Matthieu Stefani reçoit Andy Yen, fondateur et PDG de Proton, pour parler de la protection des données personnelles. Selon lui, le modèle économique du web représente une menace plus grande que les gouvernements.
Il retrace la création de Proton à Genève, entreprise financée par ses abonnés et contrôlée par une fondation. La discussion aborde aussi la souveraineté européenne, la rétention des données, le projet de contrôle des messageries et l'intelligence artificielle.
Les auditeurs découvrent surtout comment quitter Gmail et pourquoi la confiance pourrait devenir un atout pour l'Europe.
Dans cet épisode Matthieu Stefani, Andy Yen
Cette transcription de l'épisode consacré à Andy Yen et Proton a été réalisée grâce à la technologie derrière l'outil HappyScribe de transcription réunion.
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Today, when you use a Gmail or any other non-encrypted service, it's a bit like sending letters without envelopes. I'm the founder and CEO of Proton. It's a bit like Google: we're building Google services the way Google Workspace has. Today, if you go online, the default is "share all your information with everybody." And that's including your emails, your documents, your whole internet existence. And I think that's a poor choice of defaults. Twelve years ago, we wanted to go and fix: "I want privacy to be accessible to everybody in the world."
If you haven't heard about Proton, it already has like 100.
Million users. You don't have to adopt the Silicon Valley business model to have a scalable enterprise that can grow. The most critical thing in getting to the first 100 million users actually is talent. The first 10 people you bring into your company will determine whether you succeed or fail. If you don't pay for Google Ads, a competitor can actually bid on your keyword. What they're trying to do is create engagement on the platform and make you stay. And Google understands so much about you that they know exactly how to frame the arguments from this political party to make you receptive to the message.
How often do you get pressure from governments or companies?
We had the Russians come to us and say, "Hey, we need access to Proton information, and we want you to put servers in Russia." People know how the story ended because we got banned.
We are the average of the people we spend the most time with. My name is Mathieu Stefani, and I invite entrepreneurs, athletes, and artists to raise my average and yours. Just before we begin this episode, I'll switch to French for a brief moment to thank my sponsors. Welcome, Andy. How are you doing?
Yes, thanks for having us. Thank you.
Cool. I'll put the microphone a bit lower.
Lower?
Yeah, like that. That's good, like this.
Perfect.
So, yeah, I'm happy to have you here, actually. I've been reading about your story for the past few days.
Good things, I hope.
Yeah, great things. And it's very interesting because, I mean, it's many things we talk about. We're going to talk about sovereignty, we're going to talk about privacy, which are not the same, which can be opposite sometimes, actually. We're going to talk about Switzerland a bit, Europe, maybe the US, maybe the rest of the world too, and a lot about tech, AI. But I mean, the core things about privacy, or mainly privacy, is something you're like, well, you know, who cares?
I mean, it's cool, but I mean, will the CIA really look into my emails or look into my photos? I mean, who cares, right? Nobody cares about my stuff, right? And I'm not like a big company, and I guess you were at the CERN when it all started. You'll tell me about that, but I mean, it's not like a day-to-day problem in my life. But sometimes, each time I read about it, I'm like, yeah, maybe it should be.
I don't know. Should it? Should it?
Well, the argument that people often make is, "I don't need privacy because I'm not doing anything illegal." This is a common thing. You're not doing anything illegal. Most people are not doing anything illegal, so it's not a problem.
Not that much, actually. At least.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And that concept, like don't do illegal things, it's kind of a good and sound concept to live by, right? The problem arises when you talk about what is the definition of illegal. And this is where it gets more tricky, because what you consider to be illegal, somebody else may have a different interpretation. So privacy isn't because you have nothing to hide and you don't do anything illegal. It's the protection and safeguard in case the definition of what is illegal changes in the future.
And that's actually why you need it. If I kind of give an example, there are certain countries where protesting used to not be illegal. In fact, for more than 20 years in Russia, you could actually protest. But today, certain protests land you in jail forever. And you could argue that similar trend may be happening in the US as well. So it's really a question not about you have nothing to hide. It's really a question of what is the definition of illegal and who defines that.
And you don't have much control over that. So that's why I think it's still important to take personal privacy into consideration.
And the other very interesting thing people must have told you about is that you're originally from Taiwan, which is, I mean, a specific part in the world. I shouldn't say a specific part of China, but around China. And you grew up, at least during your studies, in the US. So you kind of understand, and you've been in Europe for like a couple of decades almost.
15 years now.
15 years, yeah. So you kind of understand the different ways of seeing privacy, freedom in different places around the world, right? And I guess you know that like the freedom of speech in the US. So I was seeing the other day like American people doing Nazi, what do you call it, salut signs and stuff, yeah, saluts.
Apparently happened in Germany this weekend as well.
Well, which kind of is, I mean, it's not kind of, it's illegal in France, actually, at least. And I would say I kind of understand why, but in the US, freedom is above all, and you can say and think and do whatever you want, right? So I guess this story you have is quite big into this company you have now, you built.
Yeah, it's an interesting perspective. I think very few people have maybe had the good fortune of living on all three continents. And you do see sort of the pros and cons of each approach. They are quite different, by the way. And this doesn't just come from a value standpoint, but also on how you do business. The business strategies are very different on all three continents. And then on privacy as well. I would say if you grow up in Taiwan, you see, of course, very close by what's going on in China.
But the example that Taiwanese go to more often today is not what is happening in China, because that's a bit abstract, but also what happened in Hong Kong. You look what happened in Hong Kong and you realize, oh, OK, so if we were to reunite with China, this is what our future is going to be. And that's not a great future. You saw in Hong Kong, essentially overnight, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, all that disappeared in a very short period of time. So it shows you how quickly, in fact, democracy and basic freedoms can be lost. The US.
Plus, sorry, before we go to the US, when you're in Taiwan, you feel, I mean, really the threat, right? I mean, you know it could happen from overnight, right?
Yes. But it's not the threat just from external. It's also the history of Taiwan. Taiwan was a dictatorship for many years. In fact, it was a military state for quite, actually, most of its history. Democracy only came in the 1990s, and that was fought very difficult to get that. And so you remember the lesson of democracy, and you don't want to lose it. US, actually, you can kind of imagine why big tech maybe doesn't concern them so much, because they've always had a history of quite a lot of freedom, and that's sort of a different culture.
Europe, I think, is a very interesting and somewhat strange place, because we don't have to go so far back in European history to actually have dictators in Europe on this continent. Most of the Eastern Bloc, actually, under communism.
Yeah, plus, I mean, Spain, Italy, I mean, Germany, like.
Yes, yes, yeah, and until quite recently. So for me, it's fascinating because Europe, it wasn't so long, and some of the maybe older generation still actually lived it, whereas nobody in the US can say that they lived under that type of situation, maybe until quite recently, right? So from that perspective, it's almost like Europe has somehow forgotten the lessons of its very not-so-distant past and is now maybe going down some of the same mistakes in the past.
So I find that the idea that in Europe we would not focus on security, privacy, and fundamental human rights in some areas kind of a little bit surprising, in fact. And I'll give you one example. In Brussels recently, there was a proposal to do chat control. Chat control is where you want to break encryption and read all messages. A bit like what the East Germans used to do. And the idea that such a proposal could advance to a quite far state here in Europe.
Like on WhatsApp or Telegram.
Yes, on WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, things like that.
If you want to operate in Europe, you'll have to be like chat control, like open, or you have to be, yeah.
Yes, yeah. So the idea that something like that could be considered in Europe, that only a generation ago lived in a police state in half of the population, that to me is surprising.
Yeah. And I guess you get like so many arguments for, pros and cons, but we'll get there afterwards. Andy, if you agree, would you be kind enough to introduce yourself?
Yeah, of course. So I'm the founder and CEO of Proton. We're a, well, the best way to describe Proton is I like to say it's a bit like Google. We're building Google services. So what Google Workspace has: email, calendar, file storage, documents, sheets, the whole ecosystem.
It's a bit like Google, but without the search, though.
Yeah, not yet.
Which is the beauty. OK.
Not yet. Maybe we get there someday. But it's essentially a European version of Google, but without the creepy business model.
Without the?
Without the creepy business model. It's a more ethical business model around privacy and security. And that is, yeah, so it's Google in a sense, but it's also the anti-Google, basefully in Europe, in Geneva, Switzerland. My background, actually, I'm a physicist. I'm a scientist originally, not a business person. Don't have an MBA. Don't have one of those fancy business degrees. But I studied economics and physics for most of my career. And had I not done Proton, I would probably be a physicist still today, be a professor.
So I was in the academic path, and then at some point, of course, switched to the business world, which was also quite a change as well.
Do you miss it, physics?
Ooh. Well, you know what they say about physics? It doesn't matter how long you take. The nature of the universe is not going to change. So you have sort of all the time in the world to discover it. Whereas in business, there is definitely a greater sense of urgency. So I like the part of physics where you could sort of take your time a little bit, maybe a bit more of a relaxed pace, a little bit less stressed, to be honest. And that part I do miss. It was a calmer and more peaceful era of my life.
Business world is, I think, more exciting, but also more difficult in different ways. So they're quite different. And I can also begin to see why the two worlds don't mix as often as we think they would.
Well, it seems somehow they're mixing more and more at the moment. And, well, the interesting thing about what you just said is that it's kind of slower physics, right?
Yes, yes.
But I had the chance to talk, to have a dinner and lunch with a French physicist called Michel Devoré. He's a Nobel Prize about quantum computing. And he was explaining me how fast it's going now. I mean, much faster, like probably maybe 10 times, I mean, the research. And I was surprised because sometimes you see people telling you, I mean, he's a Nobel Prize, so he's not like chatting about that.
And he was saying like a thesis you would make in seven years, something like this, maybe 10 sometimes, can be done in less than a year because all of the research, all of the trials you have to make, all of the, how do you say? Yeah, well, I mean, it's just much faster. I mean, you can simulations.
Ah, the simulations.
Simulations, yeah. And even things that haven't been found before, right?
Yes. Well, this is the most prominent in math. If you look at math and AI, well, a proof that maybe took previously 5 or 10 years to figure out, AI model can do maybe in a matter of days. So yes, I think AI disrupts many fields of the world, but particularly science will be disrupted very quickly and probably very decisively by AI. And this is something that we see starting from mathematics. It's already very clear.
Yeah. Well, we'll talk about also the impact of AI in your business. And so it all started from there, right, actually, if I understand well, when you were at the CERN.
Yes.
You've been concerned that after, was it the, what's his name, the.
This is 2014, so this was a little bit after Snowden.
Yeah, after Snowden. You were concerned that maybe you would be watched by, I mean, several governments, maybe US or I don't know, around the world. And so you thought it was interesting to get like a very secured email. Was it?
It wasn't so much government surveillance, actually. What Snowden showed to the world is government surveillance. But if you think about the problem, the bigger problem actually is companies, is corporations. And maybe let's do a kind of a thought experiment. I actually think tomorrow the US government could actually shut down the NSA, save billions of dollars. So if Elon at DOGE has some ideas, maybe they can shut down the NSA.
Why? Because from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta, they would have all the data, probably even more than what the NSA has on you. So Snowden showed us government surveillance as a big problem. But I would argue the corporate surveillance, the business model of the web today, that's actually a much larger problem. And that was the problem that, well, now 12 years ago, we wanted to go and fix. Because today, if you go online, the default is share all your information with everybody. And that's including your emails, your documents, your whole internet existence.
And I think that's a poor choice of default. So what Proton wants to do is give people another option. If you want certain parts of your life online to be private, you have that possibility now. And that's important to really have that choice. Because if we don't offer that choice, then big tech companies have a very clear, let's say, philosophy, and they have a very clear incentive to give you as little privacy as possible.
OK. I mean, how private can you go? I mean, it seems to me now that the, I mean, even if you try really hard at the end, like it's always breakable, right? So I guess you're trying also very hard on your side that it's not on Proton.
Well, there's no such thing as like perfect security, perfect privacy. Everything can, in theory, be broken, be cracked, be opened up. But then it's a question of difficulty. It's quite difficult, actually, to hack an individual. It takes a lot of resources. And what that means is if you're being targeted by a government, maybe they will get you, perhaps. But it's very difficult to do that at scale across the entire population. So I think making the bar higher is still actually quite important.
And so, of course, there's nothing to be absolutely safe, right? There's no 100% guarantees in life. But it's still important that we make it so that it's not just a direct query into a database. And that's what it is today, right? Today, if the government has a question about you, they can simply ask Google using legal order, and Google will tell them everything.
Because this is going like, I mean, a million steps further now with AI. I mean.
Oh, yeah.
What I'm telling Claude or ChatGPT about my life, or I'm trying not to be like, to transform it as my psychologist. But still, I mean, it knows so many things about my heartbeats, my weight, my like everything, and my business. I mean, it can read my emails and so on. So the idea, like your emails are not read by an AI?
No.
No?
Well.
Do you think I shouldn't do that?
I think it's probably not a good idea. And let me give you maybe a bit of perspective, right? If you consider, there's always the joke, like when I die, delete my browser history, right? Because you have all your search history and everything that you have seen. But you consider what is in a browser history and what is in a search history, and you look at that data compared to what AI knows about you, AI actually has a much better idea of who you are than what your search history could imply about you.
And this is the reason why big tech companies are pushing into AI, because it gives them so much more context. It is so much more information. It's so much more effective at profiling compared to what they had in the past. So AI is a massive accelerant. It's an acceleration of the existing surveillance capitalism business model, now with massively more data compared to before. And at Proton, we actually released a tool recently. So if you look up like AI paper trail, this is a new thing that we launched as part of Proton Lumo.
OK, Lumo, right?
Yeah, yeah. So Lumo has an AI paper trail tool. You can actually upload your data from Claude or ChatGPT into this tool. It'll tell you what AI knows about you. And if you do that experiment, it's pretty scary for most people. So maybe try it out when you have some free time and see.
Is it free?
It's free. It's free, yeah. Anybody can do it. And once you put it in there, you go, wow. Oh my god. I cannot believe that it knows this much, and it can infer this much about me just from my chat history. So it's important to build tools like that, because it lets people have a concrete sense of what is going on. It's all hypothetical until that tool gives you your report.
Just to be clear for people listening to us or watching us, if you don't know Andy yet, or if you haven't heard about Proton, it's not like a small new startup. It already has like 100 million users, right?
Yes, yeah.
And what are the incomes? Is it public?
So we don't disclose the revenues. But the business is profitable. We're not a VC-backed. This is something that is not widely known and also a little bit strange these days.
2.5 million. Well, it's not VC. It was love money. And was it also a.
There was crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding, yeah.
At the beginning.
Half a million, was it?
Yeah, we received some EU grants as well. But today, there's no venture capital on our cap table, which is odd, right? Not a typical situation. But so the business is profitable. And I think that's the key thing, because it proves that you don't have to adopt the Silicon Valley business model to have a scalable enterprise that can grow.
You were talking about we were talking about that before we started recording. The majority shareholder is a foundation, actually.
Yes.
So it's more than 50%, right?
Yeah, yeah. The foundation is a controlling shareholder.
Yeah. And so it's the same as we were talking about, same as Rolex, actually, somehow. And it's interesting. It's some Swiss thing about foundation. I don't know.
I think foundations are created for different reasons. Rolex did it when he died because he had no heirs. And that's sort of a common thing that happens. If you die with no heirs, then what do you do, right?
Well, give it to me. I mean, I'm here.
Perhaps, yeah. I'm not dead yet, right? So I didn't do it for that reason, let's say. No, the reason that we did it at Proton is because I think people want certainty in a very uncertain world. And there's always the question of how do we know that Proton will stay true to its values in the long run? We've seen many examples of European success stories that say one thing, and then after some period of time.
