Perhaps you’ve been meaning to buy a ticket to our big Silicon Valley event with Evernote CEO Phil Libin tonight, but you keep forgetting. Well, now’s the time to take action. We still have some tickets available online for $50 ($40 if you work for a startup)—but a walk-in ticket tonight will cost you $95.
Of course, if you’re one of Evernote’s 20 million users, you’d be very unlikely to forget something like that. The company is all about remembering the important stuff in your life—hence the elephant logo.
Now, if your promise to customers is that you’ll protect their digital memories forever, then you sort of have to plan for the long term. But that’s not how most startups think—they’re usually focused on the next product release, not the next decade or the next century. So the message Libin has been sharing lately about wanting Evernote to last 100 years or more is logical, but at the same time pretty radical.
That’s why I wanted to get Libin on stage at an Xconomy event—so that I could ask him how a startup CEO manages to think about the long-term even as he deals with the here-and-now demands of employees, customers, and investors.
And when you have an entrepreneur who says he’s not too concerned about getting acquired or planning an IPO, it takes a pretty special type of investor to back him. That’s why I also wanted to bring in Gary Little from Morgenthaler Ventures, one of Evernote’s earliest backers, as well as Roelof Botha from Sequoia Capital, which recently acquired a larger stake in Evernote by buying out previous investor Troika Dialog.
It’s this very pattern of secondary trading—with newer investors buying out older ones—that could help Evernote get really big without having to worry about going public. Tonight, I’ll be asking Little and Botha how working with Evernote is different from working with their other portfolio companies—and whether Evernote’s serial fundraising strategy can work more broadly.
Of course, we’ll also geek out a bit about Evernote itself, which is one of my favorite online tools. So register now. Meanwhile, for your reading pleasure, here’s an archive of all of my major pieces about Evernote.
Can Evernote Make You Into a Digital Leonardo? (July 2008)
Online Notebook Smackdown: Evernote vs. Springpad (April 2010)
The Rise of Evernote: An Interview with CEO Phil Libin (June 2010)
Evernote Opens a Trunk of Goodies for Online-Notes Fans (July 2010)
Sequoia Leads $20 Million Round for Evernote—Q&A with CEO Phil Libin (October 2010)
Xconomist of the Week: Phil Libin, Evernote, and the Death of the Exit (October 2011)
“Independent of Exit”: Talking Evernote with Morgenthaler’s Gary Little (January 2012)
Evernote Wants to Make Your Memories More Magical (January 2012)
How to Be a 100-Year Startup (January 2012)
