Evernote’s new CEO and the elephant in the room

Evernote CEO Chris O’Neill. Photo credit: Evernote.

Evernote’s new CEO Chris O’Neill celebrated his one-year work anniversary last month. He’s a Valley veteran who drove by the Evernote offices on his way to work at Google and still keeps a bottle of wine in his cellar from a summer internship at Wine.com.

Evernote was one of the first so-called unicorns before US$1 billion valuations were being thrown around like confetti. Always one to enjoy a challenge, Chris is stepping into stride as he prepares the elephant – once the champion of the freemium model – for its next stage: profitability.

Tough road

Chris says it has been difficult to see people with passion for Evernote move on or let go of old team members who were no longer a good fit. He wants to reembed a quality obsessed culture and has brought on new management to guide the company to maturity as well as make self-sustainability the top priority.

“Working through transitions is never easy,” he remarks.

Words of encouragement from users to Chris at an investor conference earlier this year.

“There is also a tension between some of our power users versus the challenge of getting people to engage with the product on a regular basis.” The new focus is less on features and more on Evernote’s core strengths. “Competition is too ferocious in this world to be mediocre at any one thing.”

“The big things are in place,” highlights Chris. “Building a brand, a company with 200 million registered users – that’s hard.”

Updated playbook

“I think Phil’s and the company’s overall strategy was really anchored on remembering things,” says Chris, referencing Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO from the app’s launch to 2015. “And there were early attempts to branch into a workspace. Our strategy is a continuation of really delivering on that potential.”

35 percent of Evernote’s users are in Asia.

Future app updates may look to remove distractions and create an environment to get work done. The team has been working on AI, or augmented intelligence as it is referred to internally. “AI will hopefully enable Evernote to become a workspace ‘hub’ – the single place knowledge workers can go to get things done,” explains Ken Inoue, general manager of Asia-Pacific and Japan operations.

This all connects to a larger concept of “deep work” which Evernote is exploring – although Ken and Chris admit it’s not a huge part of strategy yet.

“What we do is cool,” says Chris. “But what people do with us is even cooler. It’s far more epic than what we do.” He would like to see more users pass the “toothbrush test” – have people use the app two or more times a day.

A new billion

I… I feel so alive