They get bought by Americans.
Sold to American private equity, right? Or they take on Americans as investors. Investors become bigger and bigger. And then eventually, it's.
I mean, if I give you $5 billion, somehow you're OK, right?
You owe this person something, right?
Yeah.
And so at Proton, we don't want to go down that path. I think it's not compatible with the values that we believe in. And the only way to give certainty in the long run that it will continue to defend its values over the long term is actually a foundation. It's certainty. I kind of make the joke. I can get hit by a bus today, and you know what's going to happen.
Yeah. Well, we're going to come to the, yeah, I mean, the funding. How do you reach 100 million users with 2.5 million euros? I mean, or dollars. I mean, it's insane. But before that, I would just want to understand, why Switzerland? I mean, there must be something here. And I guess there is some kind of an issue maybe coming.
Yes, potentially.
So are there any other options? And when I was reading about Proton and yourself, I was thinking many times about Pavel Durov and Telegram. And there are a lot of, I would say, similarities, I guess. I don't know where Telegram is based, actually. He is in Dubai, but.
I think it's Dubai. Dubai is probably the most accurate way to say where they're based.
OK, OK.
They keep it a little bit secret, though.
All right.
Yeah, but Switzerland. Why Switzerland? The answer was because I was there. I was at CERN. And you tend to start wherever you are at the time.
All right.
Right? The more interesting question is probably why we stayed. Because the obvious answer for building a tech company, well, even back then, but also to some extent today, is actually you should go to the US. Go to San Francisco, open an office, get on the VC system, and then grow to a billion and have a lot of success, right? We stayed for a couple of reasons. And there's probably two or three, let's say, beliefs combined with some other factors.
Number one, there was very strong support from the state of Geneva. This is something that people don't think about so much. But I think the environment in which your company is in and the institutional support actually plays a big role. So helping with the office space, making the bureaucracy easier, those are things that actually, early on as an entrepreneur, especially back in those days before things became more digital, it's important. Even things of getting my own work permit, right, was kind of a complicated thing to figure out.
So I think the support from the state of Geneva was important, one factor. Second thing is I sort of looked at talent globally. And I'm not convinced, actually, that most European tech startups going to Silicon Valley is the right move. And the reason I say this is because the most critical thing in getting to the first 100 million users, first 100 million revenue, whatever you want to call it, actually is talent. The first 10 people you bring into your company more or less will determine whether you succeed or fail.
This is something that a lot of people miss. And if you go to Silicon Valley back then, but even today, as a European company, you're going to be most likely a very, very small fish in a huge pond.
Yeah. But it's a huge pond, though. With a lot of money, right? I mean.
Yes.
If you want to go big, or go home, you want to go big, it's over there, right?
Sure. But if you want the top talent, your entire seed round financing might be what big tech pays one engineer for a year. It's not going to work out very well, I think. I think you will have a lot of difficulty attracting the top talent that you need to come work for your business and then to scale that over time.
Yeah, you can pay an engineer half a million euro a year. I mean, it can be the cost in the US, in the valley, right?
Well, that's just starting. It could be much more than that.
Yeah, yeah. How much is your what is the highest salary at Proton?
Well, I think at Proton, if you so again, in Swiss francs, a bit more than euros, you probably have some people around 200, 300, 1,000, right?
Which is the highest, right?
Yeah, yeah. It's, let's say.
You would get an intern in SF, right?
It's decent by European standards.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's not the same ballpark as US. Now, US is different, right? US, if you get like if you get a health problem, then you need all those millions that they're paying you. It's not the same here in Europe. So quality of life context is a bit different. They have high taxes as well. Child care is a problem. So it's not exactly comparable.
Still.
It's not exactly comparable. And I would say, actually, you need much less money in Europe to reach an equivalent standard of living. And in the end of the day, I think quality of life is actually the bigger, maybe more important metric. Let me get some water.
Yeah, do. But I guess there must be something the place where Proton is incorporated must have something with privacy. I mean, obviously, you would not incorporate Proton in Moscow or, I guess, in Tehran.
Well, I'll give you an example. I wouldn't.
In Beijing?
I wouldn't incorporate it in France either, to be completely honest.
Yeah? Why that? Why is that?
That's because today, if I look at the French legal system, France actually has more or less a police state when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to what the government can do. And I give you kind of a classic example. The European Court of Justice has ruled three times that you can't do data retention. Data retention, indiscriminate retention of data of all users, actually, that's illegal.
What's data retention?
So data retention is let's say you're an internet provider. Every single email message collection has to be logged for six months, has to be retained, and handed over to the police whenever they ask for it. So it's kind of like saying you can clear your browser history, but actually, you can't.
All right. And that's for everybody, or it's for people under investigation?
It's for everybody.
All right.
Not just the ones under investigation. And this is the state of currently surveillance in France.
So if all of my SMS or messages or everything are held for six months?
Six months.
In France.
Actually, maybe longer. France might be 12 months, in fact.
OK. Just for in case, I mean, police are asking for it.
Just in case they want information about you. And this is ruled to be illegal in the European Union, but France does it still. And you're one of the only countries that does it, even though it's illegal.
So if I have a Proton mail, you don't hold them, because you're not based in France.
No, we don't. We don't.
OK.
And this is interesting. So how does France justify it? France justifies it by.
Pedophiles or terrorists, right?
No, no. But because the exception, the loophole, is to declare a state of emergency.
All right.
So like clockwork, every six months, nine months, they renew the state of emergency.
So we're in a state of emergency, right?
Continuously. And that's, in my mind, a perversion of the law. That's like saying, OK, because I can only do this in emergency, I would just always be in an emergency. So yes, the legal jurisdiction does matter. And the reason we picked Switzerland is because, up to today, it has one of the best frameworks within Europe. Now, the framework, in my mind, is quite important, because when we're dealing with technology, first of all, I think it's not debatable that Europe has a developed technology.
Without a tech industry, we don't have an economic future on this continent. In fact, no continent has a future without getting into tech. This is maybe an important point. But then if you decide you want to do tech, the question that we have to ask as Europeans is how do we want to compete? What is going to be our competitive advantage? I'm from Taiwan. I know the Asian system. You might have heard of 996. Do you know the cost of a 996?
We've been in China last year, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Well, 996, for the audience, especially the French audience, to shock them a little bit, is the Asian way of working. 996 means you start at 9:00 in the morning, you end at 9:00 in the evening, and you do it six days a week. That's not going to happen in France.
No?
Probably not.
Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe in a decade, or I mean, decades, sorry, or hundreds of years.
Yeah. Even in Switzerland, with the hardworking culture, it's probably not going to happen as well. But it is actually day-to-day life in China and for a lot of people in the tech industry.
Which is good or bad on your what do you think about it?
Well, it has pros and cons, right? We see from China's development the results of that work ethic.
Of course.
We saw actually Taiwan's development as well, from, well, a relatively poor country to now the wealthiest in Asia, outside of Singapore, which is just a city, right? You can make results with this. But we would be lying if we say there wasn't a human cost to that as well. But irrespective, we're not going to do that in Europe. We cannot. We can try, but I think it will be very difficult to manage that. The US has a massive market, huge amounts of money.
Their pension money actually is unlocked and able to be invested in capital markets, which is not really the case here in Europe. It's a huge missed opportunity, in my opinion. So it has the amount of capital and amount of scale in a single market without any borders that Europe cannot actually match. So we don't have the money. We don't have the work ethic. What is our edge to compete? And the answer to this, in my opinion, is trust.
What we have is values. We have values of human rights, security, confidentiality, privacy, and at least in Switzerland, maybe even a certain level of stability. So this is the way that we compete in tech. This is what is going to make us economically relevant in the future. And it's quite important, because in the digital world, trust is actually one of the most important factors in businesses and consumers deciding where they put their data. Now, I give you the example. Everybody uses AI, but no one really trusts Sam Altman.
And that's really, in one sentence, the opportunity of Europe. And if we do things.
I mean, he proved in the past we shouldn't trust him.
Yes.
I mean, many times. I mean, he's probably one of the most brilliant minds in the world. But I mean, he created OpenAI as a nonprofit. Was it like a foundation, was it?
Yes.
And he switched to a for-profit company.
Yes, yes.
And made many people learn math, actually, including Elon Musk.
Well, Elon said he stole a nonprofit. He probably wasn't too far off the mark when he said that, right? So trust is a huge thing. But if we do things like chat control, which is we want to scan all your crypto messages, if we do things like France is doing with the data retention, which, by the way, even the US does not do, then we are, in a way, undermining the unique selling point that European tech needs to survive and compete.
So it's on one side, we desperately need to build a tech sector. But on the other hand, our politicians are taking actions that are weakening that sector by eroding the competitive advantage. And this is the contradiction I see in Europe, is that our politicians have not figured out what it is that they stand for. And the result is a continent that's sort of adrift and doesn't have a clear vision of its future.
Plus, the whole continent is drifting on the right side. I mean, extreme right, we can see it now in Germany and many places. I don't know about Switzerland, but in France and Italy. And I mean, the control, at least on this side, is maybe on the extremes, both right and left. But I mean, everybody's talking about immigration and terrorists and pedophiles and everything. So you want to have to be able to get in messages or chats and everything, right?
How can you I mean, how can you respond to this.
To the sir.
Because I mean, at some point, I mean, it's been useful to be able to get into messages of terrorist organizations in the past, right?
Yes. Well, the interesting thing is you mentioned kind of the far right. And we also have sort of a right-wing party in Switzerland as well. This is kind of actually, all European countries now have this. But the curious thing is it has generally not been the far right that has been pushing most strongly for these measures. In fact, the far right isn't actually in power, so they don't have the means to push through this. If you go back to the history, an example of chat control.
Chat control, the big push that happened last year, which thankfully failed I think this is very important to note that was driven by the Danish government and, in particular, a Justice Minister that came from the Socialist Party, so actually from the pretty left side of the political spectrum. And this goes to a mistake that I think, let's say, center-left politicians in Europe are making today. The logic is the following.
They think to themselves, we're actually losing power, because they are. The recent election in Germany proves it. We're losing power. And the reason we're losing power is because social media and algorithms are brainwashing the electorate to vote in a certain way. And some of that, for sure, is true. I think there is some level of social media manipulation, right?
Absolutely.
And in order to stop that problem, we need to control the internet. We need to monitor, censor, block, and do all that. The reason I.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah. The reason I think this is a mistake is because if you take that path, what you're actually doing is you're validating all the arguments that the far right is making. They're saying the system is rigged against you. Politicians are trying to keep you from the truth. They're hiding information from you. And this started with COVID and all that stuff, right? By trying to censor and block and control communications, information, the internet ecosystem, you're, in fact, validating the far right in the eyes of large numbers of voters.
So the way to confront the far right is not actually to try to block them, censor them, break encryption, read messages. That doesn't actually work. You need to fight them on ideas. You need to win the argument. You don't win the argument by actually censoring the argument, because your argument is going to get out there. The talking points are going to spread. You need to beat that by putting forward other ideas to refute that. And a lot of the far right ideas today in Europe, they're nonsense.
They're ridiculous. And they're so easy to refute. But I don't see anybody actually putting the arguments out there to counter that. And so if you take censorship as your first approach, that's a losing approach. And this is why I think this is a mistake that I see being made very much by the political center left here in Europe. And we need to do something about that. Now, the far right, if they come into power, which at least in France seems quite likely, the of course, a lot of people are worried about this, right?
They say, oh, it's going to be a catastrophe. But the thing about the far right is, fundamentally, the reason Europe is in the current state that it is, with the far right rising, is actually an economic problem. You don't have this type of, let's say, shift in politics in an economically healthy society. And I still haven't seen anything from the, let's say, far right's economic program on how they're going to address that root cause.
And I can tell you, kicking out all the immigrants is not going to fix that problem. It might get you some votes. It might get you even into office. But it doesn't address a fundamental economic issue. So even if far right comes into power, I don't think they can stay in power unless they address the root cause of Europe's crisis. And that's an economic one.
If I get back to that question about getting control over, I mean, terrorist organization, let's say. I mean, you know at some point, I don't know where I stand here. I mean, I totally understand that. I would love to my chats and emails and everything and all of my files to be like 100% private. Like, nobody can access to it.
I do understand that. I do feel that. But at some point, I'm quite happy that you can't, I mean, bomb a stadium because it's been controlled somehow. So I mean, what's your stake on this? I mean, where do you stand out?
Well, there is a society today, a couple of societies, where let's say crime is probably lower than it is in Europe. And one of those countries is actually North Korea, China as well, in fact. Even Russia, you might argue. But I will not say that people in those societies feel very safe.
Yes, maybe they don't worry about terrorism, but they have other concerns, which are actually maybe even worse. But then even in those societies that are so tightly controlled, there still is terrorism. These things can still actually happen even in a fully controlled society. So the argument, I think, and the way to think about it is it's not an absolute, right? We're never going to have complete freedom, but we also should not be under complete control.
There needs to be a balance. And in a society where democracy is important, we need to put that balance in a place where democracy can actually survive. The only reason democracy works is actually if there's freedom of speech. People need to feel safe to express what they actually believe, because the core of democracy actually is debate, is opposing views debated in public to reach a consensus among an educated and informed voting group.
You don't have debate without freedom of speech. And freedom of speech is only possible if there's privacy, if you can feel confident to have a private discussion with somebody on a potentially controversial issue. Then you have the debate. So I actually think privacy is a bedrock principle of democracy from that perspective. And if we choose to live in a democracy, then we need to tolerate some level of privacy, despite the negative potentials that can come with it, because it is core to our society.
It's interesting, because what you're saying is 100% true. I mean, it's in the back of my mind when I talk to you. When I talk to you about, like, I mean, I was talking to you about OpenAI CEO and saying, I mean, he deserves this reputation about trust. Or I was talking about Google, who's, I mean, sometimes one of my sponsors. I'm like kind of, I mean, what is the backlash? I mean, what will I get from this conversation?
There might be some consequences.
Yes.
And, well, that's private. And I mean, it's a private problem in a public conversation. So I decide to talk about it and make it loud, right, and clear. But it's true that sometimes, when you're talking to when I'm talking to an AI or when I'm sending an email through my Google Workspace, I'm just thinking, yeah, I mean, is it OK to send this here? I mean, for now or the future? I mean, you don't know what's going to happen in the future.
You don't know where your data goes. You don't know what will happen to it. It could be leaked someday. Many things could happen. And once you lose control, well, you can't really get it back. That's actually the issue.
The more I'm talking to you, the more I'm thinking about, like, I mean, Gmail, I mean, is so big. I mean, it's I remember I started on Gmail. I had, like, an account in 2005. And you had to be, like, sponsored.
There's a beta waiting list, some sort of a thing.
Yeah, yeah. And it was and now it's like almost 40% of the email addresses I'm in the world. It's like almost one out of two. I mean, this is wow.
It's higher than that in some countries, I think.
And the thing is that, I mean, the search at Google is the place where they make money. But if you take Gmail, I mean, for the search, I guess they use it, you'll tell me. But for the AI and Gemini, I mean, knowing your email since my email since 20 fucking years, I mean, this is insane.
Yes.
I mean, they know everything about me.
They know you better than your mother, probably.
Well, you know, when you were saying that, I was thinking they probably know me better than I do myself.
Yes, yes.
Somehow.
But you know that trick that Google did with Gmail is not actually just your data. It's something a little bit less obvious, but far more powerful. The power of Gmail, actually, is that you're logged in.
Logged in, yeah.
Right. And if you're logged in to Google as your Google account, then they can track you across the entire web.
Yeah.
