In this talk Phil Libin, co‑founder of Evernote, explains how to create a company that can survive and stay innovative for a century. He argues that the core challenge is aligning the often‑conflicting interests of founders, employees, customers, and investors, and that misaligned incentives are the primary cause of failure. To achieve alignment, Evernote adopts a user‑funded revenue model that avoids ads, data‑mining, or affiliate traffic, ensuring the product serves customers rather than the opposite. Libin emphasizes that culture is effectively the product of a company over its lifetime; a design‑first culture must be deliberately crafted, from office layout to promotional items, and is reflected in every output. He illustrates this with the story of designing and installing a massive Evernote building sign, showing how cultural priorities can create operational friction but also reinforce identity. Finally, he rejects the zero‑sum mindset that dominates startup discourse, arguing that disruption is a by‑product, not a goal, and that value creation can vastly exceed any value displaced. The talk blends strategic principles with concrete anecdotes to outline a roadmap for building a sustainable, innovative, and long‑lasting startup.
Chapters
How do we build a 100-year startup? Our goal at Evernote from the beginning has been build a 100-year startup. We want to build a company that's around in 100 years and a company that's still a startup in 100 years. By startup, I don't mean small and constantly running out of money. I mean huge and flush with cash. No, I mean huge because I want to have resources. but I mean innovative. I mean a company that still makes products that people are in love with, that still has creative ideas. And for us, how do we build a 100-year company? The main thing is this. So think about all of these different threads in your business. These are all of the interests. You have interests from like what do your founders want, what do your employees want, what do customers want, what do investors want. And these are all tangled up. And we want to untangle them. We want to align them. We want to make them run in parallel. So if you look at where we think we are right now, it's kind of right at that point where they're starting to come together. Every decision we make is about aligning interests. Because I think fundamental conflicts of interest is what kills most companies. There's many examples of this. I'll give you just one quick one. This is why our revenue model at Evernote is direct. So we don't show ads. We're not big data. We don't data mine anything you put in. Drive affiliate traffic. We could. And we could make money doing this, because we have enough data now where we can actually make decent money. But we don't. And we specifically publish our 3 laws of data that says we will never do this. Our money only comes from you as a user when we give you an experience that you feel like paying for, where you're like, yep, this is good enough. Hurry up and take my money. The reason we do that, even though it costs us short-term revenue, is because it aligns the interest of what we want to build with the customer, with what the customers want to use. If we were, for example, showing ads, we would have a fundamental conflict of interest. We would have to build a product that was good enough to get you to use it and to trust it, but we would also have to figure out a way to make that valuable when we're reselling your data or showing you targeted ads or something like that. And it's pretty hard to do one thing well, even harder to do two things well, and it sets up this conflict where we might be able to get away with it for a while, but it's unlikely that we could stretch this out for 100 years. So for us, alignment is the most important thing. And if you're trying to build a sustainable company, a robust company, I think alignment is the most important thing. And if you're not trying to build a sustainable company and a robust company, then again, I don't know why you're bothering. Because it's just as much work to build something you're going to sell in 3 years than it is to build something that you're going to keep for the rest of your life. Measured over the life of the company, the culture is the product. This is the second most important thing of the wha-how. So it's all about culture. The culture in many ways is more important than the product measured over the lifetime of the company because the product is today's product. The culture is the next 100 products. When you look at any product, and you can learn to do this pretty well, in fact some of you are probably already good at it, when you look at a product, anything, and you kind of squint at it the right way and you hold it up to the light, you can see in it a direct reflection of the company that made it. You can see the office layout reflected in the company. You can see whether they have cubes. You can see how happy people are. There is a reflection. There is a stamp of the company and the culture that makes a product visible on every single product. And you cannot hide it. No product designer can buff that away. You're going to have a reflection of your company on the products you make. And the only way to deal with it is to have that be a reflection of a beautiful company. So the culture is the most important part, and there's many different ways that you can think about culture, but the most important one is to think