Phil Libin: Making Bets and Getting Lucky

At a high level, our goal with Evernote is to be 100% buzzword compliant. So whenever the important new buzzwords come around, whether it's social or tablet or at some point it'll be olfactory. That's going to be a big thing. We'd be like, yes, we're there. At a higher level, we got extreme. Somebody actually asked me recently in an interview, I, how did you guys predict the success of smartphones and tablets? Because in 2007, actually, it wasn't successful. How did you guys predict it? And I said, well, we didn't predict it, we bet on it. We made a fairly foolish gamble. It's like, how did you guys predict that it would come out 35 black if it did? Well, we didn't. We just bet on it. And we got lucky. We bet right. We bet right that smartphones were going to be huge. We didn't even know about app stores. We just got really lucky on that. We bet right on tablets. As soon as we heard about the iPad, we were like, yeah, we're on that. I think my official quote, I got contacted at that point, I think by, I forget which magazine, they wanted quotes from CEOs about whether or not you're thinking of supporting the new iPad, the new Apple tablet. This was like when Apple first announced it, but it was a few months before they launched it. And they ran this article with quotes from other CEOs, and the quotes were all very nuanced. It was like a paragraph or two about, well, we think this and this and it'll be exciting to see this. And my quote was, I was quoted in print saying, yeah, we're going to support the hell out of it. In fact, the day that Apple announced it, we obviously couldn't get them ahead of time or anything, but they published the physical, the dimensions. And so we had cardboard. We cut out cardboard into the perfect physical dimensions of an iPad and we carried around these cardboard iPads, and that's how we built the whole interaction design. We put them in and out of our bags. We carried them. We photoshopped pieces of paper with where UI elements could go, and we stuck it on there and we tried to figure out, well, do my thumbs go here or do they go there? And we bet on this being huge and it paid out. In fact, I didn't see Evernote running on the iPad until I stood in line with everyone else and got the first iPad and saw, wow, it actually runs pretty well on it better than it did on cardboard, although the cardboard was lighter and it had better battery life. It.