Vishnu's Podcast ft. Mo Bitar - Founder of Standard Notes [Part 1]

Hello Mo, thank you for joining us.

It would be great if you could introduce yourself, share your background and tell us the origin story of the standard notes.

Yeah thank you for having me.

Um, so it's crazy to think it's been 10 years since I found it.

Standard notes, oh maybe nine years on the one hand, it's a long time.

But on the other hand, you know, I think like Figma was like founded at the same time and they're now a public corporation and standard is like this small company.

So it's just crazy to me how, you know, where we spend our time, but, um, I started tinkering with privacy software in like 20, this was like 2015, 2016 in this Snowden era where everyone started really becoming aware of what was happening with our data online.

And, you know, I was playing with like Monero, things like that.

And, you know, if you know me, you know that I always just build note taking apps.

I don't know what it is about me.

It's like, I'll start some like some unrelated product and it'll morph into a notes app.

And that that's been just my history.

I just love building note taking apps.

And maybe because I used to like to write, I don't know what happened now.

I don't, I don't write as much.

don't I don't have any more interesting thought.

All my thoughts were had in my twenties.

Now I, now I just live.

So I, you know I wrote a lot and I started building yet another note taking app.

And this time I sort of just incorporated everything I've learned throughout the years.

I mean, I got into software development.

I mean, I've sort of been doing it my whole life, but I didn't seriously get into it until the app store came out on iOS.

And so I started tinkering and playing around there.

uh And, you know, it took maybe So that was in 2009, 2010 but it took maybe five years of learning how to ship and build products to learn how to make Standard Notes not just be an app, but a business.

So that was the main breakthrough with Standard Notes was that you don't want to build just like an app.

You want to build a brand, a business, packaging, something that contains the app.

so that's what Standard Notes was.

was a mission.

more than anything and it was to, you know, to usher in privacy, security, in productivity.

So, you know, was a simple, you know, the software itself is simple.

The encryption is the hard part.

That's always the case with tools like ours.

It's the encryption that makes everything so damn hard that, prohibitively hard.

It keeps all competitors at bay.

You don't have to worry about, no one's going to want to do encryption voluntarily.

It's miserable.

uh So yeah, that was 2016 and it sort of, you know, this was around the time where Evernote modified their privacy policy and they said, we're going to start training AI on your data.

Yeah, that was really great for me because it was so easy to pick a fight there.

It's like, you're doing what with my data?

You're going to, I mean, these are my notes.

Like these are not yours.

These are mine.

Why are you training your systems and letting your employees access it?

So it was very easy layup for me to be able to say like, okay, well, standard notes just solves all this guys.

Like, why are you putting your stuff in Evernote?

They're going to, you're going to see your stuff.

They're going to train on your stuff with standard notes, it's end to end encrypted.

So you don't have to worry about that.

So.

That was the background and it took off.

It didn't explode, but it was a good business to run um up until...

uh It didn't end, just that we eventually sold to Proton.

We can get into that later, but that's the high level overview.

Correct.

Then I'll piggyback on that.

So the proton acquisition happened last year, like mid last year.

Now could you shed some?

Yeah, 24.

So could you let us know how that happened?

So in 2020, well, I'll start all the way at the earliest that I could possibly think, which was in like 2017, I emailed Andy Yen of CEO Proton.

And I was like Hey Andy, just a cold email.

I noticed that you guys are sort of a for-profit company, but you accept donations on your website.

how is that working out for you?

Is that something you recommend?

And he, you he replied, he was very nice.

He was like, yeah, you know, people sometimes just want to support.

the product, you know, they understand it's not like a nonprofit, but, um, so, you know, he gave some helpful advice there.

Um, and that was really well, then fast forward to maybe 2021 or something.

Uh, we wanted to start using Proton mail for our support inbox for like, if people wanted to have encryption with their support correspondences with us, they could email our Proton.

uh account and the only thing that was available was STD notes.

Now, know, STD is short for standard, but it just didn't look right.

So I emailed Andy, was like, you know, is there any chance you could get us standard notes at Protonmail.com?

And he said, yeah, you know, let me, let me check on this.

And he, was able to get it for us.

He offered the owner like a visionary plan and you know, he relinquished it.

So that was like, you know, so at least he knew my name when I finally reached out in 2022.

Um I think it was 2022.

