Why Europe Keeps Losing the Tech Race | Proton Founder Andy Yen

If I look back at 11 years ago when we started, we thought, what is the most pressing issue for democracy, for society, for the future of the world? It was really the way that the internet was going. It was going in a direction that was going to hurt society, probably destroy democracy, eliminate freedoms over the next decade if we didn't have a different way of doing online ecosystem, different business model for the internet. China was the first country to weaponize tech as a way to control a population. But the same thing can very easily happen in Europe. It can very happen... in the Well, it's actually already happening in the US. You're completely beholden and you're completely captured. You're nothing more than digital colony. Because if you're operating on American or Chinese tech, guess what? You're operating on the basis of American and Chinese ideas.

This is Melanie. And this is Christian. You're listening to Follow the Gradient, the weekly podcast with actionable insights about how to build a business while staying sane.

You just heard Andy Yen. Andy is a particle physicist, turned founder and CEO of Proton, the tech scale up behind ProtonMail and ProtonVPN. The company is based in Geneva, employs over 600 people globally and serves more than 100 million users who want a private alternative to the big tech ecosystems. We recorded this conversation last week at OpenE in Zurich. What I love about Andy is that he does not just talk about privacy as a feature, he connects it to something much bigger. Growing up Taiwanese next to China, seeing how fast freedom can disappear and then deciding to spend the next decades building infrastructure that actually defends democracy instead of eroding it. In this episode, we talk about why he left CERN to work on one of the hardest problems on the internet, why Proton was crowdfunded by 10,000 users and is now controlled by a Swiss nonprofit foundation, why he believes Europe became a digital colony and how we can still turn that around, and what a competitive European work culture needs to look like if we want to stand a chance against the US and China. If you want all the extra questions we did not have time for and more context on Andy and the European Scale Up space, you can subscribe to our newsletter at Follow The Gradient To Teo. But now, enjoy my conversation with Andy Yen.

Andi, you started your career inside one of the most complex scientific systems on earth at CERN in Geneva and later helped build a company from a cafeteria prototype into a 500 plus person European scale up. When you look at Proton today, what's the through line between those worlds, the scientific mindset and the long-termism and the mission that still anchors you? Well, I think people that go into science usually do it because you want to work on a hard problem. And preferably it's a hard problem that has impact. know, an impact as in something that makes the world better. You don't do it for the money. Science isn't, let's say, a very lucrative career in general. And so that same thread of hard problems with impact, I think is the common thread that goes from science to what we're doing today. If I look back at, you know, 11 years ago when we started, we thought, what is the most pressing issue for democracy, for society, for the future of the world. And it was really the way that the internet was going. And it was going in a direction that was going to hurt society, probably destroy democracy, eliminate freedoms over the next decade if we didn't have a different way of doing online ecosystem, different business model for the internet. And that's an extremely hard problem to solve. So as a scientist, you're attracted to hard problems, but the fact that has a very important social value, that's also important as well. And I think that is something that, you know, made it interesting for us. And you've said publicly that leaving particle physics for entrepreneurship required a full identity shift. In our prep talk, you also described how the first 10 years of a person's career really set the trajectory for the next 30 and why especially young founders must push early if they want to option optionality later. Can you walk us through your own internal transition? Like what you had to maybe also unlearn and how you build a mindset that could survive the pressure of a Mission-driven scale-up?

But the thing about science, and I tell this as a joke, but it's true, the nature of the universe is not really going to change. So whether you find it in this century or the next century, physics and mathematical truth are kind of a constant. And from that perspective, you didn't really have the same sense of urgency. It's not like the physical world was going to change if you were a little bit slow in discovering it. You will make this comment just later. Of course, there's competition between different scientific groups to be the first to find a discovery. that same pressure, that same pace was not really there in the scientific community. There was always, as we joked at CERN, the next conference you could go to to announce your result. And business in the startup world is different. In the early stage, actually you're burning money. So you have a finite runway at which point you are dead. And this was really kind of a mindset shift that required us to really start to adopt a sense of urgency. And that was maybe the biggest shock. But other than that, I find that people that come from science and technology, it's a pretty smooth transition because it's about solving problems. And the problem solving skills that you pick up as a physicist or as a mathematician or as a chemist, this translates very well to the business world. So people in science who think, oh, I can't go into business, I can't go to technology because it's so different. Actually, it's not. Just pick up the pace and you'll be fine. How do you actually do that? Because I feel that it sounds so logical to say, you have to have more speed and it's finite and so. how did you, like what helped? Did you just have the pressure and you had to react? Because you could also freeze and say, this is not for me. I go back to academia. My personality was always someone that liked to get things done fast. So that was kind of natural. And I think many founders sort of have what I call a maniac sense of urgency. You just want to do it, not because maybe you have to, but because it's innate in you. And that drive that's kind of sitting within you and many of the founders that I meet, I think that's an innate ability that sets founders apart. And it's something that you need to have. And if you have that,

