Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Can your diary organize your professional contacts or remind you to pick up a carton of milk? Not yet. But in the future it may, with the help of Evernote, a digital notebook that wants to be your diary, personal assistant and collaboration tool rolled into one.

The Evernote tagline “Remember everything” holds a certain charm. But chief executive Phil Libin wants to go one step further in actually boosting your cognitive abilities. ”We want to make you smarter,” Libin said, referring to the popular note-taking service as an “external brain.”

Evernote has a worldwide reach, with 45 million people adopting this easy-to-use notetaking tool. The company has raised over $250 million in five funding rounds, led by investors like Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler, and Valiant Capital Partners. And while previous reports have suggested Evernote plans a 2013 or 2014 public offering, Libin told us that an IPO is even further off that that: In 2015 or 2016, he says.

For most Evernote devotees, the app is a way to keep track of life’s minutia, meeting minutes, favorite web pages, and other things. But one particular customer struck a chord with Libin. Colorado Springs resident Patrick Jones suffers from a traumatic brain injury that has led to profound short-term memory loss. According to a blog post from a couple years ago, Jones uses Evernote to “piece together the basic memory flows we take for granted.”

VentureBeat invited Libin to our office to discuss his vision for his company’s future, which includes a new COO, and the host of new features designed to appeal to busy professionals. And don’t miss the short video interview on company culture at the bottom.

VentureBeat: Here’s a deceptively tough question to kick things off. How would you describe Evernote to your grandma?

Phil Libin: It’s hard to have a pithy one-line answer. Believe me, I’ve heard countless pitches. I say something like, “We want to make you smarter.” It’s a set of products and goals to give you an external brain. It’s a way to help you remember everything.

VentureBeat: Interesting. Have you looked into brain-training tools like Lumosity?

Libin: Yes, we were talking with them about making some games. I was a subscriber for a while, but I’d have to look into the science to see if it’s conclusive. But it’s the type of thing I could see us doing.

VentureBeat: Evernote has grown so rapidly; do you plan to keep up the pace of innovation?

Libin: Startups that get to our size can get paralyzed and afraid to innovate. But you have to keep innovating quickly until you find something that sticks.

VentureBeat: Can you shed any light on the company’s IPO plans?

Libin: I’ve always been pretty unambiguous. It’s definitely not going to be this year. We want to build a 100-year company and don’t want to be acquired. Going public is the morally correct thing to do, but it’s a step you can get wrong (editor’s note: research has found that most job creation occurs after a company goes public). We have been planning it for a while now and it will happen in 2015 or 2016.

VentureBeat: How about acquisitions? You’ve made about five or six so far. …

Libin: We bought five small teams and will keep our eye out. The size of the companies we acquire will get larger as we spend more on mergers and acquisitions. Our criteria is to look for products that we would want to use.

VentureBeat: I love that my Evernote notebook is just for me — it feels so personal. Will that change as you add more collaboration tools?

Libin: We used to say that Evernote is antisocial. But sometimes, when you are trying to achieve something, you’ll do it in a small group. With Evernote Business, we want to make it easier for five or 10 people to collaborate. But it can also still be private and all about you.

VentureBeat: Evernote is great for storing notes — but will there be any actionable or automated reminders?

Libin: Yes, we’re adding intelligence to the things you capture in Evernote. When you meet someone, for instance, you can push a button in the Evernote Hello app and it will automatically send an email saying, “Great to meet you and here’s my contact info.”

VentureBeat: I can see the upside to data analysis. But is their any kind of guarantee that my private thoughts won’t be packaged and sold to advertisers?

Libin: We just changed our legal terms of service to make it as clear as possible. Your data is yours; it’s not ours and we will never make money off of it!

For more, check out our video on Libin’s shift to a more user-centric design.

Silicon Valley better watch out.

A few weeks ago I was invited to Helsinki as a guest of Finnish investment fund Vision+. Soon after landing, word spread that a scion of Sean “Diddy” Combs had arrived in town, and I was shown the red carpet. (I used to work with Diddy.) I spent seven whirlwind days taking meetings and partying hearty with some of the best and brightest tech companies and startups that Finland had to offer, including folks from leading game publisher Rovio.