I've lost track of the years by now, but, um, maybe end of 22, I'm like, you know, Hey, Andy, you know, for man, 2022, that's six years into running the business.

You get tired, you get burnt out, you have, and you just gotta keep going.

And sometimes the burnout heals quickly.

Sometimes it doesn't.

Um so for whatever reason you know, And loneliness may have been a big part of it.

uh Just being a very distributed team.

It's only maybe four five people.

But you know, I was in the U S everyone else was in Europe or something.

And so, yeah, maybe a bit lonely and just, you know, ran like a dog for these six years.

And, um, I dunno, I was feeling tired and I email him saying, you you guys ever thought about proton notes and if so let's talk it so that you know the you know the interesting it'd be interesting to collaborate and he's like you know we we

have wasn't on our mind but you know we can talk so got a call maybe i know some number weeks later and it a good call and he's like you know ultimately like you need to come out here and we need to see you need to meet you see if you're

real person, you're not serial killer.

So uh I think I ended up flying out there 2023.

And um Well, you know, this is where it starts to get into the details, which we can go into.

Just feel free to stop me if it gets too deep into the weeds.

um I go into Geneva, I go into their office.

mean their office is like stunning.

It's so cool.

I was like, man this I wish I worked here.

I was because you know me working from home for the past six years you just look at it's like my god, there's people and there's lunch and It's like man.

I miss this and I you know, the vibe was so great and I felt so like It was really positive experience and I'm like man, you know, I would love to be a part of this now so, you know, it was just

casual conversation nothing serious at that point, we're just sort of getting to know each other and uh I go back home and you know we think about it, they think about it and you know i i was at this point knows really sure of anything and so he's like you know and he's very big on

co-location he wants everyone to be in the same office or at least in an office and protons got a bunch of offices you know he wants everyone to be in some kind of office which i don't blame it it is really good for productivity but i was

i was in the u.s.

u.s.

and so he's like would you consider moving and you know it uh The thought of moving to Europe had never crossed my mind, but at that point I was so burnt out and so romanticized by what I had seen there that was like, you know what Andy,

maybe I would move to Geneva.

um And it wasn't until a week later, I emailed him back, I you know what Andy, I'm not gonna move.

I think I started coming to my senses a little bit.

Like I can't move to my whole family's here.

My wife's family's here.

Daughters, cousins are here.

So.

They're like, okay, you know what?

You don't need to move to Geneva.

um And so, you know, we started getting into it and uh they showed some serious interest and eventually they made an offer.

And it was at this point that I started getting you can call it cold feet.

I started talking to lawyers and accountants and it started getting so complicated.

was so overwhelmed.

was like, it's an international transaction, I need to find a Swiss lawyer.

Then I need to find a lawyer I can trust on the American side.

I didn't know how much this was going to cost.

I was thinking it was going to be like $50,000 to $100,000 and I started getting just super overwhelmed.

Believe it or not I this is gonna sound silly.

I have a...

a...

It's gotten a little bit better, maybe.

But I have a crazy fear of flying.

And...

I knew that if I joined Proton, I would have to go out there like twice a year.

And...

That started scaring me.

Everything started scaring me and I was like...

was like...

And it wasn't just fear, I was also like, okay but this is my business, this is everything that I've built.

And if I sell it...

it...

Is you know, do I have...

have...

Is there anything else?

for me, like what's next for me?

I've only ever built note taking apps.

Can I really figure out another product to sell here?

Or, you know, I didn't think that I had other ideas in me because I hadn't thought of anything.

I've been so obsessed with standard notes for the longest time.

And so all these thoughts and I just sort of crashed and I just said, you know what, Andy, I can't do this.

um You know, yeah, it was, it was just too much.

And so that was the end of it.

That was maybe May, 2023.

And I went back to work that that sort of energized me that motivated me.

It's like, now that I turned them down or canceled sort of the talks, now I have to make up for it.

I have to I have to prove myself here.

And so I was very motivated.

So I went in, I did some really intense work for three months.

When really, you know, I more dev work.

I should have been doing marketing work.

mean that's always been my flaw.

Just always coding when I should have been doing like, you know, suit and tie stuff.

And everything was going great.

um You know, we get a daily email report sent to our inbox from our oh database server side that gives us a daily report.

know here are your sales from yesterday.

