By any standard, the past year has been hard on Evernote. Phil Libin, who led the company to 100 million registered users and a $1 billion valuation, abruptly quit the CEO post last July, triggering an exodus of top executives who had led the company since 2007. Complaints about the increasingly bloated core product mounted, just as the bottom began to drop out of the market for consumer productivity software. Soon, some critics were calling Evernote "the first dead unicorn," using the Silicon Valley term for startups valued at $1 billion or more.

Into this mix came Chris O'Neill, who previously spent a decade at Google. He once served as the managing director of the company's business in Canada, and later ran the business side of Google Glass. He had less experience building products, though. Given other the high-level departures and layoffs at Evernote, it has been easy to be skeptical about the company's prospects.

"If I wanted to do something easy, I'd go somewhere else."

But after nine months of rebuilding, O'Neill is ready to present his vision for Evernote. In a chat at the company's headquarters in Redwood City, CA, he described a leaner, more focused operation dedicated to building the best home for your notes and other documents. It's considering giving up on underused features, including its Work Chat messaging system, and plans to simplify its interfaces on every platform.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about the company's critics, its business prospects, and Evernote's plan for the future. "I’m not going for a second to suggest that scaling this company, or this transition, is going to be easy — it’s not," O'Neill said. "That’s why I’m here. If I wanted to do something easy, I’d be somewhere else. But I love challenges. I grew up in small-town Canada, and I love to be underestimated. I’m a fierce competitor. This is the stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning."

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Casey Newton: So you’ve been CEO for 10 months now. What have you been focused on?

Chris O'Neill: I announced early on I was going to focus on three things: building a great team — building on a great team — getting us on a path to sustainability. And the last is getting back to the core, the essence, of the product.

What people don’t understand about the company is that we’re in a very solid financial position. We’re on the path to sustainability. We don’t have to raise more money. We had a cash-flow positive month in March. These are really important things at a time when the funding environment is so volatile. So I think that’s important for people to understand.

"Companies go through transitions. It's not a story."

Second, companies go through transitions. It’s not a story. Companies go from startups to more mature companies that are more interested in things like scale … I think that’s healthy that we go through that. There are bumps in the road, but I am quite pleased with the team we have in place. It’s a world-class team that has experience in navigating precisely these kinds of transitions.

Last, the core stuff is interesting. I think it’s great that companies place bets and take risks, and that’s what we did. We made bets on things like Work Chat, we made bets on the market, we made bets on lifestyle things like Food and Hello. That’s a sign of strength, not weakness. But it’s also a sign of discipline to look back and say, did it pan out the way we thought. And more important, is it distracting from our ability to deliver against the promise we made to our users? That promise, and that market, is enormous — the potential is still there. So I think it’s early for us to see some of the results, but they’re very promising.

I want to dive in to all of these subjects. But I also want to ask, at a high level, how you see Evernote’s place in the world? Is it different than what it maybe was a couple years ago?

I’m here because I love Evernote. I’ve used it for many years. I connect deeply to the brand, the purpose, the mission, the product itself. I use it as a super-power to get shit done — to basically help me curate all the stuff that bombards me every day. We’re all bombarded with knowledge all day long. You need a safe space to capture ideas and come back and cultivate them, to then bring them to action. Evernote is, in many ways, the tool that helps you determine the signal in a very noisy world.

Our place is as relevant today as it was when Stepan [Pachikov] started the company 10 years ago. Our market’s growing. The globalization of the economy has led to more knowledge workers — that’s good for us. Smartphone penetration continues to grow, albeit at a lower rate. That’s good for us, too. And the other thing, which may sound counterintuitive, is that it isn’t just information overload — it’s collaboration overload. It’s good that we’re working across borders and functions, and silos are coming down. The bad part is that it’s crowding out to time to actually think, and do what some people call "deep work" — the ability to focus on a task for more than 15, 20 minutes at a time. Deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy, and Evernote is the killer app for deep work. It allows you to capture your ideas and cultivate them.

"Evernote is the killer app for deep work."

That rings true for me. We need one great place to capture the knowledge in our lives, and then I think there’s a lot of opportunity in helping people easily manipulate that and turn it into other things. Whether it’s turning numbers into charts, or turning text into HTML. There needs to be a central repository. And it’s not email, or Dropbox, or Slack.

It’s interesting — Forrester or IDC, they don’t have a category for "note-taking." But we intuitively know, you have groups like students and knowledge workers that basically take notes for a living. So we think the market is real, and we think it’s big. And we think there’s an opportunity, to your point, to connect it to action. One of the things we’re excited about is moving from more of a service to a platform. To play well with others. We’ve done some of these things — we announced an integration with Microsoft Outlook recently. These are small things, but they speak to a larger strategy.

We need to remove friction — we sometimes say "capture at the speed at which you think."

To that point: over the years, Evernote’s core product has gotten a reputation for being bloated.

Yep.