One of my favorite finds was Hitlantis, which has one of the most unique graphical user interfaces I have seen from any music startup. With over 6,000 independent bands already using the platform, platforms like Myspace, Spotify, and Google Music could be bolstered by acquiring this unique startup. As a lover of music and games, I fell for Hitlantis’ unique Music Plasma-like GUI, which enables music discoverability that eludes most of us on Vevo, Pandora, and Spotify. Instead of a list of “Featured Artists”, Hitlantis allows for actual contextually relevant discovery.

Hitlantis' music-discovery interface

One of my other favorites, Kiosked, may end up changing the way online retailers operate. With its distributed content retail model, Kiosked lets consumers engage a retail transaction through any Kiosked-enabled image on the web. Imagine a politician using every image of himself online as a way to raise capital for his political ambitions. Imagine Lady Gaga selling her music through every image of herself on the web. This company looks like a game changer.

One of my favorite nights in Helsinki started with a dinner hosted by my hosts at Finpro. To put Finpro in context, the organization consists of 66 offices in 45 countries offering Finnish companies local market knowhow in all major global markets.They work closely with Tekes—the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation—and the other key actors in the Finnish innovation system to offer Finnish startups a kick start for their international growth. Their presence isn’t limited to tech, though, so I had the pleasure of meeting Jukka Hilden a partner at Rabbit Films at dinner that evening. Although I tend to stay away from physical comedy troops, Rabbit Films and their Dudesons content franchise have shown that with an aggressive and unique approach, a Finnish media company can reach a global audience. Their partnerships with US-based production companies and development deals with content aggregrators across the globe are a model for any fledgling production company.

As a gamer and mediaphile, I always find it a rush to discover the next generation Napsters, Spotifies, and Guitar Hero’s. Along those lines, SongHi is one startup I thought was particularly interesting.

SongHi is a social music game where you can earn fame by making your own songs, customizing your own virtual music character, decorating your personal home, and sharing all of this with your friends in a game-like environment. This game certainly engaged my creative juices. In SongHi you don’t need to know anything about playing musical instruments, composing, or notes. You can create music easily by ear with only a click of the mouse.

As in the more progressive virtual environments, consumers might even run into their favourite bands and artists in SongHi and join their music-making competitions!

In the non-music space I found two startups particularly interesting: Web of Trust and Fair Tourist.

Web of Trust, the first crowdsourced safe-web-browsing tool grades websites on their safety and lack of harmful spyware and virus’. With almost 30,000,000 users, this platform is creating a web within the web of safe sites.

Their safe surfing browser tool is easy-to-use, fast, and completely free.

Fair Tourist is the first platform that encourages sustainable travel across the globe.This platform empowers travelers, tourism businesses, as well as investors and non-profit organizations to create a community that takes action and changes the face of tourism. The community has a shared vision of a new era of tourism. In its vision, the interests of the local communities, tourists, businesses, and the environment intertwine creating a sustainable world for travelers to experience. Fairtourist aims to become the leading platform to fulfil this vision.

Destinations get the necessary funds for their development projects; the conservation of the environment, restoration of precious historic monuments and places, and capacity building projects to manage tourism in a sustainable way. The traveler gets an enhanced experience, and sustainability is improved.

My trip to Helsinki wouldn’t have been complete, of course, without the serendipity of staying in the same hotel as Pop Icons Maroon 5. After running into the band at dinner, I ended up at their concert at Helsinki’s “Cable Factory” along with thousands of screaming Finns. Quite an unexpected treat.

168 hours in Helsinki was slightly more expensive than a week in NYC or SF, but the quality of the restaurants combined with the high quality of the nightlife provided by groups like Night People Group and venues like Ari Cocktail Lounge created a perfect environment to engage the next generation of startups to follow Finnish success stories like Rovio and Nokia.

For the roving tech traveler, I give Helsinki an 8.8/10 on the business and play scale. Other aspiring Silicon Valley clones will have a hard time competing, so you better get started!

