So I just read through the last couple months of his X feed. Some things I picked up on:
- He regretted hiring employees and adding complexity to Standard Notes as the additional hefty expenses of paying other developers meant they needed to increase revenue to stay profitable, which was difficult to do. The extra complexity also meant he couldn’t return to a single person project since it was too much to maintain himself. So, selling to a larger company was that only way to escape.
- He had lots of long term burnout from the work while not seeing revenue growth. He was originally considering selling because of this burnout, but was indecisive about it. The second guessing and delay apparently led to Proton shaving off $500k from their buyout offer, but he still acknowledges that he did not regret selling.
- He seems to have continued to have experienced burnout at Proton as well as an existential crisis, questioning if he would ever accomplish anything else in his life besides Standard Notes. He seemed to be wrestling this a lot, desiring to have the mindset of a 20 something year old developer, despite acknowledging that he is 35 with a wife, a kid, and extra “baggage.”
- He appears to follow a lot of go-getter tech/entrepreneur accounts on X and retweets/replies to them semi-often. Seems like stepping away from Standard Notes was something he was mentally sitting on for a long time and was simply looking for a new idea to work on before he did. (He’s working on a slack alternative).
- Acknowledges that there is a competitive market of high quality note taking apps now and the team at Proton has it taken care of.
- Possibly taken out of context, but he also seems to be having privacy fatigue. He has multiple tweets complaining about how privacy is getting in the way of his daily life and that trying to protect specific sensitive personal information is a pointless endeavor. Kind of an odd take for someone who created a privacy focused note taking app that sold to and worked for Proton.