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Most start-up entrepreneurs talk about exiting the company within five to seven years, but not Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote.
“We’re creating the 100-year start-up,” Libin said. He also calls it “The Forever Start-up.”
Evernote explicitly does not have an exit strategy, Libin said. He doesn’t want to sell the company or take it public or merge with someone else. He’s building something that he loves and he wants his customers and employees and everyone else to love it too.
That’s a pretty bold strategy for a Silicon Valley-based technology company. But the 100-year startup appears to resonate with the least likely crowd, the venture capitalists, which have given Evernote $100 million. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Troika Dialog and DOCOMO Capital.
“I may not be the CEO 100 years from now but I would like to be involved in the company,” Libin said. “There’s no exit strategy. That permeates everything we do.”
Libin spoke at the official opening of its first U.S. satellite office in Austin on Thursday.
“Austin is the ideal place to try this first,” Libin said. “Austin is a great place to build things. Austin is a crappy place to raise money.”
But Evernote already has its money in the bank and now it needs talent to create and expand its product line. That’s why Austin and Evernote make the perfect fit, Libin said.
Evernote also has offices in Tokyo and Moscow. And in the next few months, Evernote will open additional offices in Europe, Beijing and Singapore. Libin believes in going where the most talented people live. He wants to keep the “studio” offices small and nimble like start-ups but connected to each other as part of a larger mission. That mission is to put Evernote in the hands of everyone on the planet.
A Japanophil, Libin explained that Japan has many companies that are 100 years old. The country and its people believe in long term planning. He wants to combine that business longevity and ethics with a start-up’s ability to quickly change and adapt to the marketplace.
Evernote’s business model is not “clever” or “complex,” Libin said. Its model is to build something great that people will pay for, he said.
“We want Evernote to be a tool, like a hammer is a tool,” Libin said. “The right tools change your brain.”
“With Evernote, we want you to know you’ll never have to forget anything again,” Libin said.
Evernote is a free application that lets people take and save notes. It also offers a premium version that costs $5 a month or $45 per year. Its paid product offers bigger upload capacity, greater sharing options, a note history, better search tools and no ads. Evernote has more than 17 million customers worldwide and of those about 800,000 pay to use the product.
“Our product becomes more valuable over time,” Libin said. “People hate to be forced to pay for things. But people love to pay for things they love.”
In the first month, less than 1 percent of Evernote users pay for the product, but by the third year, more than 20 percent are paying, Libin said.
“We want people to use this for the rest of their life,” he said.
Evernote has more than 17 million users worldwide.
“This is all organic growth,” Libin said. “This is word of mouth growth in a little over 3 years.”
Evernote, founded in 2007, has never taken out ads or done traditional marketing. Its never appeared during the half time of the Superbowl like some other technology start-ups.
“Everything we do – all of our efforts – are put into making the best possible products,” Libin said. “We want the first time you hear about Evernote not to come from us, but to come from a buddy in a bar.”
Evernote also recently acquired Skitch, a free app that allows people to draw pictures to communicate ideas. Skitch takes communications back to the stick in the sand concept, Libin said. E-mail has become a frustrating way for many people to communicate, especially visual ideas, he said. Skitch makes it easy, he said. Anyone, who works with their hands, in the blue or white collar industries will like Skitch, Libin said.
The Evernote family of products now includes Evernote, Evernote Peak for education, Skitch and Evernote Clearly, which creates a better reading experience online. Evernote plans to add two more “super-secret mystery” products this winter, Libin said.
Evernote has 115 employees, tripling in the last year, Libin said.
“We’re hiring like crazy,” he said.
The Austin Evernote office hopes to have 25 employees by the end of year and has space to hold up to 60 employees, Libin said. It’s mostly looking for product designers, artists, engineers and product managers, but it also hires writers, marketers and others. Libin worked in Austin more than 10 years ago. He lived in Boston and commuted to Austin to head up a company called Engine 5, which he sold to Vignette in 2000.