Here's a how many subscriptions you've sold things like that.

And.

the numbers were going up and I was like, okay, this is, this is awesome.

Like our work, our hard work is paying off.

Like good thing we didn't sell.

And at some point I was looking into something and it turns out that our Apple in our purchases were being double counted, maybe triple counted in some cases in our, in our analytics tool.

And that just crushed me because you know our team was getting hyped about these numbers I was getting hyped and it turned out it wasn't real the growth wasn't real.

It was all a mirage And during that same time I got really sick with some kind of flu and and these things and I just man I experienced the low that I never experienced in my life before.

I mean it was just devastating And I was like, my god, I can't believe I didn't sell I mean, man, there's been burnouts before, but this was something spectacular.

mean this was something else.

And yeah, I was just devastated.

was like, what did you do?

Like you had that, it was your only chance to move on and do something and to take this business.

And I started thinking about my users.

I'm like, you know, I'm holding data.

for hundreds of thousands of users and it's like important data and it's like, who am I to hold all this for people?

And the weight of that just crushed me and I'm like, man.

So yeah, this was September, 2023, maybe October, something like that.

And yeah, it was really devastating and I was like.

Yeah, it was tough.

And I felt like I screwed it all up.

so I don't know, I email Andy again.

And well, someone had tweeted and mentioned us and Proton and someone tweeted said, you know, hey Proton, you guys should buy out center notes already.

And so I, you know, I use that as a, a excuse to email him.

I'm like, you know, it looks like people still thinking about this.

And I told him essentially like, like I feel a sense of feel bad about how things ended.

And he's, and he replied a couple of weeks later.

was a hard couple of weeks.

I didn't really expect him to reply to be honest.

I, you know, I did what I, what I could.

The rest was on him.

And so he replied saying, you know, look, no hard feelings at all.

mean, you know, and You know, something like, know, in the long run maybe our paths may converge but, you know, for now it's not really something we're thinking about and I wish you the best.

And I was like ah man, you know, that hurts.

so I I don't know what I said but I was like, okay cool, yeah, you know, for sure.

if proton docks or proton notes ever crosses your mind again, you know, get in touch.

This is what I love to build.

And he was like, you know what actually.

We are thinking about Proton Docs.

one thing led to another.

we flew out to Geneva again.

This time I brought some of my team members.

Yeah.

Uh, I pushed through, I pushed through the, I mean the legal side ended up not being as crazy.

The legal bill was maybe like $10,000.

The accounting bill, they didn't even charge me for the time.

don't I don't know why.

Cause I, um, it was like a couple of calls with, with the accountant.

And so yeah, it was way less complicated than I thought.

I thought acquisitions were really complex and intimidating, but really it's just a paper that you sign.

That's it.

That's what an acquisition is.

It's just a paper.

Um and so I like, You know, that if I'd known it was going to be that simple, I don't know.

Maybe I wouldn't have backed down the first time.

But and so, yeah that was maybe February 2024.

And yeah, we announced in April 2024 and we got to work on Proton docs right away when we now right away, maybe, you know, in a span of a couple of months.

And then we docs in June of 2024.

Nice, nice.

I mean, I'm glad that it actually worked out.

is really nice of Andy to kind of continue the conversation even after it kind of broke midway.

So that's really nice.

So I'll actually continue on this thread right?

See, from the perspective of a founder, what was the impact of selling your company?

And I'm asking this because I look at Entei like a baby and I'm very emotionally attached to what has been created.

And I'm hoping that since it's been like a year since acquisition you've had time to distance yourself from the episode in some sense and kind of reflect and achieve a sense of closure.

So I would like to understand what worked well and what did not and what did you not see coming and like if there's something could have actually done differently.

Um I don't know.

I mean, you know, I don't know if you, if you play around in the stock market or things like that, where sometimes you you buy something and then you sell and sometimes you sell and in retrospect, you look back a couple of months, you're like, man, I was a genius.

I sold at the right time.

Other times you sell the stock too early.

You're like, damn it.

Like it's skyrocketed right after I sold it.

And so it's the same thing here.

Uh I sold shares of standard notes and you know for the first couple months I didn't know what to whether to root for standard notes or whether to whether for whether for it to just continue doing what it had been doing because the reason I sold was because I couldn't really grow it to the to the to what it needed to be at to sustain a larger team.

know, standard notes was a great business when I was solo and I was solo for a long time, maybe four years.

