YouSaid · the spoken record

Nili G. Shalev

lines on the record: 105
first: 2026-07-16
most recent: 2026-07-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We made some preparations about where we could possibly land for this if both the EU and Switzerland become inhospitable to this. This is separate things. There are the practical challenges that we all know this stuff is happening. There's a wave of whether it be age verification or breaking encryption or stuff like this. This seems to be in vogue right now and it's something we are fighting on the policy front”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a cost. Well, it is a cost. It's maybe not as much of a cost as you might think, right? We already have employees in different countries. We have satellite offices. We have other things. We have data centers in Germany. We have our data centers in Norway, not to be too blase about it, but we could do a corporate inversion to us somewhere else and then say, okay, all the legal requests have to come through here, right? And all the data is with you.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's dead serious. I mean, it's with all due respect to Swiss authorities and everybody else. I think it would be absolutely suicidal to continue down this path. Part of the Swiss brand is privacy. It's been that way for 80 years. And, you know, they have a good proton largely, but also they have a good case for that reputation and that economic advantages because there's a lot of businesses, a lot of commerce that requires confidentiality to the 21st century, to the digital age. And, you know, throwing it away is, I think, short-sighted to say the least. But it's a serious threat. The thing about digital services is they can be moved. There's a lot of flexibility in this. And if we get truly dystopian, there may be a world where there's no”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To where the default should be privacy, as I said, privacy by default. And yes, we are also responsive to legitimate law enforcement requests, however you define legitimate. And that legitimate question will always be a matter of process, which we, of course, are only one player in this process. But I think the legitimacy.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A specific hypothetical abusive case that might have not been, that mistakes can be made, of course. But I want a system like the system we have, which is that if The government has some sort of reasonable cause and can convince people in a defined process to give data. Yeah, the data should probably be given. What I really worry about is that we often live in a world where you can basically, the government can instead ask, give me all your data. And I'm going to look for problems. I'm going to look for a crime, right? The word wiretap comes from a time where they had to literally go to your house and tap the wire. And I don't think it was really thought of at the time, but this actual physical act of having to do this had a barrier to the fact that you couldn't surveil everybody at once, right? It was just, it was simply logistically impossible. We live in a world today where you can surveil everybody. So we want to build services and systems where this is impossible, right? Where you have to.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a lot of this stuff at some point it's going to be up to people we've done the best we can and I don't think people are going to have different opinions about what which requests are legitimate or not but we've done the best we can in saying that okay the Swiss authorities will decide we will comply with whatever they say because we are a Swiss jurisdiction in the meantime we do and can and arrange our And this of course there are laws that govern this but we do whatever we can to minimize the amount of data that we can give right I mean payment data is sort of there's not we can encrypt it and we use payment processors like they can get it they can get it from lots of different sources so if you have a if you have a credit card attached and and there's a legal request coming in there's not a whole lot we can do right you mentioned systems because I think this is important what's important to me and I realize this I don't want this to sound callous for like the”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And those requests, we don't have a lot of visibility into where the requests are coming from, but those requests we have on good authority are usually not honored. Whereas, you know, people's opinions may vary these days, but the FBI requests, they tend to be given a certain presumption, but there's still a presumption of legitimacy, but they're still evaluated by this with authorities. And then what we do is we comply. We have no discretion here. And this would be the case for any, but we have arranged the system such that we think it is the safest, one of the safest that can be constructed and stay legal.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within constraints like making a product that people want to use and can use and do the job, right? But we engineer our products to be as private as possible. And the Swiss and we are subject to Swiss jurisdiction. Mutual legal assistance treaty request, MLAT requests, come in from governments. The Swiss authorities decide what is legitimate, what is not. We have no stake in that. And then the issue and order. And we comply with those orders. And that's the way it has to be. And we very deliberately chose our jurisdiction in a way that the Swiss are famously neutral and they also have a certain, like every government is made up of humans, but they have a reputation for being reasonable people. And as a result, and that system has worked pretty well. In general, there are countries that are less trustworthy than others.