Because every website you go to that runs Google Ads or Google Analytics or other data, all that is correlated into one account that you're constantly logged in at. And then that lets them tie all your activity to a profile of a real-life person.
Yeah, plus I use I mean, the and I just love it, I have to say. But when I can log in somewhere without, you know, how do you call it?
Log in with Google.
Yeah, log in with Google.
Which ties them back to your account.
Yeah.
So what Gmail actually is, you shouldn't think of it as a communication tool. It is communication. It is email. But what it actually is, is a digital passport. It's your online identity that links your entire online existence to you as an individual. And that's extremely powerful, because they control your identity.
The thing is that I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. And I'm just naive, probably. But I do trust Google more than other companies, other American companies, because they haven't been so much, at least, involved in crazy stuff. And Sergey Brin and Larry Page are probably trustable person, right?
Well, I think.
He's laughing.
I think you set the bar too low. If you compare them to Zuckerberg or Sam Altman, I would say you're probably correct. But it's like comparing someone to the devil, right? We should maybe set a higher bar for what is acceptable.
Interesting. And.
It's like you're saying, you know, they're not the devil, right? So I can trust them. I mean, between the devil and the Pope, there's quite a large spectrum.
The thing is the cost, right? The cost. I'm not talking about money right now. We'll get there. But the cost of going out of Google is just immense. I mean, it's just so big, because I won't get those auto login. And I won't get I mean, maybe you'll get there someday. But it will take long. And.
Yeah, exactly. And at Proton, the reason we built the password manager is because we don't have login with Proton. But if you provide a good password manager, you can circumvent that problem to a certain extent. I think you're right. There is a cost there. And the job of companies like Proton and the industry that we represent is actually to bring that cost down as low as possible. Because imagine we get to a world in five years from now, maybe faster with AI. And that cost drops to zero. Everything you do on Google, you can also do on Proton.
At that point, there would be no reason not to switch. And the reason I think we've been able to grow from zero to 100 million users is because, for the past 12 years, we have progressively brought down that cost. That cost goes down with every new feature we launch, with every new innovation that we bring to the market. To give you kind of a recent example, now you can put your Gmail account into Proton. So you can actually get all your Gmail emails there. You can read all your Gmail messages. And you can have both accounts in one place. That's something that, for example, brings down the cost.
So it still runs through Gmail.
Yes.
But I can read it on Proton.
Yes, exactly. And you can also have your Proton account there as well.
It's not just I would transfer and get all of my can I just transfer all of my 20 years on Proton easily?
Yes, now it's the same feature. It transfers everything from the past. It also lets emails that receive at Gmail come automatically to your Proton.
OK.
And if you want to respond as your Gmail account from within Proton, you can do that as well. So these are different features that we add over time that bring down that cost. But that's the biggest challenge of our business, is how do we make it so that anybody can switch? And I'm not going to say it's trivial. But it's easy enough that 100 million people have done it, which also means that it probably isn't so hard. It's funny you mention this. A few years ago, there was a journalist at the Washington Post who did an experiment.
She said, oh, yeah, I'm going to try to get off Google and see if I can make the switch. And she found the experience so easy that she actually wrote an article to say, oh, you know, this was so easy that I was surprised. Google does everything to convince you that if you leave, you're basically going to go back to the Stone Age. It's not actually true.
All right.
It's a lot easier than people imagine.
It's Middle Age, but not Stone Age.
No, not even that. And we have actually European regulation in the bank for that. GDPR enforces data portability. So GDPR is really annoying and bad because the cookie consent you do everywhere. And I think that's a really bad feature of GDPR, let's say. But it did give us the ability to get our data out of big tech. And that's something that today allows any European to easily switch from Google into Proton.
You have to be compliant.
Yes. And that's actually not as hard as it used to be. In fact, I think if you try to make that switch, you would probably find it's easier than you imagined, maybe like that journalist discovered.
Yeah, I'm just trying to because I mean, to be honest, I mean, it's been more than 20 years. And the whole thing is kind of a threat, like somewhere in the sky, right? But I don't feel I mean, I don't feel like I've been betrayed anytime or.
Well, but I'll give you an example about how the two can coexist.
And sorry, sorry. Just to go to I mean, plus, I mean, I think at some point, maybe the fact that Google knows me very well, I mean, it helps probably my life, you know, at some point, a better search. And you can see the other way around, right? And a better AI that knows me very well and a better and so the whole thing, I mean, and it gave them the whole search money gave them a lot of, like, financial power that gave them, I mean, so much advance that is I mean, I have a benefit out of it, right?
And I think, I mean, it's interesting what you're saying. But how long will it take before a company I mean, owned by a foundation can get there? And it seems, I mean, yeah, out of 2.5 million, you made 100 million users. So you might get there. Sorry.
Well, I think it's not like one or the other. So I make an omission here. I still have a Yahoo email account.
All right.
I have one.
That's you.
It also shows my.
Your other one.
It also shows my age, right? And now that I've created Proton and I have it for everything, what is to keep the Yahoo around? Well, when I go to the McDonald's and they ask me for the email for the Wi-Fi, I'm not giving them my Proton account. No, that's too sensitive. I give them the Yahoo account. It sits there to collect spam. So I think it's possible to have more than one email. And you could say, hey, you know, I'm going to use Gmail for all the stuff I don't care about. But for the things that matter, the things that are important to me in my life, I'll put that on Proton because I want that to be secure.
And this is, again, the example of privacy is not absolute, right? There are things you want to keep private and things you want to share. So there are things I'm happy to post on LinkedIn to show the world and to announce to the world. But then there's also communications that I have on my email that I don't want anybody to read. And I put that on Proton. So this is the spectrum that is useful to think about. It's not one or the other. Now, to your point of Google's financial resources, Google's money revenue, things like that.
We're talking about, like, $30 billion every quarter of.
Yes.
I mean, profit, right? Not incomes, right?
Yeah. There's I think if you look at the history of business and to give the example of maybe a French example, Javier Neal with a free.
Yep.
The idea that a small incumbent startup could take on the big tokos with their billions of euros of profit and succeed in that market probably seems fantastical. Even if you go back to a tech example, the idea that two PhDs from Stanford with a product called it was not Google back then. It was Goggle.
Goggle, yeah.
Right? Would take on the billions that Jerry Yang was making with Yahoo and succeed also seemed absurd at one point. Every disruption in history has generally come from a smaller, less resourced incumbent with a better idea and better execution, but more importantly, better efficiency. A big company like Google has a lot of money. But for sure, it is not a very efficient organization.
For sure, it is not under the same constraints that force it to develop in a way that prioritizes efficiency and efficient use of resources. Now, I'm not saying that overthrowing Google will be easy. But I'm simply pointing out to decades, maybe centuries of business experience that shows that no company is invincible or immune from disruption. And Google probably is not immune either.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing we talked about with a French another Nobel Prize winner called Philippe Aghion about Schumpeter, right? The how do we say it? Would we say it in English? The le le sac de l'innovation de Schumpeter et de la.
Yeah, innovation cycle.
Destruction creative destruction, right?
Yes, yes.
So I mean, probably at some point, it will happen to everyone anyway.
Yeah, yeah.
Hopefully, you're one of those. The thing is that and then we'll get to how do you do that and how do you make it private.
And also, I want to touch on another point. You mentioned that because Google knows everything about me, it can maybe make a better AI product. I don't think that is also, again, a mutually incompatible thing with privacy. I think, actually, you can build that better product still with privacy as a core value as part of the technology stack.
The constraint that makes Google not private is actually not a technological constraint. There are some technology choices that are more difficult with privacy. And I'm not saying that the tech differences are trivial. But Google's main constraint in providing you privacy is less technical and more business model. It's fundamentally not in their business interest to give you privacy. Because at the end of the day, you're not actually Google's customer. What you are is the product that's being sold to the actual customer, which is the advertiser.
And that conflict of interest is a business conflict of interest that's very difficult to resolve.
But you know, as far as the advertiser doesn't know that, you know, he's a Volvo car dealer. And he's trying to sell me the last whatever EQ90. And he doesn't know I'm Matthew Stephanie. You know, I don't care. I mean, it's OK. He knows I might be I've just sold my previous car. And I might be about to buy a new one. And that might be the right moment. You know, maybe even more, I might be happy with it because they're going to offer me like a good deal.
They're going to, you know.
Yeah, of course, of course. But that's goods and services. And goods and service advertising has been around since the Roman times. It's not the end of the world. But Google isn't just selling you goods and services. What they're trying to do is create engagement on the platform and make you stay. So I'll give you an example. Maybe there's a political party paying them a lot of money to run advertising. And they want lots of clicks. They want lots of engagement. They want people to come to the website, vote for them.
And Google gets paid based off of that. And Google understands so much about you that they know exactly how to frame the arguments from this political party to make you receptive to their message. And once you start going down the rabbit hole of that political party, they know the exact type of content to keep feeding you and keep showing up to you in all the places on the internet that you visit to reinforce your thinking in that direction.
Plus, I mean, when I'm listening to you, I'm just thinking, well, I've never seen any message from any political party. I mean, maybe in France it's more complicated, but.
But it's more subtle than that.
Yeah, exactly. Maybe it might be like, you know, something about military things or some other things about immigration or some other thing about.
What appears on your YouTube feed, right?
Yeah, and something like it will push me some things about as we've seen on TikTok also.
Yeah, and this is the concept of what is known as filter bubbles. And I tried to explain what that means. If you are somebody that politically leans more to the right, the algorithm knows that you're receptive to that content and that you spend more time on that content. And you're more likely to stay on it long enough to see the advertising that's embedded in that content. Well, it's going to keep feeding you more of that same stuff. If you're somebody that's leaning to the left, the algorithm knows that as well.
And it feeds you more things on the left. So what happens is society instead of talking to each other becomes more and more polarized in their own bubbles. And you can track actually the rise of the division in our society to really the moment when algorithms, social media, and advertising took over because that is actually what is splitting our society today. And that's the danger. That's real danger. It's not that they want to make you buy a Volvo, right? It's that they're destroying the framework of our society by eliminating the conversations that used to happen and polarizing our society into two very separate directions, very separate bubbles.
As probably you did. I've been around digital for very long, right? I've been working in the area for like more than 20.
I think longer than me.
Yeah, probably. Fuck off. And yeah, probably, yeah, more than 20 years. And what I've been discovering is that most of the time, you know, I want to have access to, I mean, the best things and discover the things like, I mean, early accesses, right? So I have early access to many things thanks to Claude or OpenAI and ChatGPT and best algorithms. And sometimes, yeah, you can get but I see the world moving faster than other people thanks to that, right?
And I've tried OpenClaw. I'm literally obsessed by OpenClaw. And I haven't tried Hermes right now. But and the price to that most of the time is privacy. I mean, I have to I mean, I share so much, like literally like everything. And I'm kind of, and so what, right? And but at the end, I'm very, I mean, sensible about what you're saying. So it's very, I mean, hard to be hardcore.
Some people are too hardcore on privacy. Some people are too maybe I'm too hardcore on the other side somehow. But I think it's hard to.
Yes, yes.
Be on one side or the other. I mean, I can't find myself.
Yes.
Help me.
So you're what people at least what in our industry we call the early adopters.
Yeah.
The top 5, 10% of the population that's at the cutting edge. But when we build tech, we're not building tech just for people like you. We need to build tech for society as a whole. And this is where I think the value of defaults is very important. You're tech-savvy. You've been in the space for a long time. You understand these issues. You know the settings to be careful of. You actually have what I call informed consent because you're letting these applications get into your data.
But you know what's going on.
I know.
You are informed. And you're conscious of making that choice. And because you're conscious of that, actually, even without knowing it, you are taking safeguards. You're doing things differently because you're aware.
That's true.
Even though you don't maybe completely realize that. And that's fine. The problem is what happens for the rest of society, you know, the other people of, you know, let's say, you know, someone who is less tech-savvy than you doesn't understand these things. If they take the same path as you with the same default settings that exist today, actually, they don't take precautions. They don't realize the problem.
They give a lot of information without actually being aware where that is going. So the default is important because the default is to protect the people that are not completely aware, which is the vast majority of the population. So that's actually the thing. It's not that you don't care. You don't care because you know. And the fact that you know allows you to not care on certain things. But for people that don't know, actually, they cannot afford to not care.
That's the reason why Andy has a couple of phones with him, one of which is an Android and the other one, which is like a probably 10-year-old iPhone.
Yes.
And you were saying that it was important to you to have old iPhones because people who don't really care, don't know much, and who have old phones must have a good Proton experience, right?
Yes, yes. This is in the tech world, we often you get the newest MacBook, you get the newest iPhone, you get the newest Android. And then everything works great. Everything's fine. But the average person out in the street doesn't have the latest gadget because the latest gadget might cost €1,500. And they can't afford to buy one every single year. It's not realistic as a feasible. So I try to use devices that are more reflective of what the general population actually has access to.
Now, they can't be so old that they don't get security updates anymore. But they're kind of at the cusp of that. So all my devices are at least these mobile devices are at least four years old because that's what the average person actually has. And you need to build, like I said, not for the early adopters, but actually for the mainstream of a society.
So before we go to the maybe a bit of tech stack without being too deep, right? But and how do you make sure you're really private and strong and breakable? If I want to switch I mean, that was interesting. You used the term the switch. And I was talking about Christopher, my partner upstairs. And he's a new it's a newsletter and a new media. It's called theSwitch.eu.
Oh, OK.
And so yeah, you can check that, everyone. You can register. It's a pretty cool newsletter. And if I want to switch, so where can I switch? I use like well, I don't use my personal Gmail. I haven't been using it for more than a decade. But Workspace, like several workspaces on Google, Google Photos. I do pay actually Google Drive, I think.
Yeah.
I use like, obviously, YouTube. You don't have a YouTube. I mean, where do I switch? What do I switch on Proton? And what is the cost? But primarily, how long does it take? I mean, can I just register and say, boom, one button, bam, and I have everything there?
Well, let's say for businesses, it's different than individuals. Businesses are more complicated. You can switch. Actually, over 100,000 businesses have switched over to Proton. So it is possible to do it. But I think most of your listeners are probably individuals. So let's discuss.
Half of, yeah, probably.
Yeah, half of, right? So let's discuss the individual case. Individual is actually pretty easy. You create a Proton account. And generally, it's a Proton Mail account. Let's say you do it through our website. You set it up. Right away, you get an option. Do you want to bring over your Gmail? Hit yes. Put in your Gmail information. Everything in Gmail gets pulled over. All your emails, calendar, contacts, that stuff syncs over. Your future messages that we see at Gmail will also appear into Proton.
You're in. You start using your Proton ecosystem. And.
What about my photos or stuff like this? No, I have to.
So we have a Drive product right now. The photos don't automatically come over. You have to manually pull them over. But probably, let's say, in the near future, we will get to the place where that comes over as well because, again, GDPR is required to make that possible.
All right.
Yeah, so it's actually not so difficult. And then you can begin to take like, for example, my financial banking information. That doesn't sit on my Yahoo, right? Yahoo is for McDonald's, right? This other important stuff sits on Proton. So you can move your accounts over one by one. And the great thing about this is then you can log out your Gmail. And Google no longer has a profile on you to track you around the internet. You have broken free out of their ecosystem. As simple as that. You can still go to YouTube.
I still go to YouTube. I can still watch videos.
I can still use my Gmail and log in with my Gmail everywhere if I want.
If you want, yes. But I actually suggest that you get Proton Pass. And it's a password manager that works on all platforms.
It's like 1Password or Dashlane.
It's the same thing, right? You don't click log in with Proton. But it autofills the login for you. So it works more or less the same user experience.
There's a big company in Europe that is already on all of these. I see you have a VPN password manager.