And uh because of all the burnout and some injuries, like uh there were episodes where I just find it really hard to work.

And so I had to grow the team.

And once you grow the team, you don't know when to stop.

It's really hard to know.

how many people you should hire, whether to invest, whether to go in the red to hire.

All these things were new to me, so I didn't know the answers to everything.

so yeah I we struggled to really grow it, or I struggled.

The growth was very slow, and the churn was not great.

Now, I don't know if that's something to do with Standard Notes or the industry.

uh, where note taking is just a very, um, you know, lot of disloyalty in that space.

Everyone's always trying something new.

Everyone gets really unhappy at the slightest inconvenience.

it's very portable.

Um so yeah, it was, yeah.

I felt like I wasn't doing its service and I thought that it was a great product.

The code was excellent.

Everything about it was great, but we sucked at marketing.

I suck at marketing.

Proton is really good at marketing, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to lead it to the next level.

ultimately it didn't really change much.

you know, it, I don't know, it, didn't really start growing again until like chat GPT started pushing out, uh, recommending standard notes.

Um, and so I saw that I was like wow.

I didn't, didn't I didn't predict that.

Uh, I mean, you know, we got a ton of traffic from Google, but, uh, the traffic from like chat GPT started going up and, and standard notes being so established in the online sphere it was easy for LLMs to recommend it because it's so prevalent in the training data that and it's very valuable to have and it's I don't know how difficult

that is to build again for a new product maybe it's easier than I imagine or maybe the recency might make it easier but um yeah overall I don't know I don't think I have I don't think I did anything wrong I don't think I mean...

mean...

I think ultimately in retrospect, now I don't have regrets about this because I couldn't have known, but in retrospect, I think what I had was a really good business.

I think it was a cashflow generating business and it was consistent.

And what you'll find is that actually, so you know, when Proton paid me for the acquisition, you know, they You get a bunch of cash up front, And you expect that when you get this cash that you'll feel a sense of richness.

But that's not what happened.

Instead I felt poorer um than before because when you get a lump of cash and if this lump is not like hundreds of millions of dollars, if it's like a more modest sum, The best thing you could do is just put it in a bank account and never think about it again.

You'd be foolish to spend it because it's not coming back.

There's no more acquisitions to be had.

And so that's what happened.

uh I put it in separate accounts and it wasn't mine anymore.

It was just like this safe thing that I needed to protect because I'd worked so hard for it.

And instead, my cashflow went down.

My monthly cashflow went down.

mean yeah I had a salary but it wasn't...

it wasn't...

uh It wasn't even enough to break even every month with my expenses.

And so what ended up happening was that I felt, you know, I got poorer.

Not to say I'm not grateful for all of this, but the economics of it is that I learned that cash flow is more important than having a sum of cash in your bank.

So if you can cash flow some amount more than your income, you know, if you're, if your expenses of five, $5,000 a month and you're getting in cashflow of 10,000, that's really good.

You know, whereas yeah, the, alternative of just having a lump sum of cash and breaking even every month is not ideal.

And so I started feeling the crunch and eventually that's what led to me having to leave Putan.

And we can get into that.

I don't want to talk forever here.

But it really was just, and it's, know, like even if they paid me more and they were open to it, um salary wise, there's a cap.

You know, there's a, there's a limit to how much you can possibly pay a salaried person.

And to me, I realized that the only way to, to get going again is to start another company and so that's where I am now.

Correct.

So I'll again continue on what you left at, which was leaving Proton because I felt that is one of the interesting things that came out of this, like you flying down there, seeing the vibe of the place and kind of wanting to work with other folks.

So like what changed?

Like what worked well there and why did you end up forfeiting like whatever you had?

Yeah.

So I mean it was an awesome experience.

The first year was an awesome experience because I'd never worked in a company, which I would call a large company, like 500 people.

You know, I didn't understand what it meant to work on a large team.

didn't like how do you guys do that?

Like every time I saw a big company ship things, was like, who's doing that?

Like how are you guys?

It was mind boggling to me.

But once I got in there, I figured it out.

It's like, okay.

Just because it's a large company, the teams are actually small within the company.

And so it's the same thing.

Same thing as standard notes where the team is small.