you can actually make it contagious for the rest of the team as well. If you bring in the excitement and the energy and the speed. moving quickly, yes, it's hard, yes, it's painful sometimes, but it can also be incredibly exciting. And there's a, once you have a sense of the speed, the thrill of the speed, then actually you just want to keep going quicker and you don't want to actually slow down. When we also stay a little bit at the beginning and especially looking at your roots, being Taiwanese and also later studying in the US and working in Switzerland, you've seen three different models of power, freedom, and also state control. And you told me this in our prep meeting that this really also shaped your worldview early on. you said, I mean, back then at this time, there were things going in a direction that you didn't like. How did that combination also, like your personal roots basically, especially your Taiwanese roots next to China, influence your sense of urgency around privacy, sovereignty, and also building Proton as a mission-led company? Well, that's a lot to unpack there. Actually, I'm gonna take off the jacket. do that. I just go off the page. This is a podcast so we can be more startup. Absolutely, please.

Okay, so maybe to unpack that a little bit. Of course, the interest in building a privacy company, something that is standing for freedom, privacy, and also democracy does come from having come from Taiwan. You see very quickly what happens in a society if you give up your privacy. There's no privacy, there's no freedom of speech, there's no freedom of speech, there's no democracy, and everything goes. And China was really the first country to weaponize tech. as a way to control a population. But the same thing can very easily happen in Europe. It can very happen in US as well. It's actually already happening in the US. And so that's why that was a very relevant problem, that it was something close to my heart. And I think that is an issue if we don't do something about it now, actually it becomes too late. The window of opportunity to take us off the current path and build a different path for how the internet in the future could be is really the next five, 10 years. And we want to build, in my view, internet actually Your data, your identity, belongs to you. It's not a commodity to be monetized, exploited, and a tool to control you, but we want to have internet where you are actually free and you're actually sovereign. And this also translates into the world of geopolitics as well. Today, if you look at Switzerland and Europe, we buy most of our tech from US and China. That gives the US incredible leverage over us. They're susceptible to blackmail because everything that we use to run our business or economies from the US. There is really nothing you can say to Trump in that situation because you're completely beholden and you're completely captured. You're nothing more than a digital colony. And the reality is there is no such thing as actual sovereignty without tech sovereignty. That's the reality of the 21st century. So I do think it's also very important if we want to defend European ideals, if we want to defend democracy, that we have our own tech sector, our own tech stack, that we can operate independently. Because if you're operating on American or Chinese tech, guess what, you're operating on the basis of American and Chinese ideas. This is the way it is. And the 21st century is a battle of ideas as much as is as a battle of, you know, of a strength. And that comes from tech. So I think this is sort of the perspective. The other thing that I interesting from my background is I've sort of seen all three systems. I kind of see how China does things from Taiwan, which is kind of close by. I've seen how the US does things. I did my bachelor's and PhD in the US.