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any company anywhere is going to have a jurisdiction and be subject to jurisdiction. There is no company or an individual which is above the law, right? And nobody, you know, no company is going to go to jail for you, right? That said, you can arrange structures such that there are safeguards here. And our safeguards, for instance, is that we are a Swiss company. And we've actually been asked repeatedly, hey, can you just respond to requests from friendly government agencies? And we have repeatedly said, no, because it can't be our job to decide what is legitimate and what is not. That is not something that we can take on, right? So what we do is we engineer our products to have”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I spent so much time on the technical side that corporate structure side and the culture is because Proton faces a lot of pressure. And all of this, as you've described, is designed to resist that pressure, is designed to build products that can't be broken by that pressure in different ways. Let's just start with, I don't know, the governments of the world, which are a lot of pressure and have found lots and lots of ways to get past the kinds of controls you put in place to protect user data. We'll just start with the splashiest one. In March, a report from Fore Media found that Proton handed over the payment data of an account called StopCop City, which is located in the United States. They handed that data to the Swiss authorities, who then gave that data to the FBI, and that led to their identification. This is metadata. I don't think it's actually the data, the contents of the emails. Proton's argument is, look, we never actually gave anything to the FBI. We just complied with a legal request from the Swiss government.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to import people with expertise, so I'm not infallible. Let's do this. And that was probably too permissive. And it caused, you know, we had some nothing catastrophic, but we had some expensive mistakes that I had a bad feeling about, but I let go through anyway because, you know, the worst. Because I was trying to do this. And so I think moderation doesn't tend to be the sexiest thing to sell, but it is. It's a balance. You don't want to mandate how things are done, but you also want to make sure that you're there to stop people from doing like truly catastrophic or expensive decisions that you can see the brick wall in the distance and you want to make sure that doesn't happen. It's not the most dramatic answer, but a lot of this is finding the right balance there. And it's a certain amount of moderation.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I also had maybe a similar evolution. I've been there through most of all of Proton's growth phases. So, you know, early on, I wrote a lot of code. Then I was effectively a team lead, then I was a manager and managers. At some point, I was running all of protons engineering. Then I was more handed off some of the management things, but kept the sort of CTO technical direction stuff. And in that course definitely made a lot of mistakes too, right? Early on, it was I had to, you know, teach myself not to make other people like me, not to maybe not micromanage, but not to tell, not to just tell people what to do and have them execute it. And then I went through a phase later where I let people, you know, okay, people need to learn, people need to make their own mistakes.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, culture is extremely important, is extremely important. That comes from the top as well, Andy, if you were to ask him what's the most important thing in any business. He very likely to say culture. And as a result, we try, we're very careful about who we hire. We hire relatively slow. I think we could hire faster. And I think hiring is one of the things that we could be better at. But we don't do these, you know, massive hires, massive layoffs, things like this, and we don't hire so fast that we dilute the culture. Like we want. We want to integrate people into the proton culture, not necessarily, and yet sometimes we have to change it, sometimes we have to evolve it, but we want that to be done in a deliberate way. I think...”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Early on my career, I had no idea how to manage anyone. And I went to a bunch of people and asked them a bunch of questions. And one of the smartest mentors in all this told me very seriously, she sat me down and she's like, look, you don't hire people to make them like you. You hire people to change your organization. taken that and maybe 15 years into this i'm like that's actually a pendulum right you you need people to buy into what you're doing otherwise every new person you hire is gonna radically disrupt whatever everyone else is doing because they're maybe over empowered and they're not actually on the same page proton has a mission right you're describing as a mission driven company how do you strike that balance of you want to hire new people and get the outside perspective on what are we doing wrong and then not actually get knocked totally off track because it seems very important inside of a company like proton”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mental nature of the universe. I consider that kind of a mission driven occupation. I also had a stint in Silicon Valley afterward, which is fun and interesting technical problems, but I. I miss that, right? And with Proton. The mission is really we have to be careful that it doesn't paper over organizational problems that we should really solve. Let's put it that way. But it really does make the job easier when everybody is sort of aligned in that regard.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To people, just do it. It says another thing. And again, I'm speaking for myself, but I think this has sort of common throughout Proton is that I tell people I'm not promising or obligated to agree with you, but you're never going to regret telling me what you think. And this is, I credit Andy with this, we have very little internal politics. Maybe this is something just because we're not very big yet, but we have very zero tolerance for fiefdoms or internal politics, and that also makes things, there's very much a sense that we're all pointing in the same direction and that it's not my division that I'm trying to grow. It's proton in general. Some of that comes with being a mission-driven company. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but for those of you who haven't, I've had both, right? I was a physicist as part of the CERN collaboration a long time ago. And there you have fun.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a way to align lots of different people in the same direction, right? And the trick is always, how do you get alignment in the same general direction while still having autonomy so that you're not micromanaging everything? And I'm not saying we always get the balance right, but that's the goal here. And when we do this sort of orientation, when we hire new people into Proton, and one of the things we always say there is like, I want to hear you're not used to our way of doing things yet. So I want you to look at our way of doing things. And if you've experienced another employer or you think this is either crazy or inefficient, I want you to tell us, right? And we're very clear, yes, of course, we have a hierarchy, but it's, you know, level, and part of this is our size, of course, but we very rarely have more than, say, three or four levels of management. We always say, look, if you need to ping me, you need to ping the CEO, you need to directly talk.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And I think he's responsible for a lot of Proton success. He's willing to take risks, this kind of stuff. And I obviously believe in his leadership. I wouldn't still be here after 11 years. That said, I think one thing that sometimes happens with visionaries is they need to surround themselves with people who will challenge them when they get maybe a little too far over their skis or to also make sure that we have ideas from other places. One thing that we really try to make sure is that ideas are judging their merits, not who not their origin necessarily, right? We have a senior leadership team whose job is to, yes, execute, but also bring new ideas and sell them and things like this. We try, I'm not going to say that we always, that we're perfect in this. We have plenty of things that we can improve, but we try to push decision making down the orgs. The whole point of an organization is that you have”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are a founder-led company, right? Andy started Proton. I was, I think, employee six, I want to say, or something. That's a funny story in itself. You know how I met Andy? He was my grad student at the term. I was a postdoc at Harvard and he was my grad student. And then he comes and finds me in Silicon Valley after I left physics. And I was like, hey, you want to join my startup? You can be CEO or CTO rather. But yeah, so he's still heavily involved. He has a lot of input on product direction strategy. And he's a visionary.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You do, and we struggle with that to some degree. We try to compensate for it, but it. Yeah, you do. Ship your chart. And therefore, if you want your products to look different, you should adjust your chart to support that difference, right? I mean, ultimately”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they have it in their planning so that we can ship it correctly. So we've made a deliberate decision to sort of prioritize in-product communication. And then we have to work, and then we try to compensate for the shortcomings of that in our cross-product communication. And then as we transition to more and more ecosystem-based stuff, we may make different choices about the corporate structure to support that. It's the whole Conway's law thing, right? You ship your org chart, you know, but sometimes you want the best of both worlds, and this is where processes comes along. It's not always sexy, but you find it super important as you scale organizations for sure.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do have a division structure of business unit structure. We have certain products are bundled together, like mail and calendar because they're bundled into the same division. Other ones are separate. So we have Lumo, we have Drive, we have PaaS. And we have VPN. These are separate divisions. You make choices about corporate structure based on what communication you want to be easiest, right? So that's designed to allow people to move fast and to have autonomy and make decisions within their product. And then we also have teams that work sort of cross-organization teams or support teams and things like that. And on that side, the trade-off of the business infrastructure is there. We sometimes have to work harder, right? It's a little bit like corralling cats, right? Where you have to make sure that, okay, I'm building this feature that touches all the products. I need to make sure that all the products are on board.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the macro structure. Just tell me about the more tactical structure inside the company that's building a product. How is Proton itself structured? Is there a team that makes the Lumo assistant? Is there a team that makes email? Is it divisions? Is it functional? How's that work?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's just the default of Google buying anything. I just want to be very clear about it. I know, no, they shut it down and then it's gone, right? The clock would start ticking that day. Yeah, I know.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Person Aegeus, as far as I'm aware, right? But even if some happens and the value of Proton is in the reputation. And we said this, and this has been a sort of a deliberate choice. The value of Proton is in the trust that we have. You know, if Google bought us, it would have no value because Google does not have the credibility to run Proton. Do you see what I mean?