XRP’s institutional adoption were writing the company’s obituary on a weekly basis. Someone had to hold the line on messaging through that — to keep Ripple sounding like a serious financial infrastructure company while being described as an unregistered securities operation.

Her background is the tell. She has award-winning experience in crisis communications specifically. Ripple didn’t hire a hype marketer. It hired someone who knows how to run a company’s voice when everything is on fire.

And then the fire went out, and the same voice was already in place for the part where Ripple started winning.

Mariel Kelley — SVP, People and Places

Nobody outside a company ever thinks about the People function until they need it. Inside a company, it decides everything.

Mariel Kelley runs People and Places at Ripple, which covers two things that sound administrative and are anything but. People means hiring, compensation, onboarding, promotion, culture, and internal communications — every human being who works there, and the standard they’re held to. Places means the physical footprint: San Francisco, New York, London, Dubai, Singapore and beyond.

Put plainly: she decides who becomes a Rippler, and she builds the rooms they work in.

She was promoted from VP to Senior Vice President and elevated to Ripple’s executive team on 8 March 2024. Garlinghouse announced it himself, saying of Kelley and a colleague promoted alongside her: “They both raise the bar on what it means to be a Rippler. Very proud to now have them on our Executive team!” And separately: “They’re raising the talent bar at Ripple, both in what it means to be a leader and also what it means to be a Rippler.”

That phrase — what it means to be a Rippler — is not an accident. It’s a culture claim, and it belongs to her function.

Here’s why this seat matters more than people realise. Ripple spent years under existential legal pressure while simultaneously hiring aggressively and expanding into jurisdictions on four continents. Most companies under that kind of siege haemorrhage talent. Ripple didn’t. It grew, it kept its senior people, and it opened offices in the exact regulatory jurisdictions that turned out to matter — Dubai, Singapore, London — while the US was still deciding whether to sue it again.

Somebody had to make that survivable from the inside. That’s the job.

Why this matters

There’s a version of crypto media that only ever covers CEOs and founders. It’s lazy, and it misses how companies are actually built.

A president who’s been there since there were ten employees and who mapped the product roadmap out loud while the market was distracted by a lawsuit. A communications chief who’d been shaping the company’s voice from the outside for three years before she owned it, and who had the crisis background for exactly the crisis that came. A people chief who kept the talent bar high and the culture intact through the same lawsuit and a global expansion at the same time.

None of these three needed the timeline’s permission. None of them spend their days arguing with anonymous accounts. They built the thing.

Ripple is now the only major crypto company with a federal court ruling behind it, with offices in the jurisdictions that will write the rules, and with a product line pointed squarely at liquidity, settlement and custody.

That didn’t happen by itself. And it didn’t happen because of one guy on CNBC.

Know the names.

Sources

• Ripple — Ripple Names Monica Long As President
• Ripple — Raising the Bar on Talent at Ripple
• Milken Institute — Monica Long speaker profile
• The Org — Kiersten Hollars, Ripple