And I've been out now in Europe for probably the last 15 years, which is kind of an interesting, you and you really see sort of the pros and cons of each culture. I can tell you right now in Europe, we're never going to work as hard as the Chinese. It's just not going to be possible. Absent some gigantic disaster, the culture is not the same. We don't really have the same level of ambition and the same level of capital and money as in the U.S. But Europe has something that I think is very precious, which is we have our values and these values is what confers trust. And trust is actually one of the most expensive and most valuable commodities in the future. And that's where I think we have a great advantage. We can be the trusted service provider to the world because we are the last continent that is still strongly for democracy, freedom, and fundamental human rights. And this is not a weakness. This is a strength that we should leverage in how we build our businesses to scale for the future. Absolutely. And on this notion of trust, mean, you also didn't go the typical way of how you set up your company. You also didn't go the typical way of how it is founded. Proton was not founded by VCs, but by 10,000 people who donated to make it actually real. you basically, said at one point this created also permanent obligation to the community. rather than to investors, which I think has a huge impact on how you also shape the culture of Proton, the independence and the way you make long-term trade-offs. So can you elaborate on that, what this trust also means inside your company? Yes. So part of this is historical accident, but then every company is sort of the product of its era. And we were founded in 2014. Today, I almost feel a bit jealous because I think European founders should have it so easy compared to 10 years ago. 10 years ago, the concept of VCs in Europe didn't exist. The American VCs were not even here as well. So when we were getting started, it wasn't really even a possibility to go on raise funding.

wouldn't get it. And if you talk to VCs, they would look at our business model and say, you're stupid, you're going to fail. Because what we were trying to we were trying to get people to pay us money for a service that the greatest tech companies in world, Big Tech, was giving away for free. That was... on her door. In fact, was no business plan at all because were not business people, we were scientists. so you can't raise VC money. What do you do? Well, we had users who were on the platform who really believed in what we were doing and they were supporting the mission. So it was, well, why don't we ask these users to see if they may want to give us some money? And crowdfunding back in those days was not like even equity crowdfunding, right? It was just, we'll give you money. You believed in the idea. And maybe you'll get credits for a future service that may arrive in two or three years. And what was amazing was 10,000 people actually gave half a million Swiss francs to get the project started. And this is why in some sense, we owe the success of the company to the users who backed us at the very beginning. And this is something that I never forget, that we never forget in the business. We owe it to this community. They're the ones, the reasons that we're here and they are who we serve.

and they are our main stakeholder. We don't have VC investors who have a financial interest to decide what we do. We're here to serve the community. And taking that unique path of the beginning is really putting in the ability to do that. And now also 10 or 11 years after the initial crowdfunding, you've now also really put actions to your words because you've transitioned Proton into structure where a Swiss non-profit foundation is the primary shareholder. It's extremely rare for a fast-growing tech company to do this voluntarily. What made you take that step and how does this governance model strengthen Proton's long-term independence and mission? Well, we could do it because there were no VCs. That's the thing. You have to control your cap table if you want to do something like this is the first thing. But the reason for doing it is really because it's the alignment of long-term interests and it's long-term protection. There's always sort of the question of what happens to a company after the founder has gone. It's kind of succession. And for a business like ours, where we owe so much to the community, where it's really centered around the idea of trust, it's in fact better in my opinion. Yeah, absolutely.

to take it away from linking the business success to any individual, but putting it in a foundation structure where it is written in the bylaws. This is what the company stands for. This is what the values are. And this is what we are legally obligated to uphold. And if the foundation is a bigger shareholder, it can actually enforce that because it has the voting rights in order to impose that on the business going forward. Now, what is interesting though, I think, is our hybrid structure. There is, it's not just that you know, the company went away and there's only a nonprofit, right? It's a nonprofit owning the biggest fraction of a business. And the strength of this is that it's actually self-reinforcing. And I'll kind of give you the example. First of all, the business is still profit seeking. It still wants to grow. It can actually still issue stock options to employees. There is even growth potential there. And there is financial success actually for people, you know, who join the company. And I think that's very important because you need to motivate the best talent in the world to do the best possible things for you. And if you don't have financial motivation, there's only so many missionaries you can find in the world. think we have a lot of missionaries still in the business, it's very important, I think, to also have a financial upside. So we're able to do that because it's still a profit-seeking company. And it's important to have profits because profitability is the same thing as being sustainable. Okay, so.

incentive.