“We’re really happy to be here,” Libin said. “I really developed a huge sense of respect for Austin and building things.”
It took an hour and half to get everyone checked in at the door of Evernote’s new offices in Northwest Austin Thursday night.
A guy in the parking garage said it was easier to get into a ZZ Top concert than Evernote’s new offices, said Rich Warwick, its vice president and general manager for Austin products.
More than 470 people registered to attend Evernote’s open house, he said. Warwick made some brief remarks at the event, which ran from 6 to 9 p.m.
In August, Evernote announced plans to create a satellite office in Austin. It moved into the fourth floor offices at 6504 Bridgepoint Parkway.
At the event, a couple of bars offered frozen margaritas, beer and wine. A buffet featured Mexican fare like fajitas, beans and rice.
The green-clad tables hosted packets of peanuts sealed with green sticks featuring the Evernote elephant logo and a note “I’m not being rude. I’m taking notes in Evernote.” The Jessie Torrisi & The Please, Please Me band entertained the crowd.
Evernote’s office also includes a virtual window to its Mountain View, California headquarters. Through high-definition video conferencing, people in the two offices can virtually bump into each other in the hallway.
“You can literally talk to the person just like they’re standing there,” Warwick said.
Warwick said he had to hire a team and ship a product by Christmas. And the company is on track, he said. Evernote is hiring software developers and other employees for its Austin office. Their main product is Skitch.
Skitch, a free app for Macs and Android platforms, created for artists and designers, helped Evernote design its new office.
“I could literally communicate what would take me 20 minutes to type out in an e-mail, it took me less than a minute using Skitch,” Warwick said. The app helps people communicate their ideas visually.
Skitch’s creators, Cris Pearson and Keith Lang moved from Australia to Austin to head up the product’s development team. Skitch is Evernote’s first acquisition.
Cody Powell, "Matt Sullivan" and Q Beck of Famigo. (Matt was out sick)
By Susan Lahey
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News
When people write about Austin start-up Famigo’s new tool, the Sandbox, they focus on the benefit: Parents can pass their mobile phones to children, touching the Sandbox icon, and restricting that kid to a safe world of age-appropriate games. In the Sandbox, he can never dial Mom’s boss, delete all her email or send a personal photo to her best client.
And really, that is a great benefit for an app. But that’s not what’s groundbreaking about Famigo. What sets this company apart is that, unlike many developers focused on doing cool stuff with smart phones, Famigo is committed to transforming mobile devices to something that works with families, the way families work. From its apps to its website, written in regular English, its focus is on the organic, dynamic, diverse, messy ecosystem known as a family.
“Most developers aren’t thinking about the individual,” said Bart Bohn, formerly lead advisor at the Austin Technology Incubator and currently co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Ravel Data. “Famigo is focused on a family solution, not a specific piece of content. That’s really unique. Q (Beck, Famigo cofounder) talks about the four quadrants: If you can engage both young and old, men and women, that’s a home run. That’s approaching a family as a family.”
Q Beck (and yes, it’s Q, like Harry S Truman was just S) learned about engaging families from the masters. A Texas native, he studied at Columbia University in New York and at Columbia College and worked in film for companies such as Nickelodeon and Dreamworks. He worked as a product development executive, choosing films to make as well as picking directors, casts and more.
He loves the family as an audience; loves how a movie like The Princess Bride or E.T. can draw family members into a powerful shared experience.
Then, one day, he was staring down at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef from a helicopter. His boss’s kids were sitting behind him, playing games on mobile devices, oblivious to their surroundings. And Beck had an epiphany. Just like great media can pull families together, sometimes media can isolate people. That’s when the seed of Famigo started to germinate.
Beck was a little disillusioned with the film industry: Too little opportunity to produce really original work; too many remakes and predictable plots. He wanted to instigate something powerful for families and push back against forces dividing them. He wasn’t sure how, but he could see that smart phones played a big role in people’s lives.
