Evernote's Phil Libin on not hiring 'a-------' and other gems

Photo: Paolo Vescia

Evernote CEO Phil Libin talked with Senior Technology Reporter Cromwell Schubarth in a Monday "fireside chat" at the Silicon valley Open Doors conference.

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Cromwell Schubarth: Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

Evernote CEO Phil Libin was as entertaining as ever in a "fireside chat' we did on Monday afternoon, talking about everything from not hiring "assholes" to the hot topics of the day — Apple's upcoming iOS 7 mobile operating system and government snooping on Silicon Valley tech companies.
But reading a transcript of an hour-plus conversation is way more than most of us, even dedicated TechFlash readers, have time for.
So here are the highlights from a transcript provided by TranscribeMe, one of the startups that presented at this week's Silicon Valley Open Doors conference at the Computer History Museum.
Click here to read a story posted earlier on Tuesday about what Libin said about iOS 7 and Prism.
Click here to read the full, uncut transcript of the fireside chat.

On not hiring "assholes"

You've had three startups now. Can you tell me something you learned from each one of them that you took to the next one?
There's a lot of lessons learned.
The first one we started in '97. It was me and a couple of college friends of mine. We were all working as programmers. We were all engineers. We were in this pretty big-sized company in Boston. It's called Art Technology Group, one of the big companies around the first Internet time.
We didn't know anything about running a business or anything about running our own company. We just had this question that we wanted to try out. We thought, what if three of us started our own company and we didn't hire any assholes into it?
That was the big experiment. Because we kind of sat around, and you do this all the time, right? You'll be sitting at your office and you go, OK, I understand myself, I understand why I'm here and I understand what I do and I'm decently good at my job.