And stability is very important to defend the mission on the long-term. So it's a profit-seeking business, but the foundation having the biggest part of the capital means that it is able to steer it in the correct direction. The business does something that it goes against the fundamental values of Proton. The foundation can and will intervene. Now, if you go to the foundation side, the foundation has as its, actually its only asset, a... big shareholding in a profitable business. And this is also very powerful from foundation perspective because it means the foundation is independent. The foundation didn't have its own revenue stream and needed to go ask for handouts. Well, guess what? The funders of the foundation are the ones who effectively control it. And we've seen many great foundations over the years simply lose their purpose because they were captured by the funders. the foundation having control of a business that is profitable also strengthens the foundation. And it's independence. And that's why the two kind of self-reinforce each other. And I think that's a very protective structure that gives long-term stability and the assurance to our customers and users that Proton's values are not going to change. I kind of make the joke. I am free to die now, actually. That's so, so powerful. I want to dive a little bit deeper on something that you said before, because you said like back then, the investors laugh at you because you like they were Google and Meta and like everyone else. Now you grew brought on in a market where your biggest competitors than the names that just dropped like Google, Apple, Meta, build the operating system, set the app store rules and control the distribution. How do you practically build and grow when the platforms you depend on also extract 30 % of your mobile revenue and shape user defaults?

Yeah, it's very difficult. And this is where, because these tech companies came first and managed to monopolize the markets, there's not a whole lot you can do coming in second. I do think that at scale, all successful companies need to create their own platforms. And early on, there was sort of the idea of, well, if you want a secure email, because email was our first product, you can do it in two ways. You could actually have a browser extension or a plugin for Gmail. or you can build your own email system, which is a lot harder, course. But we took the harder path because we realized that at the end of the day, unless you control the platform, you have no business. If you don't have a platform, what you're actually doing is you're just a feature on someone else's platform. And actually a feature is not a business. feature is something that will be copied and then you'll right? and depend on them.

to create it.

believe very strongly in platforms and also in ecosystems. But if you go beyond that, there are certain platforms today, like mobile, for instance, where practically speaking, even if you had tens of billions of euros, you won't be able to break in. And this is why it's really important in monopoly situations that you have regulation. I'm never going to be the first person to say regulation to fix all of our problems, but there are certain problems. regulation is the only path. And I do think, you know, some of the antitrust rules that are being put in place by the European Commission, but also in the US as well, this is something that will begin to shift the ecosystem. But also as alternative companies, they put on scale and grow, we will eventually also be able to our own platforms. But until that stage happens, you do need some regulation. And this is probably inevitable and this is coming. And I'm glad to see that, you know, European Commission and the US is starting to move in this direction. And you, mean, as Proton, you have survived censorship battles, regulatory headwinds, app store fights and also geopolitical shocks. How do you then decide when to fight politically and kind of make sure that something moves, like as much as you can actually help there, when to engineer around the problems and when to simply refuse to compromise? I think there are certain values that you can never compromise on and you need to understand very well what you stand for, what you believe in and you don't compromise on that. So that for me is the easiest one. Then it's a question of which fights do you engage in? Cause you can't fight every single issue. No. You don't have bandwidth. Exactly. I think it's really about you need to focus on the things that are really existential to your business and the ones that tie the most to your tutorial values. So that like, know, censorship. We today run one of the world's largest VPNs, which is used in places like, you know, Iran, Russia, with a very strong censorship. We believe fundamentally in freedom of information. And the truth about running a VPN business in Russia is there is no money in it. Why? Because they're under sanctions. They don't have PayPal. They don't have credit card. There's literally no way for those customers in these countries to pay you. And the result of this is that most...

companies just say, you know what, I don't care about this market, I'm leaving. But I don't think Proton has a choice to this market. Because if we leave, literally no one is there. And our mission is a free internet. And that obliges us to stay, even at the cost of millions of Swiss francs per year, that is just, it's money that we can never get back. But if you believe very strongly in your mission, then you've got to do it. And that keeps us in those markets. And that's something that we try to do. Now, for our regulation fight, I can give you an example of something closer to home. The example here is the federal council, this is the department of federal council, actually, they have a proposal now to change the ordinance to introduce mass surveillance into Switzerland. And the easiest solution for me actually would be to the country across the border to Germany. Problem solved, right? That cost me very little money. It's done within a week and I just move on with my life. But there is a deeper principle here that I feel is worth fighting for. And there is of course the human... aspect and I would say the law and order aspect. And that principle is we should not enter a society and tolerate as a democracy a system where even people who are not under criminal suspicion are surveilled by default. That is simply something that in a democratic society we cannot tolerate. So we should not say that we're going to let this pass and accept it because indiscriminate surveillance of all citizens is something that you do in China, you don't do in Switzerland, you don't do it in Europe. So that's, I think, maybe the principle from a fundamental rights aspect. But there is also a deeper economic issue because if Switzerland were to impose a set of rules for tech companies that is not done in the EU, and by the way, this is so absurd, it's not even done in the US, this puts us at a huge economic disadvantage. And it's going to destroy the tech economy in Switzerland over the next 10 years. So that's also, I think, a huge problem as well. But it goes deeper than that. It goes into the fundamental values. And our value in Switzerland and also our value in Europe that makes us competitive is we are the continent that you can trust. We are a continent that values security, privacy, human rights as the foundation of trust. And this ordinance change