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's also where the architecture comes in. We make choices about the tech stuff, and obviously I'm on the text side of this business, but we have made choices. And some of that is for business competitive reasons, right? We want to sell products where we say, we can't access your data. We don't have access to data. We can't lose it. We can't sell it. We can't do this. But that also constrains us from deciding one day to turn around and sell it because we have locked it in a box, right? And we can't access it and therefore we can't turn around and say, you know what? Sorry guys, we changed our mind. We're actually going to mine all this data and go, right? Now is anything perfect? No. But I mean the structure is designed such that we have these interlocking, as I said, controls. The President Foundation is barred from selling.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investors. We don't have private equity investors. We aren't burning other people's money with VCs, breathing down our necks that we must exit soon or otherwise we go belly up, right? We built a sustainable business. We reinvest the profits from that business back into the business. And this insulates us from some of the pressure, which I'm sure OpenEye felt given that they were lighting enormous stacks of money on fire all the time, right? But that said, you know, personnel is policy, right? There's certainly always this risk. And at the same time, you know, sometimes you find it, we found out a lot recently that sometimes rules or otherwise or norms or guidelines unwritten or not, they're not worth the paper that they're written on.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not, but well, it could also be our corporate motto is go big or go home, right? We don't set modest goals in that regard. But I think that there are a couple things that make it different. I mentioned before a lot of constraints, but one thing I didn't mention is we don't have VC.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to make a comparison that you are going to hate Just letting you know, I know you're going to hate it Maybe the most famous will build a foundation to protect ourselves from the demands of the market and make sure the thing is healthy is OpenAI, which basically killed that structure in order to chase an IPO, right? And maybe they still have really important and idealistic ideas about how Adria should be developed. Maybe, maybe there's some people in that company who really feel that way. And it just didn't work, right? They needed to chase growth in very specific ways for whatever reasons that they felt. Maybe it was money. Maybe it was just in order to take on Google search the way that OpenAI felt like it wanted to take on Google search. They had to change the structure of the company. That obviously happened, right? It's like one of the most like apocalyptic foundation moments that has ever happened. Like this thing just exploded or imploded onto itself. When you look at that and then you look at, okay, we have to grow in order to be the default. We have to grow to be big. But we're making this promise that Google doesn't have to make orsoft.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where we can offer alternative big tech. And small startups, small scale ups, you know, being 100 times or 10 times smaller than big tech is not going to cut it, right? In order to do that, we need to grow. So growth is actually part of the mission, if you will. And that means that we have to be the word not rapacious, but we have to be as hungry and as efficient and as growth-minded as we possibly can because that's part of the mission, to grow big enough to actually challenge the paradigm, we can talk about all kinds. Ways capitalism is kind of broken right now, but like we have to play the game.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to play the same game. Our corporate motto, this might be a little cheesy, but our corporate motto is privacy by default. And that default part is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I mentioned before that our goal is to design products which are easy to use and secure, right? There are plenty of tools that are secure and nobody but a few experts use them. And that's fine. I'm not criticizing the existence of those tools. But our goal is to make tools that everybody can use without understanding the cryptography, without even knowing that it's cryptography that they can use and that are as easy to use and as feature filled as are unencrypted and essentially data mining competitors, right? It's a tall order. I'm not saying we're 100% there yet, but that is the goal. But the default word in that privacy by default means that we have to be at the scale.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The short answer is no. And the reason for that is that we have to compete in capitalism. Our main competitor is big tech, right? Even though we are much smaller than big tech, where our users come from when we convert people, when we get new customers, they're big tech in general, right?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that strikes me as I talk to more and more companies that have transitioned to this kind of foundation model is that that structure is essentially there to insulate you from the rapacious demands of capitalism. You aren't being pressured to make as much money every quarter as possible to do the things that would lead you to make the most money. And that means maybe the technology can develop in a pure and idealistic state of protecting privacy instead of chasing the dollars. Do you feel that insulation, right? I mean, you do have to make money and pay your employees and grow in some way, but what's the dynamic for you architecting the products?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thus, no, thus far, no. We have our founder CEO, Andy. Andyen was, he founded the company as founder CEO implies, and as long as he is in charge, I don't think that'll be necessary. But, you know, if he gets hit by the bus, there's still a corporate structure which is designed to protect the mission going forward and to make sure the company doesn't stray, regardless. And because of this ownership model, too, the company is insulated from, say, some sort of takeover or purchase that could also redirect its priorities. But I do say that, I mean, I think that and the tech and the business model basically are interlocking protections against us betraying the compact that we have with our users.