about culture. So what we try to do is we try to have a culture of design. We try to have a culture that says designing the experience is the most important thing in the universe. And to have a culture that embraces that, we need to design that culture. Like, that doesn't happen automatically. It doesn't happen for free. We have to think about designing the culture. In exactly the same way as we think about designing the product by exactly the same people. And this reflected in many things that we try to do, how we pick our lunch program, how we pick benefits. One quick example is about a year ago, we moved into this really sweet new building right off of 101 in Redwood City. Some of you probably have driven by it and seen the Evernote sign. And I think, Adriaan, you and I talked about this. So originally, so we moved into this building. And I'm like, oh man, this is a great location for a sign because it's totally visible from either direction on 101. It's right off 101. We've got to put up a sign. But I'm not going to go to a sign company and have them make a sign. I'm not like Joann's Fabrics or something. I never know. I want it to look great. And we have great designers. And this isn't my slides. This is something they can actually get behind. So I went to our chief designer and said, hey, can you make us a building sign? And he was like, yeah, totally. That's going to be awesome. And he made the sign, and it was beautiful. It was great. It was fantastic. It was like the best sign we've ever seen. Turns out that the guys who make our app icons and our fonts, they don't really know much about building signs. And so the sign that we designed, we actually had it made, and it turned out it was like 8 times heavier than that building could support. Because we didn't think about it. And so it took 9 months. It took 9 months longer than we were supposed to to get that building sign up. Because we needed to structurally reinforce the building with more iron or steel or something. And that required additional building permits from Redwood City. And we had to explain why we were hanging this much weight off the side of the building. 9 months it took to get it. Was it worth it? Yeah, it was worth it. It's an awesome sign. Drive by it right now. But when the sign was finally going up, I was so excited that I tweeted. I took a picture of it and I tweeted. I'm like, oh, Evernote, we're finally getting our big sign. Most people tweeted back like, hey, congratulations, it's great, looks great. But of course, there's always people, there's always the haters. And so one guy tweets back, can't believe Evernote, you guys are wasting your time on that sign rather than fixing bugs in the Mac product. And my first reaction was I was going to tweet back, and I was going to be like, pfft, no, it's not exactly the same people. But then I'm like, oh, you know what? It is. I'm like, you got us, you got us. This is totally true. It totally is the same people. People that could have been working on the Mac product, and instead I had them work on the sign. I didn't say anything. I just shut up. I know when the critics are right. And they were right in this case. I still think it was worth it. So we try to explicitly have the design of the culture as part of it. And part of our culture at Evernote is you get to design everything. We make Evernote business socks as a promotional giveaway. For Evernote Business. We made Evernote Business socks because conditions were perfect. And we designed those socks. And they're great. They're like the best socks you'll ever get, if you can ever manage to still get them. Lastly, and this is the most important thing of the wha-how, is refuse to play the zero-sum game. This is the thing that pisses me off more than anything else, is the zero-sum mentality of business. The zero-sum game, you guys know what it is. It's a game when if I win, you lose. There's only so much win to go around. And the way that most people talk about business and startups is fundamentally zero-sum. The way that most people talk about business is using sports metaphors or war metaphors. They're fundamentally zero-sum. They're about winners and losers. They're about killing people. They're about beating things. The zero-sum game isn't actually right. Also, people talk about disruption. Disruption is a side effect of successful entrepreneurship. It isn't the goal. People fetishize this idea of disruption as if disruption is what you're trying to do. When you're a startup entrepreneur, you're not trying to disrupt anything. I mean, you are, I guess, if you're a sociopath. But it's not like you're trying to disrupt something. You're trying to make something new and wonderful. You're trying to add value to the world. And yeah, you'll probably eliminate value from somebody else who's doing it incorrectly, but the value that you bring to the world is not proportional to the value that you take away. It's not like you're moving value around. It's not like the value that Henry Ford brought to the world with cars was exactly equal to the value he took away from the horse industry. There's more. He brought hundreds of thousands of times more value to the world by doing it. It's not like the value that Facebook created in market cap is equal to the market cap they took away from MySpace. Right? It's a lot more. The disruption isn't the goal. It's a side effect. And if you think about it as a non-zero-sum game, it kind of becomes obvious.