is eroding and destroying that foundation, which is our core economic competitive lever for the next century. for Proton, my issue is solved instantly by moving. That's the fastest solution. But if we don't fight this, actually we are creating the conditions to destroy the economic future, not just of Switzerland, but actually of Europe. And that is a fight that is worth staying in and battling. And this is why we stay in to fight it. And we'll fight it to the end. And I hope we will win. I think we will win. But this example is something where there are certain things where you just can't compromise and this is one of them. And how does that look like? Because I imagine that it's, it cannot just be Proton who fights it. So how, if somebody is listening now and thinks, Hey, I really want to support this cause. Like how do they get involved or what are your options? Thankfully, it's not just us because there's an entire digital trust industry in Switzerland with hundreds of companies employing 10,000 people. And in fact, at the consultation phase, all the political parties, all the economic associations, everybody opposed it, right? So thankfully, we're not alone. But these fights are expensive, they're time consuming. need to have people on the ground and burn to meet with politicians and do that. And if you're a startup founder or a smaller business, You don't have the bandwidth, the time, the energy to be involved in this. And this is why we sort of picked up the mantle and took the lead on this because, not because we want to, in fact, it's the last thing I wanted to do this year. But because we realized if we didn't do it, no one else could. But now that we're starting it, I think, you know, for anybody that hears a message, and I think a lot of people have heard the message, let the politicians know. Let people like Bernie know, right? know, voice your objection.

to what is being done here. And I think there's a question of why does this happen? This happens because you have people in politics and people who work in the administration in Bern who are in reality quite insulated. They're very isolated. They don't see the rest of the world. They don't see the real, real world. And they often don't fully understand what is it that they're doing. And I don't think these people were malicious. I think they simply could not understand the implications of the text that they wrote, but they also at the same time didn't have the foresight or maybe it was an issue of ego to go out and consult all their opinions. We were not even asked. in the industry was asked before this thing appeared. And I think this is incredible. How can you put out something that will regulate and change the industry without talking to a single person in the industry? And this is a failure of our rulemaking process in Switzerland. Yeah, because I just want to say, like, this is really also up to us and the people that are in the founding community and others to actually talk to the politicians, but also you actually need to know that this is going on and be asked. So that there's certainly some education to be made. And the surprising thing is I talked to dozens of companies that were impacted. And when this thing dropped in January, nobody had seen it. Nobody had been consulted. It just came out of nowhere. And that, think, a, I think whoever did that made a major mistake. And that's the thing that we need to avoid. I think the startup ecosystem, we have an obligation as well to also become more visible, to become more present, to let people know that we're here. So we also get talk to you as well. So it's a bit on both sides, I would say. But we need to bridge that gap. because it's currently a gigantic chasm between the Starbucket system and the political space, especially here in Switzerland. But I think also more broadly in Europe as

