Proton, crowdfunded Gmail killer
In 2014 some physicists at the CERN research institute in Switzerland batted around an idea, privacy-based email. As Andy Yen, CEO of what became Proton would later say, the company was not likely to entice venture capital:
In 2014 our pitch was very simple. We’re going to compete against the world’s largest tech company, and charge people for something that Google gives away for free.
So instead of taking their pitch to Silicon Valley, they took it to the internet through a crowdfunding campaign. As they discovered, a market did indeed exist for their idea. They raised over $500k from 10,000 backers. And a dream was born.
Gmail killer Proton was born from a dream, now it’s thriving
A decade later, Proton has over 100 million accounts and has expanded its offerings to include cloud storage, VPN, digital wallet, password manager, and calendar. What will they offer next? As Yen states, that’s not up to them. Proton remains loyal to the community that originally backed them and later devotees.
People say your crowdfunding was nine years ago [in 2023], why is it still relevant today? Well it’s relevant today because the entire business, all of us here, all the employees, we now have actually a permanent obligation to the community that supported us early on. So we actually owe it to these people who gave up some general amounts of money nine years ago to bet on a dream . . . As a community-driven company we’re responsive to the needs of the users.
Companies that invite their users into the decision-making process, that feel as much loyalty to their users as the users feel to them are the ones that grow and survive tough times. This is what equity crowdfunding or Reg CF is all about.
Proton joins a growing list of privacy-focused tech companies like Brave and Telegram confronting the data-snooping-and-scraping authorities and tech oligarchs. In fact, the recent arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has dramatically amplified questions about what right people have to keep their online activity from governments.
However these issues are resolved, Proton is well positioned to keep growing and challenging the Google goliaths.
By Jossey PLLC
