Guest: Delong Lu, Chief of Staff, Proton

Host: Scott Amenta, Founder, Chief of Staff Network

Delong Lu has spent nearly a decade at Proton, the Swiss privacy company behind Proton Mail, growing from one of its earliest product managers into Chief of Staff, the "loose radical" on a ten-person management team. He joins Scott Amenta to talk about the hardest thing on his plate right now: how a company whose entire identity is user privacy moves fast on AI without breaking the promise that defines it.

Delong covers how Proton built its AI assistant Lumo on zero-knowledge encryption, why every line of AI-generated code still needs a human who can defend it, and why nothing ships without human oversight. His core lesson for any Chief of Staff leading an AI transformation: culture eats strategy for breakfast, so get clear on your values before you argue about tools.

About Delong Lu

Delong trained as an electrical engineer at ETH Zurich, added a business degree, and started his career in technology consulting and derivatives sales in London before deciding something was missing. He found Proton in 2017 after five cold emails (the last one finally got a reply from founder Andy) and joined as one of roughly 30 employees to help launch ProtonVPN. Over the next decade he cycled through Proton Mail, accounts and payments, and other business units as the company scaled past 600 people. That ground-level path through product is what made him the natural pick when Proton created its Chief of Staff role in 2022.

Key Takeaways

- The Chief of Staff role is often born from structure, not strategy. Proton organized into customer-facing business units, each with its own P&L, which optimized for shipping fast but thinned out the connective tissue between teams. When cross-coordination outgrew what the CEO and CTO could hold alone, the role had to exist.

- A senior Chief of Staff runs on autonomy, not a daily check-in. Delong meets his principal weekly and trades messages as needed. The mandate is "whatever it takes to hit our targets." That freedom is both liberating and confusing, and it only works because the CEO genuinely has his back.

- The most valuable move is closing the gap between vision and reality. When Delong noticed the CEO's AI vision did not match what teams were actually executing, he surfaced the disconnect and turned it into a work stream. Deciding what matters most is a skill he carried straight over from product management.

- AI transformation is a culture problem before it is a tools problem. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Proton's mission-driven people would walk before they would force AI at all costs, and that shared clarity resolves the circular debates about what data connects to what tool. For Chiefs of Staff at less principled organizations, the work starts with getting the executive team aligned on values, not picking software.

- The human stays accountable. Proton's policy is firm: engineers must understand and defend every line of code, nothing ships to production without human oversight, and no customer PII goes into third-party tools. The in-house assistant, Lumo, is the default.

Delong is part of the global Chief of Staff Network community. Links to connect with him are in the episode.

Learn more about the Chief of Staff Network's membership, courses, and events here: https://www.chiefofstaff.network/