And speaking of Europe, you also said very bluntly that Europe missed the tech age and that the bottleneck isn't supply, it's demand. And you mentioned that also in the beginning where you said like, we're very used to actually make sure we just take the cheapest tech and kind of rely on Chinese and American productivity tools, American AI and so on. prep talk, also argued that European founders often carry this kind of inferiority complex, assuming Europeans, European tech is automatically worse than the US or Chinese solutions and that this mindset becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. How do we practically break that psychological cycle for founders, operators, and really also policymakers? Well, I think it's best to maybe start from the problem and then transition maybe to the solution, right? If you were to ask a Chinese person today, but even 20 years ago, and you ask them what country has the best analogy in the world, the answer would be China. Obviously, you ask an American person, the answer is America. But you ask a European, they would never say Europe. And why is that? Why is there so little patriotism and pride in our own continent? And I think that is sort of, you know, that... example really illustrates the problem that we have here. And then that transcends into other sectors. So because we don't have the confidence to bet on our own technologies, we start to look abroad. The default of technology you buy is always an American or Chinese solution. And the European solution maybe is considered second or not even considered at all. And then that becomes, you know, that has a lot of consequences. If you start buying a foreign technology, you don't invest in your own technology. And then your technology over time actually becomes worse because of lack of investment. So what is the mistake that European policymakers made that China did right and Europe did wrong? We always view technology as a cost instead of what it actually is, which is an economic opportunity. If you view technology as a cost, your inclination is to outsource it to the lowest bidder. And the lowest bidder is going to be American or Chinese. They're the ones that got there first. But technology isn't a cost. It's an investment.

It's an, it's an investment in the future economic security for continent. And the Chinese realized that. So Chinese tech 20 years ago, 30 years ago, actually wasn't the best in the world. They believed it was the best in the world. They said it's the best in the world, but it was probably the worst in the world. Kind like the Chinese car 20 years ago was really the worst car in the world. But they persisted anyways. They locked out American tech to create the space to grow their own domestic tech industry. And then in 20 years, that tech. actually became the best in the world. You look at AI models today, some of the best ones actually come out of China. And that was definitely a sacrifice. They definitely paid a very high cost at the beginning to preferentially take their own technology and foster it. But today it's translated to trillions of economic value that Europe has completely missed. The bulk of the economic growth in the whole world in the past 30 years has come from tech. And we are a continent without a tech industry. That should be a shocking and scary thing for all of us to realize. And a continent with a lot of tech industry is actually a continent that doesn't have an economic future. And that is where we find ourselves in Europe. So we find, you know, Germany now going to slow in growth. The Eurozone probably entering recession. German car companies getting killed by American and Chinese car companies. Why? Because the car industry, guess what? Today is a tech industry. And every other industry insurance, banking, etc. These are all tech industries. And if you don't have a technical strength, you will not be competitive in any industry. So it's a huge problem. So that's a problem. And that sounds like, know, dystopic and depressing. So my question would be what do do now? Because we need to, we cannot just like give up.

It is depressing. It is dystopic, but we shouldn't sugarcoat how bad it is. It's a complete disaster. The good news is Europe does have tech, Smaller players, but we do have tech companies. do have companies that can supply these services. Yes. What we lack actually is demand. And the way to look at this is... Also a lot of hidden champions.

Imagine in the US that they would wake up someday and find that 70 % of the tech that they procure comes from Europe and China. What would the Americans do? Would they be okay with that? Of course not. No. They would wake up, probably ban foreign tech, invest in their own tech industry and start building. And that's what Europe needs to do. We need to start building. We need to stop saying we're going to buy cheaper tech from abroad and invest in our own capabilities. And the way that you do this is... to take advantage of something that Europe has that other countries don't have, which is government spending. The biggest buyer of stuff in Europe is actually the government, because we have a pretty large government. By the way, to give you some numbers, the amount of money that Europe is spending by American tech exceeds 200 billion euros every year. So this is 200 billion that we are sending of our wealth that we send to US and to China to subsidize a foreign economy whose companies come back exploit us. This is a lunacy, right? So let's go to public procurement. Today, we train our students in schools to use Google and Microsoft tools. So we are indoctrinating the next generation of Europeans already on American tech ecosystems. So they will be captured already for the next generation. This is insanity. is ridiculous. So I think what needs to happen is on the public procurement side, and the other important part about public procurement is we cannot really tell a private company how to spend its money. A private company needs to spend its money in its most efficient way. That's capitalism. But public money, that's taxpayers' money. We definitely have a say in how that is spent. And I think taxpayer money should no longer be spent subsidizing American and Chinese companies. That money has to be invested in European tech companies to build European tech solutions. But that's way to fix it. Exactly, but on that note, now the critics would say, yeah, well, I would like to have like a European Microsoft or Google, but this just doesn't exist. Or just like the transition from actually building an app, it takes too long and we all need to work, blah, blah, blah. What do you say to them?

