(2015-08-04) Ferriss What Evernote's Phil Libin Learned from Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and Others

Tim Ferriss: What Evernote's Phil Libin Learned from Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and Others. We met up, and I remember, you took a photograph of the menu, which was on the wall. And shortly thereafter, you were able to search all of the text. And I was like, okay, I get it. And then, I think I started with depaperfying or trying to remove the clutter of my house at that time. So it was all of the business cards, all of the legal paperwork, accounting paperwork. I just scanned it because I knew I didn’t have to really organize it per se if I could search by the text that was scanned.

Well, we started out as wanting to build your second brain

there was a team of people that were headed up by this guy named Stepan Pachikov who is this eccentric, genius, inventor, entrepreneur, Russian/American guy. And he had a team of people that go all the way back to the Apple Newton days

And I was just finishing up with my second start up. And my core team started thinking about what do we want to do next? We need to start a new company.

And our whole insight was let’s do something for us because our first two companies, we made for other people (scratch your own itch)

we had to wake up every morning thinking what does the customer want, what does the market want? And we got tired of that. We kind of said screw what the market wants. How about what do we want? Let’s just build that

This was 2007. So we thought about well, all of this new social stuff is actually kind of cool. We like that a lot. Maybe we should build a social network. And we thought that’s crazy because you can’t compete with My Space. My Space is in that market. We’re too late to do anything meaningful there. So we gave up on that

And then, we said what about productivity? All of the productivity tools around us just feel old and crappy and out of date and largely irrelevant. What if we make the new version of that, and that we kind of fell in love with

Do you have any memories of particular a-ha moments

One of them tweeted that they were a priest, and they loved using Evernote to gather information to write their Sunday sermon.

And then, later that day, some totally different person tweeted, not to the first person, just independently, that he loved Evernote because it made it easy to keep track of all of his sins so that he could efficiently confess every Sunday. And I remember thinking, yes, Now, we’re onto something. We got both ends of the spectrum. We got the priests. We got the sinners. We’re like fully, horizontally integrated

that’s still the hardest thing for us is people don’t know how to get started

I live in it. I do everything in it. Mostly, I use Evernote to run Evernote. We built it for ourselves and are still building it for ourselves. So all of the day to day things that I need for my job are in Evernote. I primarily use Evernote for work stuff. But I primarily only do work stuff. I don’t really have a work/life balance. So I used to have more hobbies and skills.

I’m a plausibly okay cook. And so I had a whole bunch of recipes and techniques in Evernote for that. I was trying to learn Japanese at one point, and I was using Evernote for that

Probably, the person that I kind of most want to be like when I grow up is Reid Hoffman. I’m just a huge fan of Reid and kind of the way that he thinks about things and how thoughtfully he’s organized his life and his companies

I ran into Jeff Bezos a bit later and was kind of saying I just got to talk with Elon, and I’m super excited about Mars. I really hope that one day I can go. And Bezos looks at me and goes, “Mars is stupid.” And I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “Yeah. Once we get off of the planet, the last thing we want to do is go to another gravity. (gravity well)

Mikitani-son says this really cool thing. He’s got this law, he calls it the law of three and ten or something, which is basically that every single thing in your company breaks every time you roughly triple in size

start ups get in trouble because you kind of blow through these break points really quickly. And so you should constantly, perpetually be thinking about how to reinvent yourself and how to treat the culture

But then, big companies get in trouble for exactly the opposite reason because let’s say you get to 10,000 people in your company. And, theoretically, you figured out how to run things at 10,000. Well, your next big point isn’t until 30,000. But you’re probably not going to get the 30,000 ever, or certainly not within a few years. It might take a decade or more for a company to go from 10,000 to 30,000. But no one feels like waiting around for a decade or more to reinvent yourself. And so big companies are constantly pushing all of this bullshit innovation initiatives because they feel like we have to do something.

How long will it take a company to fundamentally get off of email?

And you can measure how long like a fundamental corporate change will take based on just the number of job cycles that it requires. So let’s just say that something as profound as getting rid of email will take like three entire cycles of people changing their job.

