Litecoin was launched by Charlie Lee — at the time a Google engineer, an MIT graduate, born in Ivory Coast to Chinese parents — in October 2011, as an open-source, fair fork (no premine, no hidden founder allocation) of the Bitcoin Core codebase. Lee had previously built a coin called Fairbrix (a fix of a flawed coin called Tenebrix that had a large premine), but it failed after a 51% attack — Litecoin followed a few weeks later.
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Key technical differences from Bitcoin: a 2.5-minute block time (versus Bitcoin's 10 minutes), the Scrypt Proof-of-Work algorithm (versus SHA-256), and a larger final supply of 84 million (versus Bitcoin's 21 million).
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Lee deliberately positioned Litecoin not as a replacement for Bitcoin but as a complement — hence its nickname, “silver to Bitcoin's gold.”
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2013: Lee leaves Google for Coinbase (Engineering Manager, later Director of Engineering, through 2017).
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2017: Lee sells his entire LTC holdings and becomes Managing Director of the non-profit Litecoin Foundation.
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Litecoin has historically served as a testing ground for Bitcoin upgrades — both SegWit and the Lightning Network ran live on Litecoin before being deployed on the Bitcoin mainnet.