“These aren’t just phones,” he said, indicating his smart phone. They’re computers. For people born after 2000, they’re the first computer they’ll ever own. I knew I wanted to do something to make this emerging technology work with families.”
He pursued an MBA at the University of Texas. And in his second year, met cofounder Matt Sullivan who had just earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Both of them were interns at the Austin Technology Incubator. Beck and Sullivan knew what they wanted to do, but they needed a software developer to make it work: At a speed-dating event for start-ups at Capital Factory, an Austin-based tech startup accelerator, they met Cody Powell, a Dallas native who had been making “horrible websites” for his dad’s friends since he was 14.
They launched in 2009. At first Famigo created family friendly games for mobile devices, but then the founders saw that game apps were proliferating like kudzu. So they evolved to become the company that helps families find the best apps, the right apps for their kids’ age, the family culture. Famigo has programs that cull apps for various attributes. The good ones are then tested, evaluated and rated by actual human beings working for the company—often interns. Famigo keeps track of what games kids play and the more popular ones rise to the top of the parental review list. Famigo also sends parents a weekly email telling them what games—educational or otherwise—their kids are playing and recommending other games based on what kids already play.
Then, a few weeks ago, Famigo introduced the Sandbox.
As far as Keith Gaddis—father of three-year-old Francis is concerned—the Sandbox is a godsend. A software developer, Gaddis is usually in heavy demand from clients. So he couldn’t quite get why, suddenly, he just stopped getting calls and emails. Turns out Francis had gotten hold of the shiny phone with the colorful buttons and blocked everything. Gaddis was one of the 3,000 or so Beta customers for Sandbox and he chose an android phone partly because he could use Sandbox on it. (The Sandbox doesn’t currently work with iOS though Famigo’s other services do). As of about 10 days after launch, Gaddis is one of about 10,000 Sandbox parents.
“Francis will grab the phone, open it up– he knows what the icon looks like–so he just pushes the button because he knows that’s where his games are…..” Gaddis said. “Once he’s in there, he’s locked in (until a parent releases the phone with a special code).” Nor can kids click on ads on any of the apps. Pushing the ad icon takes them right back to the opening of the Sandbox.
“We supervise what he plays very carefully. This is big win for anybody who has kids who know how to use your phone.”
Most of the Famigo team is young and kidless. Cody Powell has one-year-old August. So the company has created a parent advisory board. Beck sees this as a plus. Back in the movie business, he said, if an executive’s six-year-old fell in love with dinosaurs, there was suddenly a directive from above to make lots of dinosaur movies. With Famigo, they’re not structuring the products and services for one family, but for all families. Families can decide what apps are appropriate or not for their own kids.
Famigo’s working on customizing the experience so each family member can have his or her own profile and set of games, creating a “virtual living room.” The important thing, Beck said, is creating a shared experience, the way Angry Birds has in many families, or Princess Bride did when he was a kid.
Some day, Bohn of Ravel Data said, Famigo’s focus on the customer may become a best practice in the industry, rather than a distinguishing characteristic: “They have that kind of brand potential.”
Eric Katerman, one of the founders of Austin-based Hurricane Party, spoke at Austin Startup Week at the Tiniest Bar in Texas. He said the team at Hurricane Party spent a year building a product that no one really wanted. They’ve since created Foreca.st, which is in Beta testing.
Hurricane Party was party of The Capital Factory’s startup class of 2010. The founders, Rene Pinnell and Katerman received $20,000 in seed stage funding to develop their idea.
At South by Southwest 2010, Hurricane Party generated a lot of buzz. It’s free app for smart phones that helps people plan parties on the fly.
But as Katerman explains in the video, they created something that didn’t gain enough traction in the marketplace.
So they went back to the drawing board to look at what worked and what didn’t work. (The whole adage about failing and learning from it in a startup environment.) That’s when they came up with Foreca.st, an app that lets a select group of friends know where you’re heading for lunch or a party or any kind of get together.
Dave Manzer started Austin-based PROverCoffee.com in 2010. He arranges monthly meet ups with members of the media and the business community.