would say it's not entirely true because yes, we don't have a Google or Microsoft that has all the pieces in one company, but you might find the entire ecosystem among five or six or seven different European companies. And that is also not a bad thing either because Europe, it's not one country, it's 30 different countries. So the fact that you might have a champion of something in one country and a champion of another product in another country, that's actually a good thing. We just need to stop being so lazy in government procurement. Of course it's easier to go to Amazon, go to Google, Microsoft and sign one contract, but it's bad for your country, bad for your economy, bad for your continent. So you should go out and do the work, sign maybe 12 contracts, 12 different companies, but all that tech exists. And this is something that I think has to be mandated because if you don't mandate it, people will take the easy way out. you know what? Once you start to do this, these companies grow, some companies merge. You probably build your champions this way. So I would say, let's assume that the tech is more expensive and it's worse. And by the way, it's not, the tech is probably better or equivalent and it's oftentimes cheaper because Americans charge very high margins, right? But let's assume that the tech is worse and it's more expensive. I would say even in that situation, you are still obliged to buy European because that is for the economic future of your continent. Because it's for the long term. also know that also the US started at one point like smaller and then Google also bought like different companies to actually be the Google that we know. And the Chinese had definitely worse tech than we had 30 years ago. investing their capabilities in three decades, that created trillions of wealth.

And now that you're mentioning China, I also want to dive into the last topic. And this is really about the work ethics and the culture. You've spoken openly and also just before about the differences in work ethic across continents. From where you sit, what does a competitive European work culture look like in 2025 or 2026, because we are already at the end of the year? And what must change for us to realistically build companies that can stand against the US and China? If you look at globalization and technology, competition is literally global now. If you, in Switzerland, take it for example, if you look at the legacy industries, health insurance, you're probably going to buy a Swiss health insurance. you go to open a bank account, you're go to a Swiss bank. If you're going to go shopping, you'll go to Migros or Coup, right? Because those are the shops here and the Chinese physical store isn't going to come here. The legacy industries had very high protective barriers, but tech is global. A company can be... anywhere in the world and sells tech products globally. So our competition is not like we grow and compete against each other, right? The competition is literally the American and the Chinese companies. And if the Americans and Chinese are working twice as hard as we are, moving twice as fast, we are not competitive unless we match that intensity. So I think in the tech space, which is literally the whole industry in the future, whole... Everything. It's everything in the future. We need to understand that competition is global and If you've ever been in Silicon Valley or if you've ever been to, you know, Shenzhen or Shanghai and these places, it's eye-opening. The intensity of work, speed in which they build things, but that is our competition. And failure to match that is death. And that's reality. So it's kind of a brutal wake-up call for, I would say, a large generation of Europeans, but actually maybe probably the older generation who was used to a post-war economic structure that didn't require that and didn't have global competition when Europe was comfortably in the lead. But now we're comfortably behind. In fact, we're falling further and further behind the economic dominant powers in the world. And that forces us to pick up the pace. So I'm sorry to say it, but we have to work harder in Europe. There's no way around it. And we shouldn't sugarcoat it and ignore it. We should just get to work.

This also has a lot to do with also the new generation, so to say, and there is a lot of criticism about Gen Z and Gen Alpha and whatnot, which we both see a little bit different. But you also said that the top 10 % of young European talent is exceptional, often better than a decade ago, but the remaining 90 % lacks exposure to global competition. And exactly like if you've never been to Silicon Valley, if you've never been to Shenzhen, this doesn't allow you to actually know what grade looks like, so to say. So how can founders or aspiring founders practically raise the standards without burning people out or importing toxic work practices, but really do it also in a European way that brings us to the next level. I think the top students in Europe actually are very good, very competent. We've hosted a few hackathons, at a couple of events at ETS Zürich and I see the top is fantastic. The bigger problem here is we don't today have an economic engine in Europe that can provide good opportunities for all of our students of our young generation. There just aren't that many good jobs around because we have missed the boat on the biggest economic revolution of this century. And that is a disaster. And it's going to get worse and worse for the young generation. So the way that we motivate them and drive them actually is by providing opportunities so they can actually do this. Now, if you're working really hard on your own and everybody else around you is slacking, you're going to burn out in a few months and it's going be over. But if you're part of a team where everybody has drive, everybody has vision, you know, there's a saying, If you go alone, you don't go very far. If you want to go far, you go together. This is the key. The key is to have, don't just have one person working their ass off, but have an entire culture of community people who want to push, who want to drive and want to excel. And this is what I see actually in the top 10 % of students in Europe. They really want to push. We had a hackathon at ETH on a Saturday and people showed up at 9am on Saturday. And then you know what? These top students, they spent the night at the event. They didn't go home to sleep.