Kwasi Asare was the mastermind behind Sean “Diddy” Combs’ new media empire, overseeing the development and marketing for Diddy’s brands, including Ciroc, Sean John Fragrance, Sean John Clothing, and Bad Boy Entertainment.

He has executed global marketing campaigns for artists and brands such as Ice Cube, Prince, Pharrell Williams, Wu Tang Clan, LL Cool J, Outkast, Gnarls Barkley, John Legend, Snoop Dogg, Mary J Blige,The Roots,The Fugees, Ricky Martin, Funkadelic, Cypress Hill, Diageo, Sony Music, and Estee Lauder.

He is currently CEO of FIGHTER Interactive, Inc, which builds celebrity and brand-driven games and applications for the Facebook, iPhone, Android, and iPad platforms.

He began his career as an investment banker at Citigroup’s Salomon Smith Barney.

[Helsinki photo credit: Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple fans are nowhere near done paying their respects to the man who arguably jump-started the smartphone revolution.

Dozens of fans are still gathering at the Apple retail store in New York City and across the country to pay their respects to Steve Jobs, the company’s former chief executive officer, who passed away on Wednesday at age 56. Some left notes, some left flowers, some left apples and personal messages. A security official on staff outside the Apple Store said that was the largest the crowd had grown to so far. When Jobs died, many also converged on Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Calif., and left flowers and tributes at Jobs’ house in Palo Alto, Calif.

Jobs was known as a visionary, creating products that he knew people would be fighting tooth and nail to get their hands on. They were products you didn’t even know you needed: the tablet market was basically non-existent before the introduction of the iPad, and the iPhone is now one of the most popular smartphones in the world and is an industry standard. Jobs arguably jump-started the smartphone revolution with the iPhone and its associated App Store. “It’s a phone, it’s an iPod, and it’s an Internet communicator — are you getting it yet?” he said on stage when he unveiled the iPhone.

President Barack Obama said perhaps Jobs’ greatest tribute to his success was that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. It might be an even greater tribute that all the events honoring his life have been documented by those same tools. Many people present at the vigils were sending tweets, emailing, calling, taking photos or messaging friends — on their iPhones.

“There are few people who could build something so successful and so magical and do more than (Jobs,)” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told me. “It’s humbling as an entrepreneur, more than anything else, to see what he’s done.”

[Photo credit: Matthew Lynley]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Trigger-happy investors have historically been prone to trading on Apple whenever news about its head honcho, Steve Jobs, arose. But in the wake of his death yesterday, shares of Apple have only risen 1.5 percent as of 7:30 a.m. today, only dropping 0.12 percent at their lowest level from the company’s opening price.

Apple, the most valuable technology company in the world, is back to vying with Exxon-Mobil to claim the title of most valuable company overall, although it’s value fell on Tuesday when the company unveiled an incremental upgrade to its iPhone smartphone lineup instead of a much-anticipated major upgrade.

Apple is also noticeably absent from the options market, where a move like this would typically send traders into a frenzy of speculation over what direction the company will go in. Only two significant put orders (a bet that the company’s share price will fall) crossed the Chicago Board Options Exchange as of 7 a.m. Thursday — each for fewer than 700 shares and at a modest strike price. At the same time, a much larger call order has already crossed the wire at a strike price of $385.

“This is business as usual for Apple, it would be a mistake to count them out,” Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg told VentureBeat. “Yes, the tech world has lost a significant icon and a visionary, but Apple is more than just one person — Jobs built something truly special that was much greater than himself.”

Jobs was known as a visionary, creating products that he knew people would be fighting tooth and nail to get their hands on. They were products you didn’t even know you needed: the tablet market was basically non-existent before the introduction of the iPad, and the iPhone is now one of the most popular smartphones in the world and is an industry standard. Jobs arguably jump-started the smartphone revolution with the iPhone and its associated App Store. ”It’s a phone, it’s an iPod, and it’s an Internet communicator — are you getting it yet?” he said on stage when he unveiled the iPhone.