Yeah.
Is it a NordVPN wallet, Nord Securities, right? You know them?
Yes, I know them. But they.
They don't do the email, do they?
No, no. They're not in the workspace area as much. They're more on, let's say, certain cybersecurity tools.
OK.
So it's not quite the same business.
And so and if I'm in a business, it's a bit harder?
Actually, it's not that much harder. We have something we call Easy Switch for organizations. So now it can automatically recreate your accounts for all your employees and populate them as well. So actually, the experience is pretty similar. But for a business, it's you need to plan it a little bit, right? You can't just on a weekend decide to switch everything, right? You need to probably plan within your business. And we have teams at Proton that can help guide businesses through that.
I would say that, I mean, if I were like a CEO of like a CAC 40, like a major European company or maybe something about securities. But they're more aware of that. But I mean, in my position, who cares? I mean, you know, even though I'm influenced somehow, I don't know if I can say that. But I'm not sure people want to know what's in my life. I don't know.
But if you have like a Saint-Gobain or a Thales, or you know, a lot of those companies work on Microsoft or on Google Workspace. Is it a problem? I mean, because I guess Microsoft and Google come to them and say, no, it's very safe. You're on European servers. And there's nothing that's going to happen. And it's very, very, very safe, right?
Well, I give you maybe the example from Switzerland, the Swiss banking industry running fully on American tech. Well, it's not a problem until it became a problem.
It did.
Yeah, until the Americans decided that they wanted to fine all the Swiss banks for certain tax things that they weren't happy with when they decided to do the investigations. The fact that the entire banks were operating on American tech infrastructure made it very easy for the Americans.
So they did. They did dig into their emails and into.
Oh, yeah. Of course. Of course. They dug through everything. Now, I'll give you another example. Let's say you're the European Commission. And you're negotiating with Trump on trade. And you're using Microsoft for your infrastructure. You would have to be naive to think that the Americans are not getting intelligence from your usage of Microsoft to help them strengthen their negotiating position against you.
I'm sure if you get on the LinkedIn, probably post on this episode, people will say, this is not true. He is wrong because we now have I don't know. And I'm not an expert on this. But we now have like specific servers. And it stays in European soil, territories, France, whatever.
I mean, it doesn't matter where the server sits. It matters who has the ability to access it and who has a legal right to compel those people to access it. And that's very much a question of jurisdiction. So I think a lot of this, oh, this is sitting in a European server. That's what I call sovereignty washing. That's it's bullshit, right, if we're going to be completely frank. And so as a business, we do have a lot of companies, very big companies using it. They don't switch over their entire operations because it's very difficult.
And actually, that's not an easy thing to do. But what we see very common happening in large companies and large groups is they have a separate email for executives that sit on Proton infrastructure. And the thinking is, for the daily operations of my business, fine, Microsoft, Google, I'm stuck. It's very difficult to migrate. But for the sensitive board discussions, for the executive discussions, for the things that we really feel are important and confidential, just like I gave with this individual example, I'm going to put that on Proton.
And it's also security because what if Google goes down someday? What if I end up on a sanctions list where American companies can't work with me anymore? And they deplatform me. I need to have a backup in place that can actually function and let my business continue. So it's also a sense of business continuity as well. And that's also another example where it's useful to have another option.
Interesting. Well, you don't have an MBA. But you're a good salesperson.
Am I?
I'm going to buy it.
And by the way, if you do buy it, you'll find that the price is lower than big tech.
Interesting.
Yes. So even from a cost perspective, you do save money, by the way.
Do you pay AdWords on Google to promote to the Proton?
Yeah, we have to.
OK.
And this is an interesting point. Maybe the business owners out there will know. If you don't pay for Google Ads, what happens is a competitor can actually bid on your keyword.
Yeah.
And the only way to prevent that from happening is to bid yourself. So it's almost like a it's almost a bit like a protection racket, right? Like, hey, if you don't pay us money, we're going to let other people sit on your trademarked brand name.
Which is, I mean, sometimes when you just put like Proton or you put like just Hermes or Chanel, it's OK. I mean, you shouldn't be able to buy it because it's a name. If you say secure email address or Proton secure email address, maybe it's not exactly the same thing. But yeah, interesting.
Yeah. It's like if you put in like any company, right, if you're not paying Google, they'll put someone else in that spot. So you kind of have to pay. And that's something that I think should not be permitted. In fact, I think it should be forbidden for other people to bid on a trademarked brand name. But it's not.
It's not. What if can you tell me do you have an idea of how much do you pay for a customer on Google? What's the cost?
Oh, I don't actually know because I'm not involved in, let's say, that particular part of the business. But we're a profitable, let's say, company. So we cannot obtain customers in an unprofitable way. Let's put it that way. So we have a stronger constraint here than a VC-backed company may have.
The customer lifetime value must be insane in your business, right?
No. Well, it's because it's a freemium business model. And we offer our services for free. The vast majority of people don't pay us.
OK, so I can have a Proton email and use the Proton tools for free if I'm an individual?
Yes, yes. There's a free version. It doesn't have all the features of the paid version. But the vast majority of our customers, I'm saying probably more than 95%, actually are free. So blended across the entire user base, LTVs are actually quite low. And the reason we do this is because I actually feel very strongly that privacy should not become like a luxury good. I don't want privacy to be like Louis Vuitton or Hermes, right? I want privacy to be accessible to everybody in the world.
I want everybody to have it because it's a fundamental human right. There's no fundamental human right to a Louis Vuitton bag. But there should be privacy as a fundamental human right. And this is a principle. That is why we keep it always free, despite the fact that we probably make a lot less money than if we made it paid only.
So for free, you have one gigabyte of memory.
Yeah, of storage.
Of storage. Sorry, I mean French in terms of memory.
Yeah, yeah, memory, yes.
That was like kind of how you translate that. One user, one email address. If you pay like €4, you get 15 gigabytes of memory, one user, 10 email addresses. And you can put your own domain names, unlimited files and labels, LIS, 10 LIS, OK. And you get like some kind of assistance, right, or client service.
Yeah.
Does that work on Proton? Like, you know this thing on Gmail, if you put your the dot is useless, right? You know that.
Yeah. Well, the dot works at Proton as well.
Yeah?
So you can do the dot if you want.
OK. So if you get like andy.chen@gmail.com, which is probably not your email address. Well, if you put the dot before the A, the N, or no dot at all, it works.
Yes, yes.
So you have unlimited numbers of alias at some point.
Yeah, but we also create other aliases as well. So you can also have multiple addresses tied to the same account.
And if you pay like $9.99, you get 500 gigabytes, 50 email addresses.
Yes.
I mean, yeah, you get a VPN. You get the password manager.
And you also get the Drive as well.
The Drive, OK.
And if you think about like $9.99 to get email, calendar, Drive, password manager, right, and all those tools together and VPN as well, if you were to buy those individually, it would cost you more than $9.99. So I think it's actually a pretty it's pretty competitive from a price standpoint. And that's, again, because, like I said, we don't have the same overheads as big tech. So I think that's why we can offer, in fact, better pricing.
But the thing that keeps you on Microsoft or Google are the other tools, if you're a professional at least. I mean, these are like the Google Workspace, like Microsoft Word, Excel, spreadsheets, and so on.
Well, we have also business offerings.
Yeah.
So there's Proton Workspace. And Proton Workspace has Proton Meet, which is a video conferencing.
But if I go on Proton Meet, the people I invite on Proton Meet, can they be on Microsoft? Or do they have to create a Proton email?
They just no, they just have to have a web browser.
OK, OK.
Or they download the app. It's like Zoom. You don't need a Zoom email to use Zoom.
Oh, yeah, sure.
You're just joining the call. So it's basically Zoom but end-to-end encrypted. So no one can actually eavesdrop on that conversation. There's Proton Docs, there's Proton Sheets.
Zoom is not end-to-end encrypted?
No.
OK. None of those are end-to-end.
No, none of them are, yeah. And at least not by default. So this is the so slowly, bit by bit, we built out the ecosystem. I'll be honest, we're not completely there yet. But with AI and how fast you can develop things now, the pieces are coming into place pretty rapidly. And so it's yeah, it's something where we've grown a lot of services in a very short period of time.
Interesting. Before we go to AI, I mean, how do you make sure it's very well encrypted? I mean, you were saying it's not important where your servers are. As soon as the government you were incorporated. So you were saying if you have your server in Europe, you'll be incorporated in the US. I mean, Donald Trump can decide whatever he wants, right?
Yes.
So still, the servers are important because if you're in Iran, for example, even though you're an American company, you can get some injunctions to give some information, I guess. So you have to be in a country where the servers are safe and where the government is safe, right?
Yes, yes.
Because so that's the case in Switzerland right now.
Yeah, so we have servers in Norway, Germany, and Switzerland because those are pretty safe countries. Now.
If you had servers in France, you would have to do things you don't want to do.
Well, no, because if we have servers in France, it still falls under Swiss jurisdiction.
OK.
The problem is having infrastructure in countries that are not safe gives them leverage. You can't actually very easily get data off of a server. The servers themselves are encrypted. The files are encrypted on the servers. You can physically take the server. And you probably get nothing.
Yeah, because you just have half of pictures of photography or like a third or.
Or you have like encrypted file systems doesn't help you. So it's not about them taking your server and getting access to data. The problem is, let's say a data center in Russia, for argument's sake. Putin could say, you know what? I'm going to confiscate all your hardware and shut down your data center unless you give me this. So the request is not illegal. They can't physically extract anything off of that server. But they have a pressure point that they can use to compel you to do something which may actually be illegal.
But you're still forced to do because you have no other choice. So not having servers in certain countries is about not placing yourself in a position where somebody else has a leverage over you that they can then exploit.
How often do you get pressure from government or companies?
Well, I can talk about this now because it's in the past. But we had the Russians come to us and say, hey, we need access to Proton information. And we want you to put servers in Russia. And if you don't do that, we're going to ban you from Russia.
OK.
Now, people know how the story ended because we got banned. So it's a OK, we're technically banned. But it's not so easy to ban services.
A lot of people are still using your VPN, I've read, right?
Yeah. So let's say it still more or less works, not all the time, but to a large extent. But that's an example where you can get pressure.
And what kind of pressure is that? Is it like it's just you get like you receive letters, emails, or stuff like this? Or I mean, do you get people like is it serious pressure?
Well, you get letters, emails, and in our case, even an invitation to Moscow.
Oh, right.
For consultations and discussion, right?
Did you go?
Not myself. But I sent other people. And then, of course, what they say is in our case, Russia was it was probably at that point 3% or 4% of revenue. So it was not nothing. But it was not huge either. And then you had to make a choice between your principles and money, effectively.
And for us as a nonprofit, it's very easy how to make that choice. Now, if you're Apple and it's not 4%, but it's more like 20% in the case of China, and it's your entire manufacturing base, and you have to and you get pressure from the Chinese government, you probably reach a different conclusion. And so this is why it's about economic coercion as well. Now, the Russia case is very interesting.
I can speak about this now because the Swiss government was not happy that the economic activities of a Swiss company was being limited because actually all the commodities trading are Russian commodities was taking place in Geneva. So how can you run all your oil and gas through Geneva but at the same time limit the operations of a Swiss tech company in Moscow? It's not reciprocal. So the government actually had an interest to have that discussion, have a conversation, and see if some agreement could be reached.
But as I suppose the rest of Europe found out in the last couple of years, you can't negotiate with the Russians. There is no interest to negotiate. It's not the way that they operate. It's not the way that they even think.
Did you have some kind of stronger pressures? I mean, like kind of just like did you have to get security or.
No, it's those were the before the Iran war, right? And today, I think the Russians have their hands pretty full with various issues. So I'm not it's not something that is, I think, so concerning. And ultimately, it's a pretty big company now. There's 700 employees, multiple layers of governance and security. It's not like I could wake up one day, go on to our GitLab and our core repository, code a back door, and ship into production on my own, and no one would notice.
All right.
You see what I mean? Even if you forced me to do something like that, it just wouldn't work because of the way the company is structured.
Interesting.
And so if we were like a three-person shop, maybe. But it's and also, don't forget, the code is open source. And it gets published into public repositories. So even if the whole company, all 700 employees were somehow complicit in all this scheme, the users could inspect the code and say, wait a second, that looks very suspicious.
The whole code is open source. I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah, all the client-side software that does encryption is all open source.
So I can create my own email with your Proton protocols or.
You could. You could take our libraries and make your own email service.
OK.
And there are people who have done that, actually. Am I happy about that? I can't say that we're excited when we see it happens. But that is a value of open source. If you do open source, you must allow that. So you can actually take our intellectual property, build your own email service. And Proton will not do anything to stop you, actually.
That's the idea, right?
Yeah.
OK. Who are your who is your biggest client? I mean, can you tell us or.
From the business side, I cannot say this information because we keep.
Can you give a couple of clients? Do you have some clients you can.
Well, we're a privacy company. So we don't disclose. But I can tell you probably half of the European countries, some parts of them, of their governments are using Proton.
OK.
The United Nations has talked about their usage of Proton. So they said it themselves, not us. So it's out there. And then on the individual side, the user base is 40% from Europe. This is the biggest segment of our customers. But also, we have almost 40% in North America as well. And that, to me, is very important to think about because we always get the assumption. And I don't know why we do it. I think we shouldn't assume this anymore.
But there's always the thinking that European companies can only succeed in Europe and that we don't have the ability to international our business. We can never compete in the US, never compete in China. But 40% of my revenue is North America. So not only are we able to do business there, but the European value of trust and confidentiality and security and privacy, this is something that actually sells in America.
And I think if you think about it, it does make sense because Americans know just as well as we do what big tech is doing. In fact, they maybe even understand it better than we do. And then the funny thing is, at the very beginning, we did crowdfunding. And the crowdfunding money that we collected, probably over half of that came from California because you have the analytics.
Yeah.
I'm thinking, well, why are so many people working at big tech and other tech companies supporting Proton? You know who was one of our first crowdfunding supporters? It was actually Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple.
No way.
Yeah. And then I realized, well, if there's anybody that understands how the sausage is made, it's actually the people working at Silicon Valley themselves. They know the problem with their business model. So of course, they may be more keen to support our business. So we are sort of at the cutting edge of the society shift towards privacy. But it is the people who are working in Silicon Valley that appreciate the most what we're doing because they realize firsthand they're the most aware of what is going on. And so as European founders, we shouldn't think, oh, you cannot succeed in the US.
You cannot actually make a play there. It's not possible to grow and scale. It's very possible. And you can even do it from Europe as long as you have the right values and the right product.
And what are the guarantees I have if I go on Proton? Because I mean, you said, yeah, obviously, I cannot go and create my own back door in a 700-person employees company, right? But still, I don't know. There is an event. And, well, you decide to do it anyway. And you convince like the 5, 10, 15 people to do that.
Well, you need more than 5, 10, 15 people.
But is it doable? I mean, because we're talking about encryption.
Yeah.
I mean, is there a way that you just can't? I mean, it's just into a it's locked into a safe or something that it's unbreakable? It cannot be done?
Well, I think back doors can always be introduced. But the nature of open source software means that you can get away with it, but only temporarily. It will simply be a matter of time before somebody notices. And that also goes to business model and incentives. A company like Proton, the only reason people pay us is privacy. And the instant we get caught with some sort of back door, the whole business model collapses.
So in our case, there's a very strong economic incentive as well to not do it because it would be the end of our business. And I think it's the technical limitations, the open source nature of peer review, the scale of the business that makes it very hard for any individual person to compromise something, combined with a very strong financial incentive from the business perspective. It's this combination that is actually effective. It's not any single thing. But it's the combination of all four or five factors together that makes it, in my opinion, very difficult to do as you suggest.