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Proton today is approximately 650 people total that also includes engineering, support functions, marketing, et cetera. It also includes customer support, which we do in-house. We always have. We are a corporation, Proton AG, a Swiss corporation, however a controlling stake in Proton AG is held by the Proton Foundation, which was seeded with shares from Andy, our CEO, and other early employees and has a controlling stick. There are other fellow travelers with, I would say, a similar and somewhat similar structure, Signal and Mozilla, and our reasons are the same. We have the proton foundation controls has a controlling stake in the proton company and is empowered to protect the mission. It's a Swiss Foundation, which is, I've been told, I'm not a lawyer, but I've been told it's very difficult to change. And its job is sort of the guardian of the values and the mission of Proton. So if Proton, the company, were to stray from that mission, the Proton Foundation would be empowered to correct the correct course, if that makes sense.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This does bring us to the decoder questions about structure and organization because that's where it feels like the structure has to be where the trust lies, not necessarily the technical architecture. So how is Proton structured today? How many people is”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a fraught decision, right? It's giving all their sensitive data over. And they feel like in many cases they don't have a choice. And in some ways, that's why we developed LUMO, which is our AI offering, which I think may have left off the list before, unfortunately. But I think we just launched Lumo 2.0, which is a big revamp of the models we use. And part of that is the goal of Lumo project in general is to have something which integrates with the rest of our products and can do this in a safe way. This is to address this sort of trade-off between do I give random AI companies, possibly in different countries, possibly have compliance problems, all this other things? Do I give them all my sensitive business data? Or can I do it in a way that is still more protected? Now, in many ways, there are still trade-offs on our side to make, but we keep it in-house within Proton with the guarantees that we.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the tensions there is AI sort of infiltrates more and more businesses is the frontier model companies want every ounce of data. I think a bunch of big enterprises are very leery of giving a bunch of data to frontier model companies. The AI works best when they have a bunch of data. And so there's this big choice about how much of your business will you expose to Claude? How much of yourself will you expose to Claude to get the most value out of those models? Proton sits right in the middle of that with a technical architecture that you're saying would provide choice, but it also seems like the game for a lot of these companies is to just hand everything over and say, go run my business AI. How do you see that working with your enterprise customers today?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is certainly important and confidentiality is important there. And you see things like with WhatsApp forays into having businesses connect to people who have consumers who have WhatsApp. I think that when the time comes to really make a push to B2B, the B2C user base and product suite will be a benefit to us.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, non US based European sovereignty type stuff in particular and just our reputation that are very appealing to those businesses, right? That said, we have to do a balance. And today our business is I also think that Having the B2C business being as strong as it is a competitive strength. There aren't, I mean, as you said, there are several that have transitioned to B2B, sort of from B2C. But at the same time, I think there are a lot more B2B players that start off B2B and stay there. And one of the things that we're looking at, communication between businesses and their customers is something that is”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we definitely feel the pressure. There's, what is it? I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but the old John Dillinger quote, you know, like, why do I rob banks? Well, it's where the money is, right? There's a little bit of why do you go B2B? Well, it's where the people who have budgets and are willing to pay for this. This goes. I think we're definitely considering. And we have, even as a primarily consumer-focused business, we have a lot of people who small businesses in particular who use our products for business purposes, right? You just use the consumer. And we've also made forays into small business offerings and things like that. I think this is something that growth will probably demand and I think there are a lot of businesses for whom things that we offer confidentiality.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the patterns with consumer productivity software is the sweets get bigger, the bundles get bigger, and then the companies realize the class of customers that will actually pay for increased productivity is enterprise. And we kind of see this over and over again in the space. Notion did it, Dropbox did it ever. Like I can go on and on and on. Of companies that we cover as consumer software companies that eventually pivoted to being enterprise companies. Does Proton feel that same pressure that you're going to have to go have more corporate clients, enterprise clients to grow or are you still focused on consumer?