His track record is undeniable. As VentureBeat’s Dylan Tweney wrote yesterday, “The Macintosh was the first commercially successful computer to use a graphical user interface and a mouse, a decade after the technologies had debuted at Xerox PARC and SRI. The iPhone threw out the book on how to make a smartphone and reoriented an entire industry around touchscreens and apps, well after touchscreens first appeared in PDAs like the PalmPilot. The iPad succeeded in making a popular tablet computer after Windows-based computer manufacturers had tried to do so for nearly a decade.”

Apple regularly smashes expectations for its quarterly performance and its press events are almost Hollywood-esque, with live reporting and glamour. In Silicon Valley, working for Apple — like Google, Twitter and others — is worn as a badge of honor, like attending an Ivy League school.

“There are few people who could build something so successful and so magical and do more than (Jobs,)” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told me. “It’s humbling as an entrepreneur, more than anything else, to see what he’s done.”

In fact, I rarely use the word but instead ask the question: ‘What do you hope the future will hold for your company and customers?’ What’s so remarkable about this question is that it asks an entrepreneur to take a perspective on what the world will look like several years down the road. It also drives every decision thereafter.

Most startups have a hard time defining a vision because they’ve seen visions from larger companies that seem so abstract. For example, here is a vision statement from a Fortune 500 company that I’ll leave unnamed, “Powered by Innovation, Guided by Integrity, We Help Our Customers Achieve Their Most Challenging Goals.” Generic visions like this don’t inspire or drive action and inevitably get tucked away in an employee’s desk.

Successful visions bring a unique perspective and are delivered with enough clarity and conviction to ensure they stick.

Without clarity of vision, your company is on a journey with the destination unknown. I experienced the effect of unclear visions when I worked for Yahoo! in early 2000.

Yahoo’s vision had something to do with providing users with delightful web experiences. It’s pathetic I can’t remember the details and I bet you’d find very few who could in those days. (In fact, I did a web search and couldn’t find anything specific on the subject.) As a product leader at the time, this lack of clarity allowed me to operate in a silo that didn’t fully consider the company’s overall vision. It also opened up the door for everyone to act reactively to every new competitive threat.

Conversely, almost every Yahoo! employee at the time knew Google’s vision, “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” You can make an argument that the current market cap of Yahoo! (~$20B) vs. Google (~$140B) tells a lot about the impact of this vision clarity.

But, now that I’ve told you how important vision is, I’m going to seemingly contradict myself. I’ve never started a company from a blank piece of paper with what I’ve defined as a vision.

Instead, every startup that I’ve worked on began with a ‘perspective’ that over time grew into an opportunity, which ultimately translated into a vision.

A perspective faces the realities of a market and defines an audience, problem and customer experience that opens up an opportunity in the market. When approached in an iterative fashion, where perspectives and opportunities are revisited, entrepreneur’s visions can morph to cast a wider net to inspire bigger and greater things. This is what I call the vision wedge approach.

Let me provide an example…

In early 2009 I started working with Robert Acker, the CEO of a new startup called Aha Mobile. Robert came with a perspective that was developed after years of working on consumer solutions for autos (like Dash and XM satellite radio).

His belief was that drivers had few (if any) tools that were designed for use at 65mph other than the basic car radio. Everyone was focusing on designing for the desktop (where you have a large display and keyboard) or a two-inch interface for mobile phones – both of which assume you have the user’s full attention (not a good thing when you are driving).

While some early attempts at voice recognition let you do some things hands-free, they often require extensive cognitive processing as users try to walk through menus in their minds and answer questions like “did you mean A, B, or C?” This takes their minds, if not their eyes, off of the road.

Thus, there was an opportunity to solve the problem of helping drivers safely receive important information about the world around them that no one else appeared to be focused on. Aha began by focusing on this initial opportunity, with a vision of making drivers “smarter.”

However, the company later realized that there was a potential bigger vision of becoming part of millions of drivers’ daily commutes or errands by improving their driving experiences. That’s a vision that’s big enough to build a company on – and big enough to attract enough investment to make it happen.

Both the opportunities and the related higher-level vision help drive daily decisions at a company. Continuously checking and tweaking the opportunities helps make sure the company is focused on solving a problem that customers care about.

Periodically checking the vision makes sure that capitalizing on the opportunities will lead it to a place the company and its investors still want to be.

Image by pablokorona via Flickr.

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