Proton CEO Andy Yen projects a calm persona and rails against Big Tech and critiques AI. Internally, he is pushing engineers to build Proton with AI, even when they have security concerns.

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”

In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

  • excursion22@piefed.caOPEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I’m being (perhaps overly) optimistic that this might be the last straw for Andy, but we’ll see.

    The official proton account had this to say over on that other site:

    It hasn’t been the best couple of days.

    We’ve read the various threads and we have heard your feedback. However, right now we need to focus on listening to our employees. They’re the ones who’ve gotten us to where we are today, and they’re the ones who are impacted the most.

    We love this community, and we will come back to you. But in the days ahead, we need to get our house in order first

    I’m hoping getting their house in order means kicking Andy Yen and Bart Butler out of it…