And so you just subdivide the larger team.

And so it's the same thing.

So that was like yeah understanding how big companies worked.

But, figuring out, you know, I'm a startup guy.

I just ship things.

I work fast.

I have uh a disregard for protocol and for uh not like a blatant disregard, but I, uh I cherish shipping more than I do process.

Proton wasn't super heavy on process.

I think they've got a pretty good balance.

ah But it's why we were able to ship Proton Docs so quickly.

uh We had that balance of people who were really good at op stuff and planning and things.

elevated to that level a little bit too.

did a lot of planning and product spec and design.

So yeah, I think it was a great experience.

uh Honestly There's really nothing.

Look mean entrepreneurs are going to be entrepreneurs and it's in there.

I don't know what it is about our sort of I don't know, mental disposition that I don't know, we're always itching to do something that challenges us, that impresses ourselves, that and you know, eventually at any job, most likely you will plateau and you

will start working on, you know, the same thing over and over again and um you operate in a permission-based environment.

where you have to consider everyone else on the team.

And so I just missed doing stuff.

I missed the, look, the great thing about salary jobs or positions is that there's a floor that you never go under in terms of compensation, but there's a ceiling too.

And that's the problem.

The ceiling is the problem in that we built and shipped the center notes team built and ship Proton docs.

was a great experience.

It was a great product.

was one of the best uh marketing exposure uh performance wise for Proton.

But in the end of it, what do we get?

Like, and I'm not, this, this is a critique on employment in general.

What did I get?

I got a good job Mo nicely done.

Um, you know, no, you know, you couldn't possibly give me a raise.

enough to compensate for how much value we've brought to you.

so when it came to the next thing, let's say that Proton may have wanted us to build, let's say, I don't know, Proton, I don't want to reveal their plans, but let's say Proton Calculator or something, then I was faced with the same decision.

I was like, okay, well, I busted my ass off for Proton Docs and In return, I got a pat on the shoulder and I now have the opportunity to do the same thing again for proton calculator.

my body and my mind stopped me and it was like, why?

Why would you work harder than you need to here?

ah If the result is the same, if the reward is the same, whether you work this hard or this hard, it's the same reward.

And yeah, my mind can't compute that.

My mind just doesn't, it shuts down.

It doesn't let me do work in these scenarios.

And I think that's the entrepreneur's curse.

is not that they may necessarily be too good for employment, but that their mind just doesn't let them do the job because it says it doesn't make sense.

the formula is off.

And so it shuts down.

so yeah, I just.

uh I realized that the only way to get that reward is to go the entrepreneurial route.

It's scary because there's no floor and there's no ceiling.

That's the great part.

uh Super high risk, super high reward.

I mean, I'm 35, I feel old, but I'm certain to feel older even pretty soon in my 40s or something.

So now is the time.

This is the youngest I'll ever be.

If I want to go start something new, sure, I can wait another seven months and get the next payout of my...

Yeah I did have to forfeit.

Let's see.

maybe 30 to 40 percent of the acquisition sum because I left early.

If I waited seven months, ah I could have unlocked more.

And, you know, that's a tough decision um because I'm always sitting here wondering today, like, you know, it's like, what's selling stock?

Did I sell too early?

Did I leave too early?

Should I have waited the seven months?

So, you know, my job is to make sure that I use this time so that I don't have regrets.

I don't look, if you want to plant the tree and you want it to get really tall, the best time to plant it is right now.

if you wait seven months, seven months is going to pass like, it, I should have planted it seven months ago because now I'd start seeing it already or, you know, same with anything.

If you want to build some muscle or you're a skinny person and you're just starting to work out, the best time to work out is now, because if you wait seven more months, you could have already had the body you wanted.

And so for me, I had the choice between waiting seven more months or imagining myself seven months from now.

Finishing having finished the product that I want to build I would rather be in that position than to have Than to see my a number go up in my bank account uh At some point the number in a bank

account game just stopped doing anything for For for me and for anyone, you know, you don't need a lot of money to notice that past the past the staples and the fundamentals number and bank account is not going to change anything for you.

It's not going change how you feel when you wake up.

I don't think about this number when I wake up, when I go to sleep.

Thinking about my health and thinking about my work, my family, my productivity.

And the thought hit me the other day.

was like, wait a minute.

Even if...

if...

I don't have any income right now.