This interview with Manzer is from Startup Week at the Austin Startup Bazaar. He recently launched MyLocalReporter to help companies in Austin, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth pitch their companies and products to the right local reporters. The service is primarily aimed at small businesses that might not have their own public relations representative or firm. It costs $89 for a basic pitch up to $189 for a professionally crafted pitch.
“Getting in the news, half the battle is knowing which news reporter to pitch to,” Manzer said. “We connect small business with the news media with hopes of getting more media exposure for small businesses.”
By Isadora Vail
Special contributor to SiliconHillsNews.com
Wizards, video game characters, sci-fi villains, super heroes and superstars attended the 2011 Wizard World Comic Con, a local spin off of the world-famous San Diego comic book convention.
Hundreds of pop-culture fans gathered at the Austin Convention Center to trade comic books, buy action figures, and listen to panels with their favorite stars. Perhaps the most impressive, and extensive part of the Austin Comic Con this year, was the artist and creators section. Famous artists such as Phil Ortiz from The Simpsons and Greg Capullo from Batman signed autographs and sold rare pieces of artwork. Dozens more decorated the large ballroom of the convention center with their intricate drawings. The convention ran Friday through Sunday, and drew big names like Kevin Sorbo from “Hercules,” Hayden Panettiere from “Heroes,” as well as James Marsters and Juliet Landau from “Buffy.”
For 24-year-old Cheryl Ball, Comic Con is about sharing a love of “cause play,” dressing up as a favorite character, and acting as that character — think of theater, she says. She was dressed as a Quest Giver from the popular video game “World of Warcraft.” With a yellow icon bobbing above her head (an exclamation point that means a new quest in the game) and a satchel full of prizes, Ball wandered through the convention on her own. Thankfully, she said, a few people caught on to her costume and asked for a quest.
“I love cause play and this is my excuse for actually do it all weekend,” said Ball, who attended last year’s Austin Comic Con. “This year seems like it has a lot more of a Sci Fi draw more than comic books, but I’m quite happy with that.”
In 72 hours, a group of strangers met, brainstormed ideas and then built working prototypes for six companies.
The companies included Spear Guard, an e-mail security firm, Renew Couture, a recycled clothing line, Stride Sync, a music sharing app, Golf Average, a statistical analysis app to improve golf performance, SimpLingo, a browser plug-in to learn a foreign language and Approachab.ly, a professional networking app made for conference attendees.
The newfound entrepreneurs took part in 3 Day Startup weekend in San Antonio at Geekdom, a downtown co-working and collaborative workspace.
“This is the best one we’ve had in San Antonio by far,” said Cam Houser, one of the founders of 3DS. “The crop of ideas were really strong. The execution was just great.”
That’s impressive praise considering the last two 3DS weekends in San Antonio created at least two companies that are still running and that have received venture funding. One of those is FanDash, a site for band promotion and Console.FM, formerly known as HelloWorld.Im. Console.FM, created in the Spring of 2011, is now part of Dave McClure’s 500Startups incubator.
The 3DS weekend teaches students and young professionals about entrepreneurship and creates real ventures that go on to further develop their products and services, said Cristal Glangchai, a professor of entrepreneurship at Trinity and one of the organizers. Trinity, Rackspace, TechStars and Geekdom sponsored the event.
Successful entrepreneurs also lent their expertise to the various groups throughout the weekend. The mentors included Pat Condon, one of the founders of Rackspace, Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics, Jason Seats, founder of SliceHost, Nick Longo, founder of CoffeCup Software, Todd Morey, founder of Mosso, a cloud company within Rackspace and Alan Weinkrantz, a public relations expert who runs his own firm.
In addition, several members of 3DS, a nonprofit organization which puts on the events worldwide, helped. The next 3DS is next weekend in the Netherlands.