The other thing is that we're talking about privacy. But we're still talking a lot about emails. Or maybe you have a chat too or I don't know.
Not yet. No.
OK, OK. You don't have your own Telegram or but at the end, one of the weirdest experiences I had on this was I used to own a digital agency. And we worked with the CNRS, right?
Yeah.
You know CNRS?
Yeah.
Because you work at CERN. So it's the French National Research Institute.
Yeah.
Like, it's a public place, amazing place, right?
Yeah.
But they made us choose like some tech stack to work on their projects because we were developing their website.
Oh.
And.
It was horrible.
Yeah, well, it was horrible. But plus, it wasn't it was dumb at the end because we had to use I guess at the end, we were at the time, we were using Basecamp. You know Basecamp for 7 Signals.
Yeah.
And they made us use something else. But everything was because they didn't want the American to know what we were doing, right?
Yes, yes.
But what they didn't check is that we were based on Google Workspace. So at the end, I mean, every email and all of the attached files were coming from the management system, like the tool we were using to create everything that was going at the end. So that's the problem with emails. It's like at the end, you don't want your you want your emails to be private. But still, it's not a place where you work internally. It's a place where you send stuff. And all of the things you're sending are sent somewhere that is probably unsafe, right?
So you cannot secure that.
It depends on how you're set up. At least at Proton, most of the sensitive information is not sent outside. Most of it is sent internally. And because we run our business on Proton Workspace and everybody is within the same secure system, actually, it's pretty secure from that perspective.
One technical question. If I send an email from Proton to Proton.
Yeah.
It doesn't go I mean, it doesn't go somewhere else.
No, that is fully end-to-end encrypted within our ecosystem.
OK.
So the value for business is all the internal communications are kind of secure. Now, the external communication, well, you don't have the expectation that that's secure anyways.
Yeah.
You know you're sending it to the outside. And so while that could be a problem, that's kind of a different issue, right? And then also, if you look at like the banking sector, a lot of times, one bank's got Proton within the senior execs. The other team the other bank has it as well. And then their communications are also safe. So there's also a network effect at play here.
Because I had the image of like if you want to put it this way, like former postal service.
Ah.
I would write my email or my mail, sorry. Then I would send it to you. But from France, it would go to La Poste. And maybe you're based in the US. And it would go to US Postal Service.
Yes.
And then it can be corrupted.
Yes.
All the way around.
Yes.
From all of these providers, right?
Yeah.
And then it comes to you.
Yeah.
So if I send it from Proton to Proton, it doesn't go on the web?
It doesn't do that, no.
OK.
It stays in our infrastructure. Now, the postal service is actually an interesting analogy, right? Today, when you use a Gmail or any other non-encrypted service, it's a bit like sending letters without envelopes. That is literally what email is today, letters without envelopes. And what Proton Mail is doing is it's putting envelopes around the letter so the people cannot actually read it until it gets to the destination.
So if I send an email to someone else on the Yahoo address, I send it from my Gmail to your Yahoo address.
Yeah.
Then like everybody.
Google?
Google can read it.
Google can read it. Yahoo can read it.
And the people in the middle?
Anybody that can get access to Google and Yahoo, like the government, can read that as well. In the middle, no. It's not. It's usually the same encryption in transit. But a lot of people in that chain could potentially get access to that email. Whereas with Proton, the guarantee is the person that read it is yourself and the final recipient. That's a much stronger guarantee. And then so to go to your question about like crime, terrorism, and things like that, well, terrorism is not a new invention. It didn't come with the internet.
It was already there before. And in the pre-internet era, we still had envelopes in our letters. And at least in countries like France, although this is not the case in East Germany, people didn't open those envelopes to read the letters before passing them on to the final destination. So just because it's digital doesn't mean that we should do it differently, right?
Yeah.
It's like saying, oh, because the post is digital, let's get rid of envelopes. It doesn't make any sense. So I think what we're doing at Proton is not really innovating or changing. It's actually kind of the same thing that was done with the post many, many years ago. It's the Gmail and the Yahoos of the world that are different by removing envelopes from messages.
OK. And if I take the, let's say, drive spreadsheets, what the Google for Word.
Sheets.
Google Sheets, yeah.
It's also Proton Sheets.
Yeah, Proton Sheets. So if I go on Proton Sheets.
Yes.
The thing is that like when I go work with my lawyers, they work on like every lawyer, I guess, in the world, I don't know, at least in France, they work on Microsoft. Like all of accountant people who love Excel or Word, they just work on Microsoft, right?
Yeah.
And if you're in the middle, like everybody in the tech industry work on Google, most of them.
Yes.
And so you can't really work really well. If I want to work on if I work on Proton.
Yeah.
If I want to share it with my lawyer, how does it work?
You share the Proton doc with them. You share the Proton sheet with them.
Yeah.
And then just like in Google Doc, you can collaboratively work on the same document together.
OK.
Yeah.
With their they don't have to get a Proton.
No.
OK.
No. And it's encrypted.
And it's encrypted.
It has encryption there on top as well.
OK.
So this is something that we do within the business, but also with outside partners as well.
All right.
Now, I once talked to a CISO, so a Chief Information Security Officer at a big company, right? And then I asked him, so what would it take for you guys to get off the Microsoft ecosystem? I was curious myself, right? He said, probably a few people would have to die. This is how hard it is for big companies to switch, right? He's like, you know, until some people in my IT team retire and die, we're probably a Microsoft shop.
Well, there's the IT. I guess there is the as I was saying, I mean, the legal team wants to stay on Microsoft because they're so used.
Yeah.
And, well, they will say I mean, people tell you. I'm pretty sure.
Yeah.
I mean, your spreadsheet is not as good as Excel.
No, not yet.
Yeah.
Actually, even Google is not there yet.
Yeah, yeah.
Right? So the way that we approach this problem is we want to make the technology as similar as possible. We want the learning curve to be as small as possible. And if you look at Proton Sheets and even Proton Docs, a lot of the UI looks very similar. It's not because we're copying, but because we want to make the transition very easy.
And you were talking about AI. So what's your take? I mean, how much do you use AI? Is it an obsession? Yet, not yet.
Yeah.
Did you try OpenClaw?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, tell me what you're doing on this. And do you use Claude Code or Codex to create I mean, to create your products now?
Yes, yes. I always tell people I would have preferred a world where AI wasn't invented.
I can understand that.
But it's invented. And it's here. And people that go around and say that I don't want to use AI or AI is bad for the world, it's a bit like saying, I don't want to use the internet. And the internet is bad for the world. It's and then people always ask me, oh, how about AI and privacy? That's a bit like saying, how about AI and how about internet and privacy? The internet was a horrible invention for privacy.
It was a catastrophe for privacy. But we're not going back to the pre-internet era. And AI, exactly the same thing. So if it's here to stay, then the question becomes not how do you stop it, how do you block it, and how do you, let's say, control it because you really cannot. It's really about how can you make sure that there is still going to be privacy in the AI future because that is the future.
So there are some people in my industry in the privacy space who are fighting against AI, resisting the adoption of AI, trying to avoid using AI. But I think that's misguided. I think that is losing sight of the future and not participating in the building of the future. So myself personally and Proton to a bigger, bigger extent, we are moving quickly into AI, not just in the tools that we use internally within the company, but also the products that we release as well.
We want to put AI into our products. We want to this is why we launched Lumo, the private AI assistant. And Lumo, the concept is very simple, right? It's the only AI chat where your conversations are confidential. That's it. You talk to ChatGPT. That is more or less a public conversation. And there are cases where something you type in ChatGPT end up in someone else's conversation and got leaked. You have to consider that to be a public conversation. But Lumo is different. It's AI where every conversation actually is private.
I think we need to do that because if the privacy tech companies like Proton, if we decide, oh, we're not going to touch AI, what you're essentially doing is you're applicating the future of technology to American tech giants and also Chinese tech giants, by the way, which have a completely different value system from us and also from other European companies. And that's a surrender. That's surrendering before the battle has even been fought. So yeah, I am well, I don't like to use the word all-in on AI because all-in is kind of an extreme term.
But I am pretty into AI, not because I love it, not because I want it because actually, I don't love it. And I don't want it, but because I want to be part of shaping the future that I know is coming.
And this worries you a lot. So if you don't want it or if you're I mean, I'm like very I think it's very exciting on my side. And I kind of love it. But I'm really worried at the same time. But I think, I mean, what's happening what's been happening within the past six months is just like insane.
Yes, yes. Yeah, actually, if you're an AI skeptic like this time last year and you're still a skeptic today, I think you have to go back and take a look again.
Yeah.
Because it's changed quite dramatically. And you know like our business, like all businesses, have AI skeptics. And even the skeptics, last year, they were saying, oh, this AI future that you're painting, I think there's only a 5% chance that it comes true. You ask the same people today, now they'll tell you 30%. And by this time next year, they'll probably tell you 60%, 70%, right? So it's very clear where this is going. The exponential improvement is also relatively obvious.
And the time for debating what the future is going to be, I think, is pretty much over. We know where it's going. It's not really in doubt anymore for anybody who's with a rational scientific mind that's been looking at the data.
Yeah, yeah, it's true. And how I mean, so do you know what your dev teams, what are they using? I mean, Claude Code or do you still I mean, can you still have to use all of these companies? I mean, you can't.
You got to use them all. Yeah, you cannot pick one because you can't pick a winner today. So we have we've got Grok in there, actually. We've also got Cursor in there. Cursor and Grok are the same thing now, right? We also have Claude Code and Codex as well.
Which are all good, actually, at the end.
Yes. And the interesting thing about AI is it's a bit like trying to find bugs with humans. The reason you have code review is you want a separate pair of eyes to look at something. But today, the eyes are AI. So we also do something where sometimes at least I do it myself personally where I ask OK, I ask Claude to look at something. And then I ask OpenAI to do the same thing and check the same piece of code.
And you will find sometimes different results from the because the AIs don't come with the same answer. So I do think, actually, you want to be, let's say, using multiple AIs at the same time.
What about Lumo?
Yeah.
So because at the end, what you're fighting against so you're using your I don't know if they're not competitors, I mean, Claude or OpenAI.
We're using different things, right?
Yeah, but.
Like Lumo is not so much well, Lumo can code, but it's not coding at the same ability as, say, some of the American frontier models, at least not yet.
But it's an AI with its own models. Yeah? Is it?
Yeah, yeah, actually, it's using.
It's another label.
It uses open weight models.
OK.
We started with Mistral, actually.
OK.
Then they fell behind. And then we had to actually put in some Chinese models.
Yeah.
Well, Mistral did the same thing, by the way, which is quite interesting. Then Chinese models, of course, have certain issues for a while. They didn't answer the Taiwan question properly. So we retrained them to answer certain questions in the right way. But we don't have the ability today to develop frontier models ourselves. So we use what is open weight and available out in the world.
Will that become a commodity in the near future?
Ooh. Eventually, yes. But it's going to take a bit of time. It's not going to be there yet. But every technology commoditizes eventually. The reason it will take longer in AI is because you use AI to build AI. So if you have a strong AI, your lead will increase at least for some period of time. But I do think at some point, LLMs will hit a limit and probably plateau.
There's only so many parameters you can probably incorporate into it.
Yeah. And so what's the idea with Lumo? I mean, people use it for what? I mean, if your team is using Claude Code or Codex and so on, I mean, is it satisfying? Is it good enough? Or is it.
And by the way, some people on our team are using Lumo to code.
All right.
So it's not like it's not being used for coding at all. But that's because we have access to an API that is not yet public, right?
All right.
So maybe others will do it as well when we open this up in the future. Now, one of the things I think so Lumo today, the average user is not using it to code because it doesn't have all the APIs. That's something that is coming later on. But it's a replacement for ChatGPT. So if people today ask ChatGPT to be their doctor, their therapist, their tour guide, everything, you can use Lumo for the same exact thing, except you know that what you talk to Lumo, what you say to it, that's confidential.
OK.
That conversation history is encrypted. It cannot be leaked. It cannot be shared. It cannot be used to train data. And that has quite an appeal because you ask AI sometimes very sensitive questions. And you want that to be confidential.
Oh, I mean, if we get back to the conversation we had earlier on about my own limitation, I would probably put myself because I know what I'm getting into because I'm a tech enthusiast. I mean, that would definitely change my use of AI.
Yes.
Like my kind of intimate use of AI if I was sure I could ask really anything to my AI.
Yeah. And with Lumo, you can literally ask anything you want. We don't save it. Lumo doesn't keep it. It's fully encrypted.
But that's a problem if you don't save it. And I mean, what's good about, for example, my OpenClaw or.
Yeah.
It's the memory. It's that it knows me. So it knows.
But Lumo does have memory.
OK.
So memory is a functionality that Lumo does have. But it's but that information is saved in a way that we cannot access.
OK.
So Lumo can, within this context windows, use some of the memory. You can teach it skills. You can give it these different custom things that you want it to know. And that works. But it also works in a way that's privacy protecting.
OK.
Try it out.
Yeah, well, I will.
Give it a try and see.
I will, definitely. I'll ask for a price for all of the people listening to us. I'll have for you'll have to give me a promo code, right?
OK, OK.
At the end of the podcast.
We'll figure it out. But yes, I think that can be done.
And so.
But AI, we're always a little bit worried because you pay half your money to Nvidia these days, right?
Yeah.
And they charge a lot.
Yeah, yeah, they do. No, I was thinking about sovereignty and privacy and the way it's opposite sometime. And also, I mean, it's not just on a state level or government level. I mean, probably I'm happy. I have like a 500 or 5,000 people company. How far do I want my employees' emails and conversations to be encrypted? I mean, I'm happy to know. I don't want I don't really, literally don't want to know what Clemens is talking about or whatever.
But I'm happy that probably the sales team I can monitor the sales team.
Oh, yes.
Know what they're doing, how they're improving, what is working better than others. I want to know who's who might be like yeah, maybe I want to know who might be in a burnout.
Burnout, yeah.
Or I might want to understand where should I get some new markets or what is not working.
Yeah.
And so where is the privacy here?
Yeah, yeah. Well, if you use Proton Workspace, you can do all that. But the difference is it's one thing for the company owner and management to have access to all the information. But a different thing is us having access.
All right.
So Proton as a provider doesn't have access to that information.
All right.
But you do. And the benefit of this is if someone were to hack our system and every system gets hacked eventually, your information remains safe. If the government were to come and ask us, hey, I want information on this company, we say, sorry, can help you.
Ask them.
Can't decrypt it? Ask them.
All right.
And then you have the right to say no, right? So that's a key distinction. It's that you have control of your data. Anybody wants it, they got to come to you. They can't come to us and use us as a backdoor into your information.
OK.
And for a government, you can see why that's extremely important.
Yeah, because if you go on this other level, I mean, at some point, you want to be I mean, even if you don't want to be Big Brother, you want to know that these or these people are criminals. And maybe you want to do that. Then you don't have access. So that's a problem. Maybe we don't want the CIA or any federal bureau of the US to have access to all of our people, I mean, inhabitants. But maybe you want yourself to have this access.
I guess that's a problem you can have even in France sometimes or.
Yeah, yeah. Well, as a company, you have access to all your employees' information.
Yeah, as a country.
This is kind of default as a given, right? But again, it's I think there are certain things where we have to draw the line and say, this is private. And even criminals, in my opinion, could be controversial, I think, have certain rights of privacy as well. They can be suspended or altered if they're under investigation. And that can be done on a targeted basis. But we cannot enter into a regime where we consider everybody to be a criminal by default. This is the distinction.
So when you arrived in France about like something like a year ago or a bit more, Pavel Durov.
Oh, yeah.