It has that Microsoft Office problem where it looks like most of the features are only used by 5 percent of users — who would all scream bloody murder if they ever went away. Is there a simpler Evernote in our future? And if so, how will you get there?

It’s one of the biggest challenges we have as a company. But it’s also an opportunity for us. The fact that the product is so versatile, obviously that’s awesome. Why we’re coming back to the core first principles is to say, what is it we’re really trying to accomplish? Let’s remove distractions. Without going into all the details of which features will come and go, yes — you can expect to see a more simplified, cleaner experience, powered by more intelligent software.

"We have 100,000 people sign up for the product every day."

We have 100,000 people sign up for the product every day. That’s kind of crazy. To this day, we don’t do paid marketing, we don’t have a sales force. It’s organic. So one of the things we’re obsessed with is engagement in the first seven days of all these people who come in. When you’re at 150 million-plus registered users, you’re not talking to early adopters. You’re talking to the early majority, or the late majority. They need some guidance, and we need to provide that guidance.

The trickier part — which I think will rely on more intelligent software — will basically use cues and artificial intelligence to do a "progressive reveal." You don’t need to throw everything at someone all at once. We’re experimenting with those kinds of things.

Along with Dropbox, Evernote was once a poster child for consumer productivity software. Now it seems more doubtful that a huge audience of people is willing to spend $60 or even $40 a year on note-taking software. What happened with the consumer market? And does Evernote have a future in it?



Listen, markets go through evolutions. It’s very classical, what’s happening. I think Dropbox is a particularly interesting case: it’s in the crosshairs of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and so on. It has some unique characteristics I won’t comment on. But with note-taking you have a whole series of low-end competitors, simple note-taking apps, and there’s tons of those in the App Store. They do one thing reasonably well; you kinda get what you pay for. And then you have larger players who are basically bundling things into suites; that’s business. For us to survive and thrive, we need to think through where we are unique.

"We need to think through where we are unique."

This single place, this trusted independent place, we think it’s a logical place to start. We do really, really well at acquiring people through word of mouth. The challenge for us is that point you made — how do I translate that into value for a new person? That’s where we’re obsessing. Once people find a way to bring it into their lives, we do above-average in terms of paying.

The other thing, too, is if you look at the long arc of time — who cares the most about productivity? Companies do. The economy is fueled by productivity. That’s the story of America! So I think there can be a way that companies contribute to our monetization efforts.

So let’s talk about business. Evernote invested significantly in a feature called Work Chat, which allows for collaboration around individual notes. But it doesn’t seem like the company has gotten much of a foothold. How will you tackle the business market? Should we expect the company will orient itself more toward collaboration uses?

"It's important not to try to be all things to all people."

No. It’s important to not try to be all things to all people. You have Slack, you have Hipchat. That’s a well-served market. Let’s just politely say, collaboration and chat is well served. So I don’t see it as, we need to try to do everything. If we do well with frictionless capture of ideas, and world-class search and retrieval, I think we can partner with a lot of other players. Collaboration is a fact, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to carry all the water. I’d just as soon do some integrations and partnerships to fill out that part of it.

Two or three years from now, do you expect the bulk of your revenues will still come from individuals buying subscriptions?

It’s too early for me to tell. But it’s a good question. I think you can see the balance between the individual paying and a company paying — it will become more balanced. But time will tell.

Evernote has taken lots of different approaches to growth over the years — making business software, acquiring companies, launching a marketplace of branded goods. Are you saying now that your plan is to go back to basics?

It’s not quite the basics — I think we’ve done that already. Now we need to evolve from that. It’s been liberating to understand that this thing is really frickin’ powerful, and arguably more relevant today than when it started. So I don’t want to say "the basics" — that’s underselling it a little bit. It’s going back to the essence of what Evernote means: this home where you store your thoughts, your ideas, which then get moved along to action.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft seem to smell blood in the water, and are showily promoting tools they built for you to import your notes for Evernote. So if I’m a frustrated Evernote user thinking of switching, what’s your message to me?

Every day we wake up and do something. We’ll do some big things over the long arc, and every day we’ll do some small things. That’s really the answer.

"If we're not delivering what you want — shame on us."

It’s very interesting, the Microsoft stuff. We’ve had an importer for OneNote for six or seven years. People are asking, what’s my response? First of all, they’re a partner. But also, we’ve always been about open access to information. One of our laws is that your data is your data — take it!

If we’re not delivering what you want — shame on us. We should be listening and doing a better job. But if people want to take their stuff elsewhere, they should be able to. So I think it was a little bit of poor form on their part, but I’m not too concerned about that.

I guess I’m just looking for a little harder sell for the concerned user.

We’re on the right path. We’re self-sustaining. We’ve got what we need. We’ve got the team in place that’s going to make this transition happen. It’s already happening. And I think this going back to our essence is being well received, and I think it’s going to allow us to play in a much larger market. We haven’t even talked about adjacencies like education and Evernote for Business.

But I’m not going to oversell this. The proof will be in the pudding.