Throughout the weekend, participants experienced “a lot of extremes,” Houser said. Some entrepreneurs got their ideas extinguished early on. Others discovered, after a lot of work, that their idea wouldn’t work. One guy stayed up for 27 hours straight to work on programming a new site. Some people never left the building except to interview potential customers.
On Friday, the groups voted on the best ideas and decided who they wanted to work with to develop the idea into a company. But on Sunday, some of the original groups no longer existed like Hole in the Wall, a local restaurant review app. After doing some research, they decided the market was too saturated with similar apps so those team members went to work on other projects, Houser said.
And a new company emerged on Saturday.
Vyjayanthi Vadreavu originally pitched the idea for a documentary on homeless people and a recycled clothing line. Her idea did not get enough votes to make the final projects.
But Saturday morning, she found some people who wanted to work on it. She talked to Glangchai, one of the organizers of 3DS San Antonio, who encouraged her to pursue the idea, but with a different focus.
On Sunday, Vadreavu pitched Renew Couture with a new team. The group collects gently used clothing, delivers the items to student clothing designers at local universities and then sells the clothes made from recycled material.
An estimated four million tons of clothes get discarded every year, Vadreavu said. The opportunity to take some of the clothes and make them into new garments is huge, she said. The company would work with five local fashion schools to create the clothes.
“The clothes get a second life and the customer gets a one of a kind item,” she said.
This was the first time Vadreavu, 26, who works at Rackspace, participated in a 3DS. She plans to continue to work with her group to get the company launched and funded.
“I think it’s such a fantastic experience,” she said. “I wish I knew about it earlier in my career.”
Another woman-led venture, SimpLingo, started out as Babbling on Friday, but changed its name and refined its focus after doing a lot of research and talking with mentors, said Amando Wolf, a junior majoring in Chinese language studies at Trinity.
SimpLingo is a simple way to learn a foreign language, particularly Spanish. It’s a browser-based plug-in to translate portions of text online based on a person’s level of proficiency.
“You don’t have to deviate from your daily routine to learn the lingo,” Wolf said during her pitch.
SimpLingo was the only company to ask for money outright.
“I did the last 3 Day Startup,” said Cassie Robinson, a sophomore at Trinity studying religion, entrepreneurship and business and a team member of SimpLingo. “One of the ideas that did really well, they asked for money.”
So Robinson put up a slide requesting $10,000 and provided a bank account and routing number.
The panel of judges liked the idea and the fact they asked for funding. The panel included Jay Campion, a venture capitalist, Sheridan Chambers, one of the founders of The Denim Group, Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, Suizo Mendler, a former Rackspace executive and now TechStars mentor and George Karutz, an investment banker.
SimLingo has a lot of potential, said Alex Butler, a senior majoring in engineering at Trinity and one of the team members. “It’s really scalable.”
After the pitches, the various groups worked the crowd to talk to potential investors.
Luke Carriere, head of Approachab.ly, started out pitching the app as a dating app and then switched to a professional networking app after researching the market.
“The problem was adoptability,” Carriere said. “Partnering with events organizers was a way to ensure there was a critical mass of users.”
Approachab.ly is planning a beta launch of its product in the Spring of 2012, said Carriere, a graduate business student at Fordham University who is doing a internship at the Austin Technology Incubator. He says he has $10,000 in funding from an angel investor to pursue the idea.
“It’s a way to reach out and meet new people at the same events,” Carriere said. “We think there is a market for that. And this is just the beginning.”
At 7 p.m., members of the 3 Day Startup San Antonio weekend will demonstrate their new companies and pitch to a group of investors.
The group, mostly students from a variety of universities, have been working all weekend to create their startups. They’ve rarely left the 11th floor of the Weston Centre downtown, home to Geekdom, a new co-working collaboration space aimed at technology companies.
For a peak at what they’ve been going through, check out Nick Longo’s Flickr stream. Longo, an entrepreneur who founded Coffeecup software, heads up the Geekdom and served as a mentor to the group.
Stayed tuned. I’ll be heading to Geekdom shortly to listen to the pitches and report on the new companies.