And this explains why things happen at such different paces in Silicon Valley versus on the east coast versus in Europe because the average tenure of professionals of knowledge workers is really shrinking and is much shorter here than in lots of other places. The average tenure of a Google employee right now is something like 1.1 years.

we, at Evernote, are building software. We’re building products for modern knowledge workers. How do we embrace this? How do we build products for these types of people? And that’s a very different idea than Microsoft Office. How do you build something that is meant for people who have a really compressed job cycle, who think of themselves as freelancers, even if they’re part of a company? And how do you make that great?

Let’s talk for a second about Reid Hoffman.

He just has a very... to me, it’s exactly the right balance of kind of big picture, philosophically oriented ideas that are really grounded and practical and that you can apply

I think the best thing that I’ve read from him is actually more recent. It was his last book, The Alliance, which really has sharpened my thinking significantly around this exact idea that we just talked about. This idea of having a relationship between companies and employees that’s more honest and that’s about recognizing what the actual new realities of the world are and trying to embrace them. And he’s writing this book really from kind of an HR perspective. I really read it as a product design perspective. I read it as how do we make products for this reality?

to me, Evernote doesn’t really feel like an app. I think of email, messaging, web, and Evernote as kind of the same order of things. So it doesn’t even feel like I’m using an app when I use it. I’m just using it.

things that I use all of the time, I don’t think of as apps. I don’t think of Uber as an app. I use Uber quite a bit. It doesn’t really feel like an app to me. Tim Ferriss: Is it a utility? Or how do you compartmentalize app? What does that feel like when you do use an app? Phil Libin: It’s like a service, I guess. One of my product hypotheses is that apps are going away. The concept of an app is going to become a lot less important in a few years than it is now.

Do you use, personally, physical notebooks?

Phil Libin: I do, yeah

our partnership with Moleskin is we use any notebook. Or a Moleskin notebook just works really well since we’ve optimized our software for it. And you just write and then take a picture with Evernote of the page, and it automatically gets cleaned up and indexed and scanned and put in context with everything else.

We actually make stickers that say I’m not being rude, I’m taking notes in Evernote that you can stick on the back of your laptop

if you use a notebook, if you write in a notebook while you’re talking to someone, they feel like, man, this person really cares about me

when I’m in meetings, maybe a third of the time, I’m actually taking notes. And what I’ll do is I’ll just write specific words or phrases that I know if I see later will actually pop the whole meeting into my head...cues.

before I get up, I’ll just take a picture. And then, I know I have it. I know it’s time stamped. It’s geo stamped. It’s associated with a calendar entry

When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind?

Phil Libin: Wow. I don’t know. I don’t know if my mind works like that.

Tim Ferriss: What do you mean?

Phil Libin: You just said successful, and I didn’t pop into a person.

I immediately flashed on product. The first thing that popped into my mind when you said successful was iPhone. Kind of crazy. I guess I don’t really think of people as successful.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a new answer. I like this. So let’s explore that. Why the iPhone?

Phil Libin: Well, maybe it’s more why not people because I guess I don’t think of success as being the most interesting characteristic of a person. A lot of success is luck.*

I think a lot of people go through life either playing a first person game or a third person game. And I don’t think there’s any one of those is right or wrong. I just think, for example, if you look at most politicians, like Bill Clinton, whatever you think of him, he’s clearly playing a third person game. Like he is aware of what he looks like in any scene. And he’s sort of optimizing for that and optimizing for how to do everything correctly because he’s seeing himself

then, there are other people who are clearly playing the first person game where they’re kind of oblivious about themselves in the world. They have things they want to accomplish. They know the way they want the world to bend. But they don’t really have a perception of them

I really think that I’m fundamentally a first person gamer

Who am I most like? What do you I look like in this scene? What do I look like from here? How do I change my outfit? Those are things that interest me less than most of the world around me. And that probably makes me weak at all sorts of things where I should have better self awareness. And it probably makes me stronger at other things.