My cash is depleting very fast.

uh My runways, I don't know.

It depends on inflation and what happens with the stock market, things like that.

ah But you know, I don't know, even if...

if...

My runway is probably like five years or something like that.

I don't want to get to zero.

You want to get to a point where zero and I have to start actually like start Ubering or something.

I know if I want to go back into a dev job.

um yeah, mean the thought essentially hit me that even if this new product takes off and I start making money, it's like...

I really have no use for the money in the sense, I don't have a lot of money, um just to speak philosophically.

um If the new product starts making tens of millions of dollars, I literally would have nothing that I want that I don't already have in terms of like, the only reason I've ever wanted to make money was to like, to go to this steak house here.

That's really good.

It's called Fogo.

don't know if you're familiar with it.

It's like so good.

It's like, it's a Brazilian steak house.

It's like $60.

And that's the only reason I ever want to make money.

But now I'm like trying to watch what I eat.

So I don't even want to go there anymore.

So I'm like, what am I even working for?

Maybe to pay.

I just joined the gym again yesterday.

My body's...

body's...

The day I quit proton, everything starts flaring up man.

The next day I'm like prevented from just like working.

My hands start hurting inflammation everywhere.

So I'm going on a health tangent here.

But yeah, just really briefly.

m So yeah, everything starts acting up.

mean, I've had a uh an inflammatory condition ever since I had an MRI five years ago and they inject you with this contrast agent.

They call it contrast.

But in reality, it's a heavy metal called gadolinium.

It's a toxic heavy metal.

They don't tell you that.

And it stays in your body forever and ever and ever.

But some people, unfortunately, like me, develop a constant reaction to it because it never leaves the body in my immune systems constantly fighting it.

anyway it comes and goes.

Luckily over the years it diminishes like 5%, 10 % every year.

But you know, the second I quit Proton, for whatever reason, everything just starts flaring up.

Can't work.

I can't sit.

So long story short, I tried fasting just this last week.

I did a five day fast, water fast.

So no food for five full days.

It was a great experience.

It didn't solve my problems. So I the gym yesterday.

It's like $180, man.

I don't know.

that's just...

just...

I mean, that membership, Lifetime Fitness, pretty popular, I guess, in the US.

you know, that membership 10 years ago was like $60.

Now it's $180.

So now that's what I'm working for.

I need to afford my gym membership.

So yeah, that's the...

the...

Another slight tangent is that I do feel better after actually working out.

I feel better after working out than I did after the five day fast.

So maybe that's what I gotta do, just keep my body moving.

So yeah, that's the...

the...

What was the question again?

Any regrets?

Yeah, I I just want to understand how the accident proton happened and like how you felt at like right now at this point.

And I guess like the takeaway, the positive takeaway for me is that at least now you feel like you can kind of do whatever you want to do right now rather than like waiting for seven months or that you're kind of there's no constraints right?

You can kind of execute on whatever it is that you want to do.

And I'm actually very curious on what that is.

Like what is it that you're doing right now?

Yeah, so like many of us, I'm super annoyed with Slack.

Slack has so many weird oddities about it.

It's just a very...

very...

I don't know.

I think it's a poorly designed product.

I mean, it hasn't changed since 2014.

It's the same...

same...

It's a chat app.

It's a chat app that somehow...

somehow...

businesses that have hundreds of thousands of team members are using as their main communication platform.

It's crazy to me.

How did a chat app become the main way we communicate in teams?

Slack in particular is so simple, which is good, but so...

but so...

unwilling to change or so unknowing how to change because of how many users they have that it's just impossible to change the product really.

But you know, so many weird things like one is that you're just just hundreds of messages every day, thousands of messages.

You never catch up.

Every time you catch up, it just lights up.

There's no deep work with Slack.

You're slacking.

I mean, they call it Slack for a reason.

I mean, I think it's a very honest name and maybe it was by design.

And then you're just added to channels you don't want to be in and then it's kind of awkward to leave because it just says Moe is left and it looks really passive aggressive.

So you just end up muting the channel because you don't want to look like an asshole.

And then, I don't know, you know, because you have hundreds of messages, the only way to really organize everything is to mark things as unread and put a book, you know, mark unread from here and maybe I'll come back later.

