From McDonald's "worker" to Robinhood vice president, Johann Kerbrat's counterattack life

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Fifteen years ago, in a small apartment near the French Riviera, 21-year-old Johann Kerbrat worked at McDonald's during the day and self-taught programming at night. Now, as Robinhood's Senior Vice President and Head of Crypto Business, he returns to his hometown with the company's most ambitious crypto product suite.

Cannes "Past"

"My studio was probably smaller than your bathroom," Kerbrat recalled. Before enrolling at the nearby University of Nice, he quit his job and founded his first fintech startup - a no-code payment company that helped small merchants build e-commerce websites without hiring developers. "That was the early stage of e-commerce. At that time, merchants either had to spend tens of thousands of euros hiring agency or couldn't conduct online business. Our idea was to let people build their own stores without technical knowledge - somewhat like Shopify today." The timing was perfect. In the early 2010s, online commerce was booming, and Kerbrat's tools gave small merchants a chance to compete. This also made him realize how fragile and expensive the global financial system was.

Enlightenment: Bitcoin Whitepaper

Kerbrat later recalled that a conversation with a Greek classmate made him realize the "fragility" of the traditional banking system. That classmate told him his family's bank accounts were frozen during the Eurozone crisis, and life came to a standstill. Meanwhile, merchants on his platform continuously reported expensive transaction fees, complex refund processes, and credit card fraud as an uncontrollable sunk cost. "Then I read the Bitcoin whitepaper," he said, "and I thought: 'Well, this is the solution to all these problems.'" That was in 2010. Kerbrat began assembling mining machines, deploying wallets, and trying to build Bitcoin-based payment interfaces. He didn't get rich overnight with Bitcoin or become a speculator, but instead tried to understand the real possibilities behind this technology. "At that stage, you realize that cryptocurrency is not just an asset, but a structural transformation." [The translation continues in this manner, maintaining the original structure and meaning while translating to English.]

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