Proton CEO official response:
Hi everyone, this is Andy here (Proton founder/CEO). Just got alerted about the news, and wanted to respond to some of the comments along the lines of "how do we know Proton won't sell out?"
The truth is, you can't know for sure, but Proton is structured in a way that provides a strong assurance, and we'll be sharing more about this some time in the next month. But for all intents and purposes, it really isn't possible for Proton to be acquired.
Proton is not a product of silicon valley, but a crowdfunded project that was conceived at CERN. Proton doesn't have VC investors (so no pressure to sell), and Proton is profitable (so no pressure from finances). To this day, it continues to be managed and run by scientists, and nobody goes into science to get rich.
Finally, Proton has scale with 100M+ accounts and 400+ employees. Frankly, if the goal was to sell and make a bunch of money, it could have already been done long ago. Instead, we push onwards.
Our work is brutally difficult, with daunting challenges every step of the way, and only the true believers stay on the path for this long. If money was the goal, we wouldn't have done any of the things listed on this page (https://proton.me/about/impact) much less given away over $2.7 million to aligned organizations
This year Proton happens to turn 10. We'll probably never be the cheapest, the most flashy, or maybe not even the fastest. But we will strive to be the most resilient. For as long as there's this community of users supporting our work, we're not going anywhere. In fact, the ideas and values we share together, may even win the future of the web. For that reason, we're eternally grateful for your support as we fight the hard fights.
source: reddit
@testeronious
So I spent a little bit time to dig up what Notion is.
This is what I found when searching for it ... https://www.notion.so/about
And I honestly have no idea why Skiff would be interesting for Notion. From what I can grasp the only Notion features overlap are Skiff Pages and perhaps Skiff Calendar. It's so off I struggle to fully grasp this.
First of all, Notion is not a service talking about privacy at all, afaict. And that was one of the main arguments Skiff had.
And then the first thing this merges states is that Skiff services are closing down.
I hate to say this, but Skiff founders couldn't really have cared that much about privacy then, when they chose to close down so quickly and abruptly like that, without a continuation plan on bringing privacy to Notion.
I believe the Skiff founders, if they really cared strongly about privacy, realised their service was not sustainable in a longer run, with too high running cost and too low income. In addition they might have seen that they would need to invest a lot more into further development and that it was too hard to improve their revenue stream. So the alternative was either to go down with a bang (bankruptcy), or they could sell "something" to another company and make it sound nicer.
Right now I just wonder what Skiff managed to actually sell to Notion. Most likely manpower, if I should guess.
Companies acquire other companies all the time. Notion surely thinks they can use something controlled by Skiff to make more money than by using its money another way. I expect Notion will use the acquisition of Skiff to start offering new services or improve their existing services in an attempt to increase their market share. They don't need to have similar preexisting services or products in order to do that, and there is surely information we don't know that influenced Notion's decision (e.g. a new product developed in secret that was only disclosed due to Skiff's interest in being acquired).