Was arrested.
Yes.
And he had to stay for a few months.
I think he's still here, isn't he? Or did he.
No, I think he's not.
Oh, I think he's in.
They let him out.
Yeah, yeah.
I think he's not even close to coming back here, actually, probably. But at some point, it could have happened to you, right?
No, because I think it's not the same thing. The problem with Telegram was when the police came, the answer for a long time was literally, fuck the police. I'm in Dubai. I don't care. Screw off. Just go away, right? They were simply not compliant at all. And Proton operates under a different regime. We're not often Dubai or often wherever they have any base. We often we operate under a Swiss legal regime.
If we receive a valid Swiss court order under the Swiss legal system that is passed through the legal process, we will comply to the extent that we're able to comply. So we cannot decrypt messages. But if you say, hey, I need you to log the IP address of this particular account because it's a suspect and criminal case. And it has gone through all the legal checks and balances. That is something that Proton is able to do and is legally obliged to do, actually.
So that means that if you want to know if I'm in Lebanon.
Yes.
Then you might have if it goes through the process, you might have to say, yeah, he was in Lebanon at that time.
Yes, so in the case of a terrorist, if they're looking for a terrorist and they want to know the terrorist's IP address, and they say, hey, it's this account, we are legally obliged to do that. But it must go through a Swiss legal process. And it must be properly validated by the courts and by the judges. So Proton actually is a completely legally compliant service, but operating under the constraints of Swiss law, but also with certain privacy guarantees.
OK. So yeah.
So that's different, right?
Yeah.
It's I don't tell the French prosecutors, screw you. I don't care. I say, actually, on a real criminal case, I want to help you. But please take it through the Swiss legal system where it can be validated by the Swiss justice system. And then I have the assurance that it's been checked. And I will actually help you with your request because it's not in our interest either to harbor criminals on our platform.
So the request is cannot be, I want to read his emails. It can just be, he was there. He did there. This account was logged in different places around the world at the same time or whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
And what I I mean, there is no interest of doing you remember this thing on Gmail? They had some terrorists or people that were talking on drafts, right, a long time ago. You've never heard about that yet?
No, yeah, this is the thing.
They didn't send the emails.
No, this thing about like spies who put on drafts and people read drafts, yes.
So they were logging in the same account, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's still a thing.
OK.
But in my perspective, I think it's kind of pointless.
Yeah.
Whether you send it or don't send it, it's on the platform, right? So it doesn't really make a difference.
And so you can ban some users also if it's asked.
Yeah. Well, we have very clear terms and conditions.
OK.
If you do something that is illegal under Swiss law, you're not allowed to be on Proton. That is simply illegal.
OK.
And if we find out, your account is banned.
So you can access to photos, all the files, all of the spreadsheets, sheets, whatever it is, PowerPoints, how you call them.
Yeah.
Slides, and everything.
Yes, yes, no. Yeah, that is where we draw the line.
All right.
Yeah.
What is your dream? What is the I mean, will you get a Proton YouTube or a Proton I mean, how far do you want to go?
Well, I always tell people, if you're building the European equivalent to Google, there are a lot of things that you can build. You could spend actually a full lifetime on this and still not be complete. Although with AI, hopefully, we can finish it before the end of my life. We're going to see. And from that perspective, the ambition is quite large. But I always take it back to the broader European context. And this is a lot of talk this year about sovereignty. And politicians say this, and politicians say that.
This is very popular this year. But what is sovereignty about at the end of the day? And I hope you don't mind me taking the discussion of sovereignty because this is part of my dream, right?
No, no, no.
So I go down this path, this rabbit hole. Some people say sovereignty is about resilience of our continent. And the typical example is Greenland. If Trump really wants to take Greenland, actually, he doesn't need to send US soldiers to take it over. That's actually the hard way. The easier way is to go to Denmark and say, tomorrow, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple will stop working in your country.
Everything will shut down. If he says that at 9 o'clock in the morning, probably by 5 o'clock that same day, they will most likely have surrendered Greenland to him. So sovereignty, people often say it's about resilience. And I kind of buy that argument. But I would also say for the average European citizen, whether Greenland is part of Europe or given to the Americans and this is going to be a terrible thing to say.
But the truth is, it's not going to really change the daily life of the average citizen in Europe, which is economically suffering today. So sovereignty, to me, is less of a sovereignty issue, if you will, and more of an economic problem. I've been in Europe for 15 years. It's my home now. I'm, let's say well, it's a place, actually, I spent the most time in my life at this point.
What citizenship do you have?
Well, I'm from Taiwan originally, right?
OK.
But today, I am in Switzerland. And Taiwan is a country that may not exist 10 years from now.
Yeah.
Well, depending on who you ask, it's not a country today, some people say, right? But 10 years, it could actually be completely gone. And in my generation, we all went to the US. The US was sort of the place to get educated. It's a reason why Jensen Huang, Lisa Hsu, all those tech people from Taiwan went to the US. But I'm not sure that the US is the future guardian of democratic values in the world. That is probably Europe. So I have a personal reason for wanting Europe to succeed.
But Europe is not going to have influence, relevance, or the ability to impact the world if it doesn't have economic strength. And looking at the European ecosystem, tech, but also broader, in the last 15 years I've been here, what I have seen is not really growth. What I have seen, for lack of a better phrase, is carefully managed decay.
Carefully managed.
Decay, decay. So it's sort of like managed collapse. It's collapsing, but it's managed very well so that it's not disruptive and revolutionary for the society, right? So what I think I would like Proton to do and what I want to do in Europe is I want to try to reverse this trend. And I think it has to be done through tech. So pushing for sovereignty is not about sovereignty.
It's really about economics. It's really about finding a way for Europe to return to growth. And I don't think and this is no insult to some people here in France I don't think that the growth of this continent is going to be selling more Chanel bags or producing more wine or becoming an open-air museum for American tourists to come here and spend some money, right?
100%.
We can do all that. And we should do all that. But that's not going to be enough to improve the average life for the average citizen in Europe. That can only come through economic change. And that can only come through developing a tech sector. So the dream, if you will, that Proton has that we have is I want tech to work in Europe. And I want to actually have a tech sector that can grow and drive growth for our economies.
I agree 100%. I mean, but what you said earlier on about you talked about social networks and the fact that you can ask some social network to access to this and that and so on. The tech, the influence on tech also comes from there. I mean, as a Taiwanese citizen, what do you think about a Chinese company being so big on the media?
I mean, let's put it that way. But TikTok is kind of banned in China.
Yes, yes.
I mean, you cannot use TikTok as we have it in France.
Yeah.
And, well, I'll probably get a problem on the TikTok algorithm when I'm saying this. But and we just let them do whatever they want here and in the US. And it seems they have a lot of influence on votes. And I would say I mean, we can say TikTok. But I mean, I don't know if the American social networks are doing better than them, I guess. I kind of trust them more, I have to say.
But should we just ban TikTok?
Well, I think the framing if the framing is, should it be American or Chinese, then we've already lost.
Yeah.
The question we need to ask is, why not European? And if it's European, how do we achieve that? So we today in Europe often look at the Chinese tech success or the American tech success. And we're kind of puzzled. We're like, oh, you know we don't know why that happened in those countries. And it didn't happen here. We have no idea what to do. And oftentimes, you have politicians and bankers and lawyers who say, oh, it's because we don't have enough money.
We don't invest enough, et cetera. But that's, in my opinion, a wrong diagnosis. The growth of the American tech sector didn't happen on accident. The Chinese tech sector also didn't appear on accident. It was a very clear industrial policy that was developed, planned, and then ruthlessly executed. And the playbook is very well known. If you go back 25 years or maybe a bit more to 1999 in China and maybe from Taiwan, so I have this Chinese perspective.
But China was in a very similar situation to Europe today. It was trying to digitalize and grow its economy. But it didn't have a domestic tech sector. And it was entirely dependent on the US, which was at that time actually not yet a geopolitical adversary because China in 1999 saw the US as a partner, as a trading partner, not as a, oh, the Americans are going to fight us in the future for world domination.
China was much weaker.
They were very weak. So people say, oh, China went for tech sovereignty because they needed to be independent from their adversary in the US. No, that's not the reason why. They did it for economic reasons. They did it because they realized having these tech companies in their country would make them more money in the long run. So we took two very different paths. China said, I'm going to sacrifice near-term economic growth and productivity.
But I'm going to develop the long-term capability. And Europe took the view that technology actually is just a cost. And if technology is a cost, the obvious thing to do is to minimize the cost. But what we know today is technology is not a cost. Technology is an investment. It's an investment in the economic future of your continent. And if it's an investment and a good investment, the mindset is opposite. You no longer think, what is the cheapest thing I can buy?
You think, what is the maximum I can invest to make it working?
Very interesting.
And then with the AI cycle, the same thing again, right? So what I think Europe has to do differently now compared to before is we need to have industrial policy, very strongly. The Americans Amazon, AWS, one of the first contracts they got was actually the Pentagon. It was a government contract. That was a you might call it a subsidy. But it was maybe tens of billions poured into that business.
It's even better than a subsidy because you have to deliver. You have to make it work, right?
Yes, yes. You have demand, right?
It's not just like, try it. No.
Yes.
Make it happen, right?
Yes, yes. And today, we have in Europe governments that overwhelmingly prefer to buy American tech. This is a you will never have a tech sector unless that change. And that change has to come from the top. And so this is something that I think needs a shift.
It's happening. You know what? I mean, I've let you hit on France quite a lot. And I do agree with the 35 hours and a lot of things you've said. I would say if we're talking about the will to change and the will to invest in the tech sector during the past 10 years, it was quite big, much bigger than the rest of Europe.
Yes.
And I would say if you take the past two years I mean, a lot of government sectors are going back on I don't know if they use Proton, actually, but are going out of Microsoft, out of American tech.
Yeah.
But if let me say it again. I mean, is one of the solutions a ban? I mean, I'm talking about TikTok.
Yes.
But TikTok is specific. It's a media.
Yes, yes.
But a ban is something we should can do?
Well, we're not in a position to ban anything today in Europe. You can't ban anything until you have alternatives. It's or unless you want to take a lot of pain. So China abandoned Nvidia. That was a sort of a bold move. But they didn't actually ban Nvidia, right? The Chinese tech companies found lots of ways through back channels to still obtain Nvidia chips and use it to train their models. But the ban actually was effective.
Bans do work. Chinese banned Google. And that's what gave them probably Alibaba, Tencent, these other companies.
Chinese banned Proton, right?
Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. They banned it as well.
It doesn't have the same effect. But yeah.
Yeah, yeah. But I find the Chinese ban on Proton assigned a credibility, right?
Yeah.
If you're banned, it means that you're doing something right there. Now, so I think bans can work. I think bans is something that should be considered. But before getting the bans, there can be encouragement. Now, OK, I agree with you. I think France is perhaps the leading country, the most progressive country in pushing us towards tech industrial policy. But I do think France is doing a couple of things incorrectly.
And I give you maybe one example. France didn't want to have American video conferencing. They didn't want to have Zoom and Microsoft Teams. So what did the French government do? Well, Denium, as you know, created an internal project to build their own Zoom alternative.
Yeah.
So what has happened is the French answer then to the way that I'm going to fix the lack of competitiveness of my tech industry to provide an alternative to American tech is to have the government go in and compete against my own private companies to build a solution.
Yeah.
So if the government is itself building a tech solution, why would any French tech entrepreneur decide to go in that direction and build something? It's counterproductive. In fact, it's even worse than if they just kept buying Microsoft, to be really honest.
Yeah.
So this is one example of how I think the French policy is not completely aligned. The second thing that I think France has done incorrectly is instead of an idea of buy European, France has a very strong notion of buy French.
Yeah. Well, I think that's I mean, sorry. But it should be European buying European, not I mean.
Yes.
French buying French is understandable in a Europe where Germans are buying German. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Because that's the problem.
But this started here in France. This started with Sectum Cloud. To qualify for Sectum Cloud and that's like the certification for cloud services, security certification for cloud services in France, you basically have to be French.
Yeah, I didn't say it didn't start in France. But I'm saying it's the same in I mean, all across Europe. It's like kind of a national preference that is illegal at some point.
Yes, yes. Now, if France says, I'm going to prefer French. And the Germans say, I'm going to prefer Germans, then you take our single market. And you fragmented it into tiny small markets that lack scale.
It's like Texas preferring Texas, right? Or.
Yes. So what has to happen? What needs to happen is you need European leaders with a vision to say, actually, European preference mean we're going to buy European. Doesn't matter where, as long as it's European.
You cannot be elected saying this. That's the problem now.
And that is the tragedy of Europe.
Yeah.
This is literally, in a few sentences, why Europe fails. Because as much as we need to unify to build together, we don't do that. And so I'll give you another example. Now we have this crazy thing where they're defining European preference in Brussels. And you know what country is excluded? Switzerland. And so we now, as a Swiss company, are going to have the same treatment as American tech company.
And that is absurd because the biggest AI hub in Europe is actually Zurich. So you're saying, we're going to take this strategic asset. And you can't play on our team. Go play on the American team or play on the Chinese team, but not on the European team.
And this is in Europe.
And this is a country in the heart of Europe, right?
Yeah.
So my perspective, that really is a problem. The problem is really we don't look at Europe in a cohesive way. We fragment and we segment. And a lack of a European-wide policy is going to make Europe fail.
Still, there must be a cost of not being into the European Union. There must be a cost for the Brits, for Switzerland at some point. It has to be I mean, and half of my family is from Switzerland. So I'm saying this.
I'm saying that.
But at some point, I guess it's something you can hear.
Yes, oh, yeah. And I'm not saying that it should be exactly the same as the EU country. But today, it's exactly the same as the Americans.
Yeah.
And there is a difference there, right? And Switzerland, by the way, pays quite a bit into the EU. We are part of many things. We're part of Schengen. We are free movement of people, despite what many politicians in Switzerland say. So we are quite integrated. And that needs to be reflected in also our policies. So this is really the issue. Buy French doesn't work. And the argument that I would give for politicians is take Proton as a Swiss company, for example.
Today, we actually employ more people in Europe than we do in Switzerland.
You have more clients in Europe than you do in Switzerland.
I have more customers.
But you don't pay taxes through your employees, probably.
But so I did the math as well. I calculated the total amount of taxes that Proton pays. And also, remember, we sell services to customers who pay VAT. And European VAT is a lot higher than Swiss VAT. The total tax payments that Proton has made in Europe also exceeds the tax payments that we have made in Switzerland. So it's a Swiss company. But Europe is actually a bigger financial beneficiary. And this is because Switzerland's a small country. We export many things, but not people.
There's not enough of us to export. And from that perspective, any Swiss company that scales has to do it within Europe. And let's take another non-Swiss example. Let's take a random company in Poland. Let's say there's a very successful Polish tech company. They will inevitably open up a Paris office as they expand. They will inevitably hire people in France. So the thinking has to be, we need to be willing to buy Europe because even if it's not here in France, we will eventually benefit.
Well, you know what? They don't have to. We've been at Vinted. You know Vinted?
Yeah, I know Vinted. Yes, yes.
So we've been there in Lithuania and met Thomas, the CEO. It was amazing, amazing guy.
Yeah.
Well, they operate Vinted from they don't have a Paris office anymore, I think.
Yeah, they operate from Vilnius. They operate from Vilnius.
Yes.
They don't have to.
Yeah.
But I.
But still, it's an exception, I have to admit.
Yes. And also, these companies pay taxes. It all goes in the common EU budget. In the end, Europe will sink or swim together.
Yeah.
And today, we're choosing to sink on our own as opposed to swimming together. This is a bit sad.
This is a bit sad. This is very sad.
