I can’t help but wonder what happened. On the surface, it seems like an amicable departure, but the fact that neither Andy Yen nor Proton have said anything publicly about it is really weird and suspicious. It’s also surprising that Mo didn’t stay until Standard Notes was actually integrated into Proton’s suite of products. It’s been over a year, and that has yet to happen.
I would disagree strongly. It’s pretty standard for employers to not comment on any departures. Neither weird nor suspicious.
Is that something that will happen? Afaik the Standard Notes people were building Proton Docs. Not aware of any work being done to integrate Standard Notes into the Proton suite.
It is my understanding that that was the plan. When Proton acquired SN, many people, especially Proton users, were holding off on subscribing to any E2EE note-taking app because they were confident that SN would be integrated into Proton Unlimited. Many people, who were considering subscribing to Notesnook, held off for the same reason, but also because they wanted to see what innovations Proton would bring to SN first, before they make a decision.
When you contact SN support via email, you get a reply from Proton Support, and yet it hasn’t been integrated, and it’s been over a year. I also suspect that the team behind SN are also not fully integrated into Proton because when I reach out to SN support, it’s the same person who replies to me from many years before Proton acquired SN. I’ve reached out to SN numerous times and it’s always the same person. If you reach out to Simple Login support, you’ll get a variety of people from the wider Proton Team, not just the original SL team that was pretty small.
Moreover, since Proton acquired Simple Login, Son Nguyen Kim, its French founder has published numerous blog posts about updates on Proton’s website, the last one being 3 days ago for the announcement of Proton Authenticator. We’ve seen nothing like that from the founder of SN.
They’re also “working on” something akin to Google Sheets with Proton Drive.
I would love to know the timelines of things like their wallet app vs. an SN clone and Proton Drive Sheets, because the latter is 100% something that makes it WAY easier to jump from Google to anywhere else and pick up users. Just surprised this isn’t a higher priority to figure out.
Hopefully Proton doesn’t kill Standard Notes. Its currently my only Proton product i actively used. Migrated from Notesnook a week ago.
I tested both for around a month. While free tier Notesnook are more generous than free tier Standard Notes, its a buggy mess. Trying to change login email resulted in error token something. Trying to login via web browser just stucked at “decrypting your notes” and when reloading the tab, again something about error token flashes. Weird though since I am trying to login, theres nothing to decrypt yet. Trying to change password does nothing after inputting new password, button just stared at me. Made my anxiety kicks in hard seeing those few bugs on something that supposed to handle my important notes. Meanwhile Standard Notes are stable as a rock so i migrated over.
I understand what you’re saying, but at least the NN developers take care of the app and are always improving and updating it. Meanwhile, SN seems forgotten. A few months ago, users were even wondering whether the servers were still being maintained…
Judging by SN repo, no its not abandoned. Their last commit fixing something are still fresh from last week. Their latest package release that aren’t tagged as pre-release was last month.
Great conversation or I should rather say monologue. Vishnu is great in letting Mo Bitar in silence going through his thoughts.
My TLDR take is that Mo Bitar is a bit bitter about having sold standard notes. You can feel it throughout the whole interview even if he never explicitly mentions it.
First part is basically the story on what are the events that led to the selling of standard notes and why he left Proton.
Second part is his thoughts on some products and what he wants to build in the future.
I still haven’t watched it, but we have yet to see what Proton will do with SN. What I remember hearing, and I don’t know if this is confirmed in the interview, is that Proton had approached Mo with a first offer, which he didn’t accept, and the second offer was lower.
Part of me has always wondered why Proton chose to buy SN instead of Notesnook. Is it simply because SN already had brand name recognition in the privacy community, and Notesnook was still new? Companies buy new start up all the time.
Yes, Mo Bitar is the one who reached out to Andy first. A relationship was built there so probably that’s why Proton went with Standard Notes.
Mo Bitar went to the offices of Proton and really loved it. He felt alone and was missing talking to people. After consideration, he refused the initial offer. Then he got kind of burned out and depressed (not his words, but if you watch you’ll understand). He reached out to Andy again when he was not feeling great emotionally at all. Then he sold to Proton.
He’s a workaholic. He didn’t enjoy his time at Proton, because the work he did delivering Proton Docs in record time was not accompanied with anything else then a tap on the back. It was his first experience in a semi big enterprise.
You can feel that he’s bitter that he sold SN. But all of this were his choices and he learned from them.