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't disclose direct financials, mail and VPN are the two oldest products. And as you might expect, they are the two largest products still. But we also have a lot of people who buy bundles and buy multiple products. We try to make the products work well together in an ecosystem. Some products are more tightly bound than others. And the new products, the more recent ones, Calendar is very tightly tied with mail, of course, but we also have drive and pass. Are not as big as the older products, they have less of a head start, if you will, but they are growing rapidly. So they all contribute, but yeah, they contribute differently. Often, I'm not going to say it's exactly how old they are, but those that have had the bigger runway are usually bigger.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do want to come to the corporate structure. It is Dakota, after all. But just one more turn on the product set itself. You started with ProtonMail. You've got the other suite of products, including now an AI assistant. You talked about the fact that the business model is the consumers pay you money directly for the products. Is proton mail still the core product that's making the most money or the other lines of business growing? How does this look?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say, I trust Proton because of this, this, and this, the other person, all they know is hey, I like Nili, I trust him, and he says Proton is good. There's a whole cohort, much, much greater than the techie cohort. The techie cohort is our core, of course, and has been since the beginning. But there's a whole cohort of people who trust Proton because other people they know. And by no, I mean, it might just be people who they trust on Reddit, right? But other people they know say Proton is there. And we've all been getting object lessons in the rules, bylaws, laws, other things are can be worth something, but personnel really matters, right? Who enforces them really matters? So we have the technical layer, which is designed to constrain what we can do technically. And then we also have the legal, the corporate structure layer, which is its defense in depth, right? All of these things are interlocking guarantees to our users that”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So end in encryption is obviously important as the gold standard and it's what we strive to. However, there are definitely features that Privacy, at least to me personally, is about control, right? And there are some times where I want an integration with an external service or something like this where I'm going to have to, I mean, my choices are no integration or my choices are breaking into end encryption. And our goal is to make this, the user has an informed choice and control over who sees their data. So it's not the same as never share your data, you know, never share your photos with anybody. But the point is, instead of sharing your photos with somebody like Facebook who might is sharing your photos with grandma and grandpa and only grandma and grandpa, right? So that's not to say that the encryption is everything. There's the fundamental engineering, which backs up the trust. Like people like you look at the architecture and say, okay, this is encrypted, this is important to me. And then you go tell somebody else.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the piece that resonates for me as opposed to I have to trust you or a board of directors. There are some other people who just look at the promises and take them at face value. Then there's some set of regulators that say, actually, we have a bunch of other interests in being able to see the data that goes on here. And we actually don't trust you to be a good player in the ecosystem. So when you think about trust, does it come down to the data is encrypted and that's the core promise we're making in anything that breaks that breaks the whole product or is there some other dimension of trust that is important at Proton as you build the systems?”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm pushing on it, and specifically, I'm happy that you mentioned trust is the big tech players will all make the same kinds of promises about your data being private. Facebook will happily tell you that they don't sell an ounce of your data. It's actually not in their interest to sell the data because the ad targeting that they do depends on the data being theirs and not anyone else's. We can get into this for days and days and days. I'm just curious where you see that trust being expressed or where you feel like that trust is most communicated from Proton. Because if you ask me as a more technical person, I do look at the architecture of it's all encrypted and probably mathematically it's impossible to get into. And sure, we'll come to how much metadata can be shared with authorities because there's some debate about that.”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will tell product people and engineers in meetings about new features if you've mentioned the word encryption to the user you've already failed right i mean people don't understand what this is fine our goals is to make products that are as usable and as functional as our competitors or more or more functional i mean i don't want to sound entirely derivative right we do have we do have features that nobody else has that uh are often geared towards privacy and uh and um and and functionality for people who need confidential communications however um in general we're selling we're selling the promise we're selling the promise that we're a different kind of company we're selling the trust right and that trust is uh is critical without the trust that is where the real value of the company is now that trust is backed up by technology right but but we're selling the trust”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's to very reductively summarize what you just said we take money from consumers and when we sell them is encrypted versions of popular services that they rely on like email like a VPN like an office suite do you think consumers understand that what they're buying is the technology solution or are they buying the promise of privacy or is it some mix because I'm not actually sure consumers really understand at mass scale how it all works right they think their iPhones are listening to them”
2026-07-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT