We're now going to continue with a panel, and it will be moderated by Sictic vice president Bolko Hohaus. I'm going to just hand over the mic to you, Bolko. You're going to do the proper introduction.
Good. Thank you very much, and also welcome from my side. I'm VP for the Swiss Romande. When we prepared this event, we said, where is Switzerland strong? And we said it's robotics. Therefore, thank you, Dominic, for presenting that. And the second one is also privacy. Therefore, we have today probably the most known entrepreneur in privacy in the world here, and he's someone who is in Geneva. Therefore, he is in Switzerland because Switzerland stands also for privacy. Therefore, welcome, Andy Yen, to the stage and do a little bit of fireside chat with me. Andy, welcome.
I'll say a few words on Andy. He just told me he got invited by Sequoia to the top 100 companies in Europe. Therefore, he is definitely the person to talk about privacy, and probably the most successful entrepreneur in privacy. Therefore, thank you for coming here. It's really good. Man educated in Caltech, PhD in particle physics in Harvard. And then he went to CERN. That's one of the great advantages of this country. We attract top talent to this country in Geneva. I have several startups which have CERN-educated founders, let's say, and then they get thrown out after five years because the contract ends.
After five years. I know him also from Fongit in Geneva in Cubeta. Sorry, Rafael. It's Geneva, but we still talk to them. And since many years, and it has been impressive how it's growing with more than 100 million users. Therefore, we thought it's the best person to ask really about privacy. Thank you very much again, and let me tell you, you started in 2014. Maybe the first question would be: tell us more about your founder journey. I mean, how was it? Why did you found the company? You worked at CERN. You could have stayed somewhere, and why did you want to found it? How was the journey since then?
Yeah, well, first of all, it's a pleasure to be here. It's really great to, I think, share a bit the experience of the ecosystem, and also talk about how good I think our ecosystem actually is. My journey, like many entrepreneurs, is a bit of an accident. And I think this is true for many good companies. You know, people often think, oh, it's MBAs sitting in a room who think of a great business plan and then go build a company, and that's maybe how business people think companies get created, but that's really not what happens. Proton, like many other of the great scale-ups in Switzerland, really was an accident. It was, you know, myself and some friends trying to solve a problem that we had ourselves. And because we were physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, we actually could solve it. And if you go back a few years into the early, you know, 2013 to 2014 period, that was really when I began to realize, well, the business model of the current American big tech giants really is a pretty crappy business model. It's, I'm going to give you free services, and then I'm going to abuse your data for the rest of your life, and probably also after your death as well, right? And it seemed like there was an opening for an alternative model to be built that really put user trust, privacy, and security at the forefront. That product didn't exist, and we were, you know, scientists back then. Unfortunately, we didn't have AI, so it was a lot harder, but, you know, we were able to actually build this product. And we didn't know if there would be interest in this. The initial users were actually certain scientists like ourselves. And it was an experiment. We made it open source, threw it out to the world, and tried to see what the reception would be. And on the first day, I remember 10,000 people signed up the first day that we opened it. And then 10,000 also the second day. So what we discovered was the problem that we had solved for myself, for one person, was actually a problem that many people around the world also wanted a solution to. And the startup lesson that I take away from this is: ship fast, ship early, go to market quickly, right? Because you could have spent years thinking about what is the correct thing, but there's nothing that, you know, beats immediate market reaction, immediate market testing of your idea. And with AI, we can do that cheaper than ever today. So this is, I think, a very exciting time to start a business. But that was really how the journey began. Then, of course, you had to, you know, make an important choice. Do you stay in academia, which is an extremely, extremely safe, you could almost say very Swiss career path? Can't get fired if you're a professor, right? You can be there forever until you die. It's a lifetime appointment. Or do you go off and do a startup thing where, you know, as an entrepreneur, by the way, who is coming from abroad, if you fail, not only do you lose your job, you also get kicked out of the country, huh? So the stakes are quite high. Yeah. So, you know, it was a bet. We took the bet, and obviously I think it worked out well. But I think the other lesson I learned from this is I see often entrepreneurs, and this happens a lot in academic environments, where they try to be the best of both worlds, right? Ah, you know, I'm going to stay a professor, but do these things on the side, and hopefully it works. I think success requires going all in. When there's no path to go back, when there's no, you know, parachute that you can pull to save yourself, then you will do the extra effort required to succeed, because actually your life depends on it, literally.
Wow, what a statement. Fantastic. Man, let's talk about the startup ecosystem back then. How did it change since then? I mean, and maybe related to what you said before, do you have entrepreneurs in your family? Or was it the startup ecosystem which helped you?
Yeah, it's an interesting question. You know, I'm from Taiwan originally. And in Taiwan there's kind of almost a joke, right? But you can become a doctor, you can become a lawyer, or you can become a business person. So, you know, when I got my PhD, the comment was wrong type of doctor, right? So, I think there wasn't, like, you know, a big history within the family. Taiwan, of course, is a very entrepreneurial place. It's very similar to Switzerland in, I think, many ways because it's a country that was not wealthy, you know, if you go back 50, 60 years. Had very few natural resources, surrounded by big countries, some of which are enemies. You have to survive on your own talents or you get crushed. And, you know, I saw the previous presentation with the different evolution of the industry of Switzerland. Taiwan was the same thing. It was, you know, you constantly get your industry commoditized, competition comes in and wipes you out. You need to constantly reinvent. And our latest reinvention, of course, is chips. And who knows what will come afterwards. So, I think similarities are there. But what made it possible, and I think this is something Switzerland does a very good job at, was the early support that happened. I'll give you a very practical example of how Fongit, I mentioned, you mentioned Fongit as well, helped us early on. You know, when you go apply for, like, a residency permit as a foreigner, and the sponsor is a company you yourself incorporated two weeks ago, it looks pretty suspicious. This is usually not approved, right? But if you have a, you know, a Conseiller d'État at the State of Geneva saying, 'Yeah, yeah, that guy, he's legit. This is a real company,' then your chances improve quite a bit. So, I think Switzerland does a very good job of having these support structures in place that make it possible for very smart people from around the world to come here and actually succeed. And this is something that the US did very well at until recently as well. And I think, you know, the failings of the US in recent years is maybe also an opportunity for Switzerland if we take advantage of it in the right way.
Yeah, yeah, good. And how has the ecosystem changed? I mean, obviously, you don't need so much the ecosystem as before, or how, from the outside now, how you see it, or inside here, how do you think it has changed versus when you started?
Well, I think for entrepreneurs, it's gotten a lot easier. Yeah, I'm not going to name the VC because I don't want to embarrass them, but when we were raising money back in 2014, you know, we had a VC offer us half a million Swiss francs for half the company. This was the offer in 2014, right? Nowadays, I would say that the ecosystem maybe is not as good as you might find in Silicon Valley, but it's gotten a lot better. I think, you know, you can raise in Switzerland on terms quite similar to what you might get outside in the US now. In fact, you have the best VCs also coming here as well. VC really didn't exist, you know, in 2014. You guys were maybe just getting started back then. I think if we were a company that had come a few years later, it would have been a different story. So, this is a massive shift that I think is good for startups and entrepreneurs. I think this is also a challenge for investors in Switzerland because it means your competition is a lot higher. If you want to get into a good round, you will probably have three or four American funds ahead of you. And then the question becomes, what is your competitive advantage? What can you offer to the entrepreneurs here that the Americans cannot? And if it's only money, I don't think you're going to, you know, probably get first in line to write the first check. You have to add something more than money. So, the ecosystem has improved quite a bit. The scale-ups ecosystem has also, you know, grown quite a bit. And what I think is very important is there are now founders who have made the journey, who have become successful. And as much as I like all the advisors from Fongit and Seedcamp and, you know, appreciate the work that they've done, where I've learned the most from in my journey has actually been from other founders. It's the lessons that they have experienced, the problems they have lived day to day, which turn out to be the same problems that I have as well. And, you know, in Geneva, where there's two unicorns, there's myself and also SonarSource, who is a good friend of mine, Olivier Goudet. The fact that we know each other, the fact that we get dinner frequently, the fact that we discuss the challenges in each business, the fact that we can, you know, he did something cool, I want to copy it, right? If I do something nice, he wants to copy me as well. That dynamic of founders working together is something that totally changed the ecosystem because 10 years ago this didn't exist. You were really on your own and, you know, good luck, right? But today you have a support network and this makes a big difference.