to party, they worked through the night and then they were there Sunday morning as well, right? You know, I saw them putting the sleeping bags away in the right? And they did that because it was together. So I think we need to create the opportunities and then we need to bring people together and to make that shift, not just with one or two individual, but as a society. The expectations of the degree set, right? If everybody tells you that working is bad and you'll burn out, then guess what? The message you're receiving is don't work and that this is not correct. But if society is telling you that we should value hard work, we should value ambition, and we should also reward ambition and create opportunities for ambition, then that's a different story. So it's really kind of a shift in mindset of society as a whole. And it really reminds me of the saying that the five or ten people that you surround yourself with the most actually shape whatever you do on a daily but also on a long-term basis. And I think it's exactly that what is happening and I also can only confirm I see that at DTH, see that at other places. Really young talents come together and want to build and be ambitious. And I think that is really incredible positive to see. Now, we are already at the end. I want to end with some rapid fire questions where you just answer in one or two sentences. One belief about Europe's tech potential that you hold and most people around you disagree with. Hmm. So I actually think the best place to scale and build businesses today is Europe. And the reason I say this is because I would rather be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. If you are in Europe as a scale up, actually you in some sense have kind of a monopoly on talent as opposed to going to Silicon Valley and competing with a thousand other companies for the same talent.

Europe is sort of people underestimate the potential of Europe to scale businesses because we've been trained to go abroad. this is not everybody agrees with this, but I think if you look more closely at Europe, there's a lot of hidden opportunity here. And I think it's such a powerful thing. Sometimes if you take it right, it's also to be underestimated. can actually be quite a huge competitive advantage. Yeah, I would say to people I prefer to be underestimated than overestimated. 100%. The most overrated advice founders keep hearing. Okay, that's probably the one where they go, you better hire someone, you know, senior from a big company who's done this before. That's bullshit because no one's done this before. And the idea that someone else can come into your business and tell you how to run it, it's false. There are definitely some experiences that can be useful, but every business is unique. And guess what? There's no person that will come and tell you the answers. You're going to have to solve it painfully on your own.

Yeah, otherwise the startup would already have been built if somebody else did it. The last question, the single most important metric you personally look at each week. For our business, actually, we look at revenue. And that may sound kind of odd coming from a company that is, you know, with the biggest shareholder being a nonprofit, right? But the reason I looked at revenue is because I think what companies need to do at the end of the day is create happy customers. You're creating happiness for customers. And happy customers are customers who find value in your product. And value of your product is actually if they're willing to pay you or not. So that's an important metric, not because we're doing it for the money, but because it's a proxy for the value that we've generated and if we're making customers happy or not. And that is the key thing that you need to do correctly. If you do that correctly, everything else will work itself out. If you do that wrong, there's nothing you can do that will fix it. Thank you so so so much for being here. It was a huge pleasure. I'm sure there are a ton of more questions, people that want to learn more about Proton. I also know that you're hiring currently. So how can people reach out to you and also learn more about you, but also like the work you do at Proton? I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter, you can find me there. We have probably 200 job openings in Europe, not just in Switzerland, but across Europe. if you're ambitious, want to do cool things and want to build the economic future of Europe and want to also safeguard the future of the internet, come apply, come work with us. We want smart, motivated people. And I think together we can create great opportunities for Europeans.

Thank you so so much.

And this was another episode of our Follow the Gradient podcast. And now we would love to hear from you. How did you like it? What should we improve? Do you have any suggestions, ideas or dream podcast guests? Please let us know. Thank you and see you again next week!