And sometimes engineers and product developers just get overly enamored with themselves and their ideas and lose sight of the bigger picture.īut adding new features requires discipline. The Silicon Valley mentality fosters a desire to continue building and iterating because if you don’t, you could get lapped by some new competitor who comes along and outflanks you. Last year, Libin stepped down as CEO and became a venture capitalist Evernote cut 18 percent of its workforce and new CEO Chris O’Neill promised to turn things around and bring focus to the company by winnowing that long list of features and services.īut the 5 percent problem offers a good lesson about how important it is to maintain a core identity as you build new features and products. Though Evernote did, in fact, continue to push out new features and products, they never managed to fix the underlying problem.
We’ve got a few things we’re launching over the next few months to help with that.”Įvernote had spread itself too thin, and there was no core experience. And we need to be a lot better about tying it together. If everyone just found the same 5 percent, then we’d just cut the other 95 percent and save ourselves a lot of money.
“And the problem is that it’s a different 5 percent for everyone. “What winds up happening at Evernote conferences is that people go and they say, ‘Oh, I love Evernote and I’ve been using it for years and now I realize I’ve only been using it for 5 percent of what it can do,’ ” Libin said. He conceded that Evernote had so many features, in fact, that it could sometimes be difficult to explain to newcomers exactly what Evernote was: He noted that Evernote had many, many, many more features than those other companies (though said competitors would probably beg to differ). We were talking about how Evernote was often lumped in with other companies (Dropbox, Box) that let you share and store files online.
But toward the end of our interview, he dropped an interesting tidbit that, in retrospect, hinted at the source of what has been plaguing Evernote ever since. Still, the conversation was mostly upbeat, with Libin talking about his vision for building a company that would last 100 years.
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