Yeah.
What did we forget? What didn't we talk about today, Andy?
Well, I think people sometimes ask me who I think is going to win the AI race. I don't know if you have an opinion as well. But and also, what can Europe do in AI, right? There's and there's some controversy around Mistral seeming to pull back from AI and a bit losing the race.
But the race, I would say, Nvidia.
Well, OK, it depends on what race, right?
Yeah. Yeah, but I think at the end, the one who's going to win the AI race is the how do you say? The marchand de pelle, the pioche?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. Yeah. I actually did the math. And something like half of our AI money revenue goes directly to Nvidia.
Yeah.
It's actually mind-boggling. But I don't think that situation will last. I think they have a maybe two-year lead. But eventually, other chip makers will enter that space. It's too lucrative not to have competition.
AMD is getting much better, I've heard, right?
I don't think it's going to be them. I think it will be one of the startups. AI, we can say conclusively that Europe has lost the race, unfortunately. Now, it doesn't mean we can't catch up in the future. But today, we have lost. So then it's a question of, is it the Americans or Chinese that are going to win? And the way to think about this question is to analyze the American approach and then the Chinese approach.
The American approach is, I'm going to take billions no, maybe trillions of dollars. And I'm going to funnel it into three or four of my biggest companies. And I'm going to hope they can win. That's the American approach. The Chinese approach is, I'm going to fund 50 companies, 50, 60 companies. And then they are going to fight each other to the literal death.
Yeah, that's what they did in the EV, electric vehicles, or solar panels.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, many industries.
Yes. And at the end of this bloodbath, I'm going to have three survivors who are going to be my champion.
Yeah.
If you consider these two approaches, the Chinese one is far more effective at innovation, execution speed, and velocity. The American one actually is going to be slower. So I think the mistake that the US made is they didn't do antitrust. They didn't break up the tech companies. And the Chinese did do that. And this is a structural difference that, in my opinion, gives the Chinese a quite strong advantage in the AI race today and very probably puts them in a position to win.
So this is, I think and the problem with Europe is, once the Chinese have won, the open weight models that we rely upon today to power most of our infrastructure is going to be gone. So the cost of AI is going to skyrocket when we're forced to pay much inflated API prices to the Americans and the Chinese. Because the lower cost situation that we have today is an artificial situation created by the dog-eat-dog, vicious competitive cycle of the Chinese tech industry.
But once that phase is passed, we're very screwed. And my prediction is it probably happens around 2030. It's kind of my guess.
20, 30 times more expensive than what it's today.
No, no, no. 2030. So in about three years from now, it's probably when that transition when that phase of Chinese competition finishes.
2030, OK, sorry.
So if we don't get our act together in the next three years, I think Europe is pretty screwed.
All right, interesting. Scary. The thing is that some people ask themselves that I mean, where do we get the money from? From the models? I mean, people say here on my mic and everywhere that the models are more or less the same now. I mean, they're getting to a plateau somehow. I mean, well, if you had said that a year ago, you would have been very wrong. And probably within a year, we're going to say we were I was very wrong.
Yeah.
But they have like three, four, five month difference. I mean, it takes them ChatGPT was nowhere in April. And now they're back. And a year ago, Claude was nowhere. And so.
Plateau is the wrong word.
Yeah.
It's not that they are plateauing and that improvements are getting less and less. It's that the competitors are very close together. It's a very tight pack. But it's still improving quite rapidly. So it's not a plateau, at least not yet. Now, it will eventually plateau. It's inevitable. But we are not really at that phase yet with the current technology.
But then, I mean, is there a world where we can benefit that the fact that people are more or less at the same place? How can we get our act together?
Yeah.
I mean, the question you I mean, can we get back in the game? And how can we get back in the game?
Well, we benefit today by having Chinese models available for cheap.
For free?
For free even.
Yeah.
And why are Chinese models doing this?
Because they want us not to pay American models, right?
No, no, no. It's not like a centralized it's not like there was a Communist Party meeting where they sat together and said, oh, let's dump on the Americans and kill their pricing power. That's not the thinking. Imagine you're in a space where there's 50 companies competing. And you know only three will survive in the next three years. And you want to be one of the survivors. What you need.
Well, there is one way you are the best. On the other way, you are the cheapest. Or if you're in the.
No, no, no.
Yeah?
Not even the best, but the cheapest. What you need is you need users.
Yeah.
And you need to become famous. The way to be famous and known and to get lots of users is to open your model, to make it open source so that anybody can use it. That is how you get attention in the ecosystem where there's 50 players. And you stand out to secure funding, resources, mindshare, and attention to survive. So open weight models today is not a strange strategy. It is simply a result. It's a consequence of the current phase of their competitive dynamics in their internal market.
But this is going to change in the next three, four years because these labs begin to consolidate. The weaker ones go to irrelevance, run out of funding. They will be, like in every other Chinese market at the end, probably three, four, five big players. And at that point, the incentive to open everything, that's going to disappear. So I think open models, open weight models, probably we have another three years, possibly. And then that's over. And then Europe, we're left paying inflated API rates to the remaining ones who are now going to have to make money.
Wow.
Yeah, it's a bit scary. So what can we do? Well, I go back to history. I'm not a historian. But I'm maybe this is the Chinese part of me. It's a very keen study of history. This is not a new challenge for Europe to be caught between two superpowers on a new emerging technology that is very difficult to do, that we don't find the ability to compete from the private sector or even from any country putting resources behind it.
The last time this happened was actually in the late '40s, early '50s, around nuclear. In the nuclear age, and France was quite good at this, you had the Soviet Union and the US, the two nuclear superpowers. And nuclear was unlimited free energy that would change society forever. That was the pitch. What did the Europeans do in the '50s? Well, they created CERN in Geneva.
That was a pan-European effort to pull our collective resources and intelligence that no single member state was able to do on its own into one centralized organization to become a global leader in nuclear and this new field that was opening.
And you have to be careful what you're saying because, I mean, you're going back to that Zoom protocol you were talking about earlier on.
Yeah.
I mean, CERN is a public research.
Yes.
You think we have to go on public research to finance a public research for AI?
I think what needs to be done is we have to create a CERN of AI.
All right.
And there are and by the way, there are no frontier labs in Europe that we will be competing with. It's not like this CERN is going to put three or four other businesses out of business. It's not like Zoom. In the Zoom case, there's companies like Proton. There's dozens of European companies doing that, right? But nobody's doing frontier AI. It doesn't exist anymore. The industry has been decimated. It's been killed off. Mistral tried. And even they would admit that they were not at the frontier anymore.
They're not working on models anymore?
No, no, not really. So we need, I think, a CERN of AI.
What about Ami Labs? It's different. Yann LeCun?
I mean, is it French or is it New York? I'm not sure. Maybe you should ask him. Maybe you should ask him and see what he says. And that's I think but Europe's success has always been this sort of joint venture, starting from government approach. How do you think Airbus was created? Very similar story. And today, it's one of the dominant players, right? Maybe the dominant player, at least in commercial airline.
This is the European way. It's always been done this way in the past. And I'm not saying that CERN should the CERN of AI should go and build applications and build all these other things. No, what we need to do is create an open weight, open source, frontier model available for all of Europe's businesses. No patents, no IP, just simply technology, a foundational technology on AI that we make available to all of Europe's businesses to build upon in a way that is independent from American and Chinese technology and pooling our resources.
If you take all the money that Europe has available that could be invested into AI, actually, we have enough to be competitive. But today, it's fragmented across 28 different countries. And small projects all fail one at a time because they don't achieve any scale. So this is, in my opinion, this is the way that we do it.
Interesting.
We create a CERN of AI to tackle the exact same problem that we had 70 years ago.
Well, I was not expecting that from the time when these American-based in.
In Switzerland.
In Switzerland saying, we have to create a public research center for AI, kind of, yeah, in Europe.
But I came from CERN. So I see that it can work.
You've seen it.
And you know Proton came out of CERN. So what that proves is, if you build a foundational technology, you will then have all the spin-offs that come out of that. And that will help to revitalize our economy.
Plus, there is a kind of other philosophical thing coming in because, I mean, the way Americans think, we've been talking about that. The way Chinese think is not the way we think.
Yes.
And.
We cannot copy their approach.
Americans think through private companies.
Yes.
And I mean, I don't know. There are kind of, I don't know, in the AI era, uncontrollable. Chinese think through kind of private controlled by public.
Yes.
That we don't really agree with on freedom.
Yes.
So that would at least solve something that is more of a kind of not private. Well, it would be public somehow.
Yes.
But.
But also, I'll give you an example, right? First of all, governments are very bad at picking winners. The track record of picking the right company that's going to win is not very good. Also, the resources required are beyond any one European country. So you cannot and let's assume that we think Mistral is going to be the one. You cannot really go to Germany and say, hey, I'm going to take Germany public money. And I'm going to stick it to Mistral. Not going to work. But a CERN of AI that is pan-European, that makes the IP available to all European countries, that the Germans come back, that the Polish come back, that the French come back, that even the Swiss can get behind.
So this is a model that could actually work given the unique context that Europe sits in.
You know what?
And by the way, I'm not I'm a business person. So I'm the last person to say government intervention. But what is the role of government? The role of government is to act when the private sector has failed. And today, we can say without any ambiguity that when it comes to building AI in Europe, the private sector has more or less failed. And it is time, I think, for this type of vision, this type of research institute to be created in Europe and perhaps in Geneva because Geneva was picked for CERN for a reason.
I was about to say, you know what, just to start this little war. Yeah, you know what? I agree. But as far as it's in France.
Well, the reason CERN is not in France is the same reason that.
Oh, that's right.
There was a reason for that.
Yeah.
You wouldn't have gotten some of the other funding that you needed if it had been in France. Now, the compromise, of course, is that CERN is half in France, by the way.
Yeah.
The border.
Yeah, it's in literal is in yeah, yeah.
It's half and half, right?
Yeah.
The border literally crosses the CERN campus. And I shouldn't say this, but it was kind of used like a smuggling route as well.
Oh, great. Yeah.
You didn't have to go through the border check.
Well, you could smoke on the French side, maybe.
Well, you could buy your groceries in Saint-Germain.
Yeah.
You could enter through the.
And go through the CERN.
You could enter the French entrance.
Insane.
And then come out the Swiss entrance.
Pretty good for yeah, OK.
Yeah, I won't say I did it myself. But.
Yeah.
I know of people who did it.
Yeah, I'll check into your email. Don't worry. I'll double-check. Interesting. OK. So what are the next big releases? You said we don't have a chat yet. We don't have a couple of things. I mean, what are your dreams on one side and the next one, the very next one?
Yeah, well, unfortunately, I can't say.
Come on.
Because.
One, you can say one.
We try to keep these things fairly under wraps. But the way that we work as a company, it's community-driven. It's whatever the users say that they want, we have to more or less build. If you get all your money from users, then you're actually very beholden to their opinions. I hear so I'll tell you some of the things that I hear a lot from the community. The chat one comes up more and more. So that's definitely being considered.
We also hear sometimes talk about, hey, maybe you should do a browser. You should do something along those lines. So we hear that as well. And today, we hear more and more from business customers that they want us to complete the workspace ecosystem, which we don't have the full pieces of. So I think we will probably look into these directions.
You mean a CRM or something like this?
No, we're still missing the PowerPoint piece.
OK.
So we don't have.
OK, all right.
We don't have slides. Although people say PowerPoint is less and less used now. But.
It's true.
Still being used, right?
Please don't.
Yeah, I think we have to do it. So these are some of maybe the most obvious ones. But I also think the things that we have today, they can be further improved. And that means we probably enter a phase for the next I don't know, for the next period of time where maybe there is fewer new products and greater focus on what is already existing. And it's also an organizational challenge, right? You got to imagine having one company that is in so many different fields. This is really difficult to manage.
So there's always a kind of trade-off between, do we expand the ecosystem? Do we improve what is there? My personal feeling is I would like to work more on improvement as opposed to expansion, at least for maybe the next 6, 12 months. So we'll see what happens. But this is the balance that we always have to strike as a business.
Understood.
Yeah.
Understood. What about blockchain? Have you ever thought about putting those encrypted I mean, so I would own my emails and information and data. And it wouldn't be under whatever Proton.
Yeah.
Protocol.
Yeah. We do consider blockchain. But my issue with blockchain is it is rarely the best technical solution to a problem. A lot of blockchain projects are simply on the blockchain so they can spin up some sort of token and, to be completely honest, scam some people out of some money.
Yeah, a lot of them. That's true.
The vast majority are what we call shitcoins.
Yeah.
So from that perspective, I like blockchain as a technology. I think there are certain ways where it makes sense. So for example, Proton has a feature called key transparency where we actually make a Merkle tree, which is basically a blockchain, storing the hashes of everybody's public keys. And this is put on the blockchain. Why? Because blockchain is an immutable, read-only ledger. It's a great place to make sure that the encryption keys is correct because no one else can modify it, right? That makes a lot of sense. That's an application where we use blockchain.
But things like distributed computing where you take everybody's data and you spread it across nodes around the world running on people's phones or their laptops to store data, I mean, it's doable. But that's a really shitty.
Complicated.
Technology and complicated way to store data and not the best way to do it. And just imagine like you have your data distributed across this network. And then the wrong three people turn off their computers. You can't get access to your email because it was only stored it was stored on those three boxes. It's a I know people who are trying to do things like this. But it's just the wrong technical solution to the problem. And as an engineer, you want to pick the right technical solution for the problem that you have.
And if I gave you the opportunity to offer a book, like the book you could offer to everyone listening to the whole world, which book would that be?
There's many out there. OK, this is going to seem OK, this is going to seem self-serving. But it's not because it actually is a good book. There is a professor at Oxford called Clarissa Velez. She's actually a board member of the Proton Foundation.
OK.
And she wrote a new book called "Prophecy." I think that's actually a good book, not just because she's on my board, but actually because it really breaks down some of the issues that are in tech today. And it puts them also in a historical context, which maybe, as you can tell from this interview, is something that I think a lot about. So I think that's a great book.
What's her name again?
Clarissa Velez.
OK, OK.
Yeah.
Clarissa.
Yeah.
Is it OK?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Clarissa. No L.
Oh, great, great. "Prophecy." I got it. Yeah, "Prediction Power and the Fight for the Future." Interesting.
Yes, yes, yes.
OK.
I think that's a fascinating book. And you don't need to be a philosopher or an academic or a technical person to really understand and view the world a little bit differently from the lens of that book. So I won't spoil it so everybody can read the book.
Two days computers two days computer scientists play the same role as the oracles of the ancient world.
Yes.
And the astrologers of the Middle Ages. Modern prediction not only advise on war, crop output, and marriages, but algorithm and statisticians also now determine whether we can get a loan, a job, an apartment, or an organ transplant. And when we cede ground to these predictions, we lose control of our own lives. Yeah, it's interesting.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I want to read that.
It's a fascinating book. So that one, I can recommend for sure.
OK, yeah, it's already on my Kindle. Maybe I shouldn't be on Kindle.
No, Kindle's fine. You can.
Do you well, before I let you go, do you kind of really fight against those super I mean, are they kind of your enemies? I mean, Amazon, Google, and.
I won't say enemies, but definitely rivals. But we just have a very different set of values. It's a completely incompatible value system. And it's a bit like the Chinese system, the European system, not the same.
And how do they consider you? They just don't give a shit or are.
Well, I hope they don't give a shit.
Yeah.
So leave us alone and don't do any competitive practices against us, right? This is the biggest risk for all European companies is because if the Americans wanted to kill you, they could. They could take you off the app store, play uncompetitive, do all sorts of dirty tricks, and ruin your business, right? I think they don't do that because regulators might get after them if they do it. But it's a risk everybody runs. And I always tell people, I prefer always to be underestimated than overestimated.
