Proton’s CTO: No company is going to jail for you

Meet Clavio, your brand's new best friend. With all your data in one place, Clavio knows you and your customers. It's AI agents build campaigns from one prompt and answer questions twenty-four-seven. Always on brand, always with your okay. Go to K L A V I Y O.com slash best friends. This series is presented by Comcast Business. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I Patel, editor and chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we've got the first of a two part series on the systems that run the world. I'm talking with Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton. A company that makes private and secure productivity software.

You probably know it best for Proton Mail, which is encrypted by default. but the company also has docs, sheets, calendar, even a new AI assistant called Lumo. all built and marketed around the idea that they should be vastly more private than the similar products from big tech companies. You'll hear Bart say pretty plainly that the thing Proton sells at a high level isn't really the products themselves. but actually trust. And trust in the software world isn't only about the people who run the companies.

but also the technology they develop and sell and the corporate structures in place to make sure that technology is built against the right incentives. This is pure decoder bait, in other words. The challenge is that Bart also says Proton's mission is very much to succeed at being a viable competitor to big tech, and that means the company has to grow and expand to competitive scale. All while preserving its core values. That philosophy and that challenge are baked directly into Proton structure, and even its physical location.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (84 minutes, 16,645 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.