Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Evernote wants to becomes the Nike for your brain

Evernote Wants to Become the Nike for Your Brain: 10 Questions With CEO Phil Libin


Evernote CEO Phil Libin. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Evernote is known for its eponymous note-taking app, a seemingly modest piece of software that has brought in a heap of money. Evernote has topped 10 million downloads in the iOS and Android app stores and accumulated more than 65 million users across its mobile, web, and desktop versions.
CEO and serial tech entrepreneur Phil Libin used to bristle when people would refer to Evernote as a digital notebook. He sees the product as an extension of the mind, albeit one that’s only about 5 percent complete. These days, though, he’s learned to embrace the pigeonholing. After all, it was humble note-takers who brought Redwood City, California-based Evernote to profitability in 2011 by upgrading en masse to a premium version that includes optical character recognition (handy for pictures of business cards and receipts) and collaborative note editing (great for workgroups).
This year, Evernote is in the red again as the company scales up to reach Libin’s bigger ambition — becoming something like Microsoft Office for mobile devices. Or, as Libin put it in an hourlong interview with WIRED, “like Nike for your mind.”
Evernote’s staff of 330 is divided into teams of no more than eight members — small enough, as Libin sees it, to sit around a dinner table and have a single conversation. No team project can last more than nine months, and none of the teams share any code, which is something close to sacrilege among the software priests of Silicon Valley. One recent sunny Friday, while programmers behind him raced to rewrite the iPhone and iPad versions of Evernote from scratch, we pelted Libin with questions about the past, present, and future of his company.
WIRED: People make apps that are immersive video games. They make painting apps. They make music apps. They make social networking apps. You chose to make a note-taking app, which in comparison could seem pretty boring. Why notes?
Libin: We wanted to make something for ourselves. The idea was to let you remember all the information coming at you in whatever way was easiest at the time, whether it was audio, images, text, web clips, or documents. One place where you can put everything and always be able to find it. We would take a picture of the white board and search for the words in it and find it. Then from there it grew to other cognitive problems. We wanted to make a new definition of what productivity should be. We never thought Evernote was notetaking. We thought of it as an external brain.
WIRED: Is today’s Evernote the realization of the vision or a step toward the vision?
Libin: It’s definitely just a step. We’re a hundred-year startup. We had our five-year anniversary a few weeks ago, so we are five percent done.
WIRED: Where do you see the product going?
Libin: The company that most inspires me is Nike. Nike started out with Adidas and Puma and all those other athletic shoe brands that are very niche. Nike was the first mainstream breakout brand. They’ve become the signature brand for people who aspire to, or self-identify as, being athletic. We want Evernote to be the signature brand for people who aspire to, or self-identify as, being smart, as being productive.
It will be a combination of physical products and digital products at the intersection of those two things. That’s the hundred-year brand play.
WIRED: There are some formidable companies who see themselves making smart people productive. Microsoft and Google, to name just two.
Libin: There’s always been infinite competition for us. We had the world’s worst venture capital pitch back in 2008. It was the height of the financial crisis and we had just launched Evernote so we didn’t have any traction yet. And I’d go in like, “We’re going to make this thing that’s going to let you write things down on computers and phones and we’re going to give it away for free. Can I have $10 million?” Usually they would throw us out, but sometimes out of politeness the VCs would ask some questions and the first question was always, “Who is your competition?” And the pitch didn’t get better at that point, because I was like, “Well, every single computer or phone or PDA or any other device that’s ever been released. They already come with free note-taking software that’s pretty good.”.
But we’ve never thought about it. The top five companies that we probably get the most users from, that we are partnering with are, not necessarily in order, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon, and all five of them compete with us in some way. That’s what life is. It’s a much happier way to live your life if you wake up in the morning and you think, “What I am going to build that’s great?”, not if you wake up saying, “Who are my enemies today, who do I have to beat?”
The way we’re going to succeed against all these other fantastic, inspiring, great companies, is just by making really great products. We’re going to spend all our time figuring out how to make our stuff better.
WIRED: A 100-year plan seems to imply Evernote will be creating products that allow you to create things a little more complex than text notes.
Libin: Anything that we think is stupid right now, we want to make it a little bit smarter. Evernote Business is aimed at making companies smarter. Meetings are a giant source of bad decisions and stupidity; meeting culture has become completely corrupted over the past 20 years, so we’re working on that.
Another way to think about it is session lengths. Microsoft Office was the definition of productivity for like 25 years. The average session length was probably an hour or two. You would sit down at your PC and you would like type stuff on Word or Excel. Then smartphones shrank the average session time to like two minutes, maybe five minutes. That’s part of why I think Microsoft is continuing to have a such a hard time getting into mobile, because it’s a fundamentally different way of thinking. “What can I do to be productive two minutes at a time?” It isn’t Office.
Over the next couple of years the different devices are going to shrink the average session times to seconds. So the session time for Glass is going to be a few seconds. The session time for your (smart) watch is going to be a glance, just like a second. You will have to come up with new use cases, new definitions of what it means to be productive. That is going to be just as different from mobile phones as mobile phones were over desktops.
WIRED: Who are your users?
Libin: Someone who has a poor understanding of life-work balance. They’re always thinking about everything. Someone who’s answering email at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, but also someone who’s reading restaurant reviews and recommendations at the office. The modern knowledge worker.
WIRED: You have a lot of journalists who are users. Is that a blessing or a curse?
Libin: It is a blessing. It was intentional. We specifically said early on that we wanted Evernote to be great for journalists and investors, and tried to make something so that when we went to pitch a venture capital firm, chances are half of them were sitting there using Evernote during the meeting. And the same thing with journalists. That was an effective strategy.
WIRED: What’s business like these days?
Libin: Business is great. We’re getting bigger, so there’s more and more things to keep track of. Up to a few months ago I probably knew everyone. But then it seems like overnight we went from 100 people to 300. I’m out of the office for a week or two and come back there’s all these people that I’ve never seen before.
I probably spend most of my time worrying about the culture, and the team, and then scaling. We’re very careful about when does a company stop being a startup and become something worse. I think it’s when you get one employee who’s doing a job and they don’t know why they’re doing it. And they kind of think it’s stupid. I think the key is just to militantly fight that.
WIRED: What’s in place to prevent that kind of thing from happening?
Libin: We have a weekly all-hands meeting that’s 20 minutes to a half hour on the central stairs over there. Usually with me, sometimes we have other people speak. We introduce new employees, and we talk about important things, and 80 percent of it is just setting the tone that you should never feel that way. And then, just walk around and talk, and in all the managers’ meetings I make sure that all the managers know that it’s their responsibility to not have mystery in the office. There should be no sense of, “I don’t understand why something is going on.” It inevitably happens from time to time, but the idea is to just catch it and correct it before it spreads.
WIRED: What are you up to this weekend — anything fun?
Libin: My wife is out of town so I’m going to work. (Laughs.) Usually I try to work only half a day on the weekend so we can do stuff together, but she’s visiting her family in New York, so I’m like, “Alright! Two solid days of work!” I live around here, in those hills. I’m going to sit on my porch with my laptop, and my nice Sonos outdoor speakers. Like I said, the average Evernote user has no work/life balance, and I’m the target customer.
Ryan Tate
Follow @ryantate on Twitter.
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