I had to dig a bit which founder you were referring to. No controversy here, but just want to give a background: I always think of Ryan Fugger as the person who initially proposed the network of IOUs idea and used the name Ripple for it, and later on worked with Jed McCaleb's team who implemented Ripple as it's known today. [1]

Just amazing how alt-currency/alt-payment ideas have grown so much from being on the fringe to more or less widely accepted. It was hard to imagine back in 2006 how these ideas would finally take off.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rippleusers/IVin3Qwrp7k/urza...