And you never really end up, I don't It's just such a mess.

then If have all these threads, you mark one thread as unread, you go back to check that thread, it now reads all of your threads because you clicked threads.

It's just awful Look it's good, it's fast.

It's good for just talking really fast to people.

But that speed comes at a cost.

um Yeah, I think people would be much happier with a much saner approach.

m The product I'm working on is called Conquer.

Conquer, you know, the slogan is Conquer overcomes Slack.

It's not meant to be a one to one replacement.

mean, yes, you could use Conqueror and you should stop using Slack, but it doesn't build on top of Slack.

doesn't take Slack and make it better.

It rethinks team communications from first principles, from the ground up.

How should teams communicate with one another in a way that is sane and not disrespectful towards other people's time?

And don't get me started about the...

the...

When people are typing to you and it says on the bottom, know, Vishnu is typing, you just have to sit there and wait because there's like tension and you got to resolve the tension.

Yeah, like in music, like if you play piano or something like that, there's tension in the key and you have to come back home and resolve.

So when someone's typing, creates a tension in your mind, you want to resolve it, you want to see what this person's saying.

So you just sit there waiting.

And then when multiple people are typing, it becomes awkward for you to start typing too.

It's just so awkward, man.

So many things are weird.

Um, and so yeah, there has to be a better way.

And that is what Conker tries to do.

And it does so very simple.

It's not a very complex product.

mean, it's taken a long time to build because the product discovery is so involved.

Um but it focuses on discussions, threads.

Um, yeah, basically if you want to say something, have something to say, like, you know, have something substantial to say.

And so it's thread-based.

will be chat, but it's not chat in a way where you're inclined to use it for everything.

um It's designed in a way that chat is a fallback option.

Regarding encryption, um I wavered on encryption because it's so damn hard to build that it just makes everything so difficult that I wasn't going to do encryption at all because it's going to be self-hostable.

If you want privacy, you just self-host it.

ah So I wasn't going to do encryption, but then I realized there's a very easy way to do end-to-end encryption.

um So that's what I've done.

It's really just, so what I call it is a privacy key.

And it's not like hardcore standard notes signal level encryption.

That's not what I'm after this time around.

I think that's a really tough business to build and I wouldn't wish that on anyone to build a signal style business or even a proton style business.

mean, you're just so constrained by what you can do and I'm so impressed with how much Proton is able to do given the constraints of encryption.

I didn't want this to be a privacy product.

I wanted the product to have privacy, but it's not a privacy product like standard notes or Entei or Signal or something like that.

so privacy key is just an optional thing you enable.

And if you enable it, it gives you a key and it's your key.

You put it wherever you want.

We're not holding onto it for you.

We're not doing any asymmetric encryption.

um And we'll just symmetrically encrypt your content with this key.

And that's it.

That's it.

Nothing.

uh We're not.

we're not storing this key anytime you sign into your account you need to provide the privacy key uh so there's no key rotation if you change your password it doesn't matter there's none of this complicated stuff that made standard notes so difficult to build and maintain and upgrade and so that is uh a privacy

angle here just a dead simple sort of switch that if you wanted here go ahead you can enable uh you know, it's privacy from us as the vendor.

The main thing that you want, least in my experience or in my, when I seek out a product, the main thing you want to protect against is from the vendor reading your data.

Cause if the vendor can read your data, then attackers can read your data.

The government back doors can read your data.

And so what we're going to do with this privacy key is when you enable it, we're going to tell it, we call it, we call it a privacy key, not encryption key.

We're going to say, go ahead, paste this, give this privacy key to your other team members via text message, send it via Gmail.

It doesn't matter.

As long as Conquer doesn't see it, you're fine.

Like, because the odds that us as a vendor, Conquer, is going to be able to read your Gmail or text messages and get your privacy key is zero.

uh And if a uh hacker, attacker comes in and backdoors us or gets into our database, you're protected.

Attacking our database is not going to affect whether your text messages are hacked.

we're treating this as a very low stress privacy concept.

We're not doing the try hard signal level asymmetric key sharing and public key and private keys.

Just one symmetric key.

Do whatever you want with it.

Just don't let us see it.

uh That's the encryption model.

I think that's a really good compromise.

We weren't going to do encryption at all, but I thought this would just be super easy to build.

And it was, and it was like, okay, well, this is, this is nice.

Like no, complicated crypto.

Right, right.