OK.
So my hope is to stay off the radar. And hopefully, don't think about us or even care about us.
But they don't write you a job.
And they don't see us they don't even see us until it's too late, right?
OK.
But I suspect they probably do now know about us.
Well, some of them are sued. You are suing some of them, right?
Yeah, yeah.
At the moment, yeah.
Yes, yes, yes. I sued one of them. I sued Apple.
OK.
In the US.
Well, that's courageous. That's brave.
OK, well, I can explain the lawsuit a little. OK, I can't explain too much because it's a lawsuit. But you know the US has a system called class action lawsuits.
All right. Yeah, class action, yeah.
Where you can bring a suit that represents a class. And actually, somebody else sued Apple first as part of a class action that would include all developers, including Proton. So we were part of that class. And the reason we got involved in that litigation is because I want to make sure that the settlement that comes at the end of this litigation is the correct one.
And if you're not involved in that litigation, you don't have a say in what are the remedies and what are the outcomes of that. But as part of the class, their outcome will still apply to you.
All right.
So the only way as a class member to influence the litigation is to join the litigation. So you could say that I don't wake up in the morning and say, oh, let's sue one of the biggest tech companies in the world because that's a dangerous thing to do. We did it essentially because our hand was forced.
All right.
Yeah, someone else did it. And if we didn't participate, then we have no say in the outcome.
The idea is about the 30% they take on the app store, right?
Yes.
OK, OK. Well.
And this is kind of absurd. So I give you maybe a French example. Imagine if Chanel had to pay 30% of the revenues on every bag they sold to LVMH. It probably wouldn't be very competitive.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And today, every single European tech company is paying Americans 30% on every single transaction.
Yeah.
It's a.
Yeah, at least. I mean, plus they pay AWS, plus they pay AdWords, plus they pay.
Exactly.
Meta Ads, plus they pay Salesforce, plus they pay I mean, yeah.
Exactly.
It's probably more than 30%.
And then unlike the Chanel Louis Vuitton situation, you don't have the option to buy Hermès, right? There's only two of them. And you're completely locked in. So when there is a monopoly situation, there are certain market abuses that should not be permitted. And under European law, that's actually illegal. Under American law, it's probably also illegal. And through this litigation, we're going to find out if that's the case or not. I am pretty, let's say, convinced of our position because there's been a similar Epic versus Google case and also Epic versus Apple case that has showed that, in fact, some of these monopolistic behaviors are anti-competitive.
And this is. So to kind of give you maybe a Proton example, you know today, if you want to download Proton from the App Store or Play Store or let's say the Google Play Store in the US, you've got to get a Gmail account to get a Proton Mail app. It's not really in the level playing field. And these are the things that European regulators at the European Commission have to enforce. It's one thing to not fund European companies. But it's another to allow companies in the US to create a playing field where it's really we're fighting with a two-hand tied behind our back.
It's not really it's not very effective.
How long will it take? You have approximately 0.5, 0.4 of email addresses in the world, right?
Yes.
How long will it take you to have 1%?
Well, I think with AI, we will be able to close the gap a lot faster than in the past. So what might have taken a decade in the past to kind of close the gap could now be done in maybe a matter of two or three years. This is the big disruption that AI brings to the world. It's very hard to predict how fast the business will grow. We've made many predictions in the past, and they were all wrong. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, right? What we see, though, is there is clearly a very strong culture shift here in Europe, also here in the US, and also in North America where people are deciding, you know what?
I don't trust American tech anymore. I want something European. From the start of the year and just if I look at the beginning of the year, there was a whole thing about Greenland. There was all the controversy, et cetera. Sign-ups in Denmark doubled just this year alone.
Wow.
In the past month or so, in Canada, they're up 30%, 40%. So I don't think it's like we've reached a tipping point. But you definitely see the trend happening. And the comparison that I make is a bit with electric cars and environmental friendly. The environment, 40 years ago, nobody really cared. But today, if you don't think in an environmentally friendly way, it's almost socially unacceptable.
But nobody can point to one specific moment where that shift happened. It's like electric cars. Electric cars also, we thought it was the most absurd and insane thing 40 years ago. Today, it seems the most logical, rational, obvious thing to do. But no one can pinpoint to one exact moment where that flipped. I think when it comes to the internet, it is very clear that the big tech business model is not healthy for society. It's not good for the world.
Just like polluting and burning fossil fuels and burning dead dinosaurs for energy is not good for the world. And pollution had a very clear consequence in the world. You eventually feel it. Well, feel it today. It's much hotter today than it would have been 10, 20 years ago. You see it in people getting sick. You see it in accidents and storm patterns. But same with tech. The negative externalities of the big tech business model begin to show up as well. We saw Cambridge Analytica that was 10 years ago.
But all these other things like TikTok, it all starts to creep up bit by bit. And even normal people who don't care begin to notice. Just like today, even if you don't care about the environment, you notice it's hotter. You notice the world is not as good as it used to be 20 years ago. So it will not be, in my opinion, a single factor or a single moment that causes the flip. But gradually, the transition to a more ethical and private and secure online ecosystem, it is, in my view, as inevitable as the electric car, as inevitable as caring for the environment.
It will take maybe 20, 30 years for this shift to occur. But it is bound to happen. So this is something that gives me hope, keeps me excited, and keeps us working very hard.
I think it's very interesting. And it's very good. It's a source of inspiration for people listening and for myself. I think if you take, for example, social, I mean, I just don't understand why don't we have a decent social network from Europe that is, I mean, also interesting for my data, but plus not manipulating people from foreign countries, forces, philosophies, I mean, point of views. And I believe in a lot of fields I don't think about daily this should happen too.
So yeah.
Yeah, but that's a tech question. And that's ultimately a talent question. And the message I would share is we have so many young, smart, talented people in Europe, in the continent. And I'm lucky to have hundreds of them working for us in Proton, even in Paris because we have an office here in Paris as well, right? Incredibly young, smart, bright people. The issue that I think we have in Europe is what I call a brain drain. For the last 20 or 30 years, our smartest young minds in tech went to the US.
They went to work for American tech giants. And they, in some sense, contributed to the dominant situation today where our lives and our continent and our economies are controlled by foreign companies.
And you know what? I didn't say it earlier on. But the worst thing is that you were talking about capital and finances. But plus, we put our money into the American markets.
Yes, yes.
I mean, the whole thing is wrong. Yeah.
But not only that, we put our people.
Yeah.
And I understand the people that made that choice 20, 30 years ago because if you wanted to do tech, be part of this exciting, amazing journey, there was not the option in Europe. You had to go to the US if you want to participate in this revolution. But this is not the case anymore. There are players, not just Proton, but many other companies, many other generations of young people trying to build tech, trying to build the digital future of our continent here in Europe. So I think we need the young people today who are maybe listening to this or listening to other things to think, what is important, right?
And we have in this moment probably the biggest opportunity ever to actually make a difference. So come take a bet on European tech. Come try joining a European tech company. Let's see what we can do together because unless we try, we don't really know.
And you can do that even if you're Chinese or American or from anywhere in the world.
And many of them cannot go to the US anymore. So maybe they should come to Europe. If we welcome them here as well.
And if your philosophy and what you're the world you're fighting for talks to you, then yeah, it's probably the right moment.
Yes, yes. And we have a huge opportunity as well because all this talent from around the world that used to go to the US, guess what? They're not going there anymore. And if Europe can show the world open for business and we can bring them here, this is a chance to, in the next 10, 15 years, make a generational acceleration and catch up very quickly. So I think the potential is there.
So the Proton subscription is about like, yeah, let's just take the €10, 19.99. What if I take an annual one? And I come from this podcast. Can you say now you can't? I mean, can you make it like 30%, 40% cheaper for the first year?
I don't actually know because we have to look at the commercials of it. But we do have some discounted plans that we offer sometimes.
OK, I don't take anything. I'm not asking for anything.
Yeah, yeah, no, no.
Everything for the listener, right?
Yes, of course. So we will take a look. But it is already the cheapest offer on the market.
Yeah.
And I will tell you, as a nonprofit-owned organization, we're not in it to maximize the profit.
All right.
And that's reflected in the prices as well.
But yeah, you'll try the code. If the promo code, if you can make it, we'll put it on the description on the website, right?
Yes.
And you can just use doit, D-O-I-T. It will work. But if not, you will see with your marketing team, all right?
Yeah, I think we'll do something. And maybe it'll be limited to the first some number of people as well.
Cool. Yeah, anything. Great. Thank you. And one very last question. If you had the chance to meet Andy before he left, at what age did you leave?
Academia?
Yeah, no, sorry. Taiwan, yeah.
I was young. I was like elementary school age.
Yeah, like 16, 17?
No, no, younger than that. Yeah. But what's the question, actually?
What would you tell yourself?
I mean, when you're young, you don't.
You were like even like 8, 10, or what age?
Yeah, but hold on.
Maybe later on then.
No, I think the better way to frame the question is, what would I tell myself when I left university? Because I think that is when you start to form a view of the world and start to think a bit differently. I would probably tell myself that you know it's kind of funny. What I learned after starting the entrepreneur journey is everything takes three times longer and costs three times as much, and it's three times harder.
And if I had told myself that when I was 21, maybe I wouldn't have done it. So if I went back in time, I would probably lie to myself and say, it's a lot easier. It's a lot doable. You should go and do it.
And you love it.
Yes, yes. I think sometimes this is what we have to do, right?
All right.
Everything is tougher than you imagine. But you only find that in hindsight. And if you knew that going in, a lot of entrepreneurs would tell you they wouldn't have done it had they known how hard it would be, how hard it would be. So I think a little bit of being a little bit naive can sometimes the naivete of youth is a very strong advantage that we should not.
Strength, very big.
It's a strength that we should not take away from them.
100%. Thank you, Andy. Thank you very much. Andy, and we can follow you on Twitter maybe or LinkedIn.
Yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn, yes.
Yeah, OK. X and LinkedIn. And if you want to reach out to Andy, his email is andy.yen@gmail.com, right? Gmail.com. You got it, right?
My email at Proton is not so hard to guess. People figure it out all the time. I'm sure your listeners can figure it out as well.
All right. Well, it starts with an A. It ends with an O, Y, maybe. I don't know.
Maybe, maybe.
Thank you very much. See you guys. If you didn't listen to any episodes of "Generación Dicho Self," on the English version, we'll put you also other English-speaking episodes. And otherwise, well, learn French. I mean, it's a pretty good language to talk. Yeah. Thank you, Clémence. Thank you to all of the team, Mateo, and everyone upstairs, Axel and Paul. And thanks, Andy. It was great talking to you.
Yeah.
Congratulations. You've made it this far despite my French accent. And chances are you'll enjoy a few of my previous episodes in English. So we've picked a couple of them just for you. And you'll find the links in the description. If you like this one, feel free to share it with a few friends, two, three, or even 10. I'd love to have more English listeners. Don't forget to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you're listening. And see you next time.
Notre nouveau film « Europe : il va falloir arrêter de subir 🇪🇺 » est dispo sur YouTube : https://taap.it/rewrosY
Retrouvez l'épisode en version française ici : https://www.gdiy.fr/podcast/andy-yen-proton-fr/
Big Tech knows more about us than we do.
Andy Yen goes further: according to him, they probably hold more data on you than some governments.
Most of us have been using Gmail for years without ever feeling in danger.
Honestly, who would want to read our emails?
It is this almost blind trust that Andy is trying to raise the alarm about.
For him, protecting your privacy isn’t about hiding something. It’s about anticipating the day the definition of what’s illegal changes.
We often think the threat comes from governments. For Andy, it mostly comes from the business model of the web.
By default, everything is shared: our emails, our documents, our entire online life.
Your inbox has become a digital passport that lets you be tracked everywhere and reveals far more about you than your search history.
Faced with this, Andy decided to build an alternative.
A physicist who spent time at CERN, he founded Proton in Geneva in 2014, a European alternative to Google.
They offer the same services: email, calendar, storage, documents - but with the opposite model.
Google makes money by exploiting your data to sell you advertising.
Proton is funded by its users’ subscriptions, not by their data: emails and files are encrypted so that no one, not even its own teams, can read them.
Today, more than 100 million people use its services.
The company is profitable, self-funded and controlled by a foundation.
In this episode, Andy shares his fears for Europe, which he has defended heart and soul for years, but which has neither American funding nor the Chinese work culture, and which, according to him, isn’t moving fast enough.
In this episode, we cover:
Why you should feel concerned even when you “have nothing to hide”
Why breaking away from Google is easier than you think
Why hosting your data on a European server isn’t enough
Why the European plan to scan private messages is a danger
An episode to listen to in order to understand why your data is worth more than you think, then send to someone who still uses Gmail for everything.
You can reach Andy on Linkedin and X.
TIMELINE:
00:00:00 : Why do we need to protect our data?
00:11:12 : Building a profitable company without Silicon Valley methods
00:23:47 : The method to reach 100 million users
00:32:34 : Europe's tech advantage over the Americans
00:41:03 : “Privacy is a pillar of democracy.”
01:01:51 : What Google really does with your personal information
01:10:42 : The business model of a rebel company
01:31:15 : “An unencrypted email is like a letter without an envelope.”
01:40:40 : Lumo: Proton's 100% encrypted model
01:58:48 : His dream of European sovereignty
02:18:35 : Who will win the AI race?
02:34:00 : Proton's next innovations
02:42:11 : “I sued Apple.”
We referred to previous GDIY episodes :
#555 - Philippe Aghion - Prix Nobel d’économie - Redresser la France et l’Europe
#543 - Yann Le Cun - AMI Labs - Rendre l’IA plus humaine
#397 - Yann Le Cun - Meta - L’Intelligence Artificielle Générale ne viendra pas de Chat GPT
A few recent episodes in English :
#570 - Eric Schmidt - Google, Relativity Space - What will be the next chapter in human history ?
#564 - VO - Mati Staniszewski - ElevenLabs - "Humans were never meant to write, but to speak."
#557 - VO - Robert Gentz - Zalando - Building a Shopping Empire on Flip Flops
#551 - VO - Simon Squibb - Content creator - The Dreams Maker
#542 - VO - Yoni Assia - eToro - “AI Will Replace Most Traders in 18 Months”
#513 - VO - Jesper Brodin - IKEA - 40 billion in revenue empire with no bank loan
#500 - VO - Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn, Paypal - How to master humanity’s most powerful invention
#487 - VO - Anton Osika - Lovable - Internet, Business, and AI: Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again
#475 - VO - Shane Parrish - Farnam Street - Clear Thinking: The Decision-Making Expert
#473 - VO - Brian Chesky - Airbnb - « We're just getting started »
#452 - VO - Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn, Paypal - L’humanité 2.0 : Homo technicus plus qu’Homo sapiens
#437 - James Dyson - Dyson - “Failure is more exciting than success”
#431 - Sean Rad - Tinder - How the swipe fever took over the world
We spoke about :
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Chat Control, the EU regulation on message scanning
Proton
Michel Devoret, 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
Lumo, Proton’s confidential AI assistant
Proton Foundation, Proton’s main shareholder
Arrest of Pavel Durov (Telegram) in France
The “996” system in Chinese tech
Proton Easy Switch: leaving Gmail for Proton Mail
Philippe Aghion and creative destruction (Schumpeter)
Proton vs Apple: the App Store class action
Reading Recommendations :
Prophecy, by Carissa Véliz 🇬🇧
A huge THANK YOU to our sponsors :
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eToro: https://bit.ly/3GTSh0k
Payfit: payfit.com
Club Med : clubmed.fr
Cuure : https://cuure.com/product-onely
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