Interview With Evernote CEO Phil Libin

This week is Internet Week in NYC and many folks are here from out-of-town pitching their startups and ideas to the NY tech scene. This morning I met up with Phil Libin who is CEO of Evernote. Phil describes Evernote as an "external brain" and they built the system to give you a better memory. Going into this meeting, there were two big questions on my mind. First, why do we want a tool that will scrape content without giving anything back to the content publisher and what’s their take on data portability.

Before I get into my questions, Phil walked me through the application and let me just say that not only is it very slick, but it’s potentially ultra-useful. He showed me the demo he’s been using since their initial launch, in which he shows his flight information which includes lodging receipts and he also took photos of his airline tickets. Evernote reads the text off documents that are clipped into Evernote but also optically recognizes the content from images. So he can take a photo of his travel e-tickets and then refer back to them via a search for the cities, price, brand, etc. The visual search is quite strong, whatever we threw at it, worked.

Phil took a photo using his iPhone of my business card. Within 3 minutes the card was sync’ed between his iPhone, desktop client and Web interface. He was able to search for my name, company name via logo, phone or email and it appeared immediately. Phil says that Evernote has made business cards actually useful now. He takes a photo of every business card and then can reference them back later. Previously he says, he wouldn’t ever look at a business card to find a phone number or email address and this routine has changed for him with Evernote.

One of the things you can do with Evernote is to highlight anything (image, content, pdf, Web page, etc.) and it instantly becomes a "memory" inside of Evernote. My concern with this functionality is what happens to the content producer when the Evernote user moves the content into Evernote and outside of the original content source. For example, once it’s in Evernote, it’s no longer updated. Phil says this is the way they want it as it’s a memory of that moment in time. If it changes or keeps accurate, it’s no longer a memory. Let’s assume you clip some very useful document, perhaps a Japanese-English phrase list into Evernote from xyz.com. You can return to the clipped document hundreds of times without ever visiting the original source who spent time creating the content and monetizes it via CPM-based advertising. My concern is that once you clip something, you have no real reason to ever visit the source again and are basically "stealing" the impressions that the phrase list creator should be receiving.

Phil says that first, the Web site is linked on the Evernote content page. Second, he is committed to working with content publishers in a variety of ways as the tool moves forward to create relationships with publishers. One of my suggestions is to create a publisher control panel in Evernote so that anytime something from CN is clipped, I can add my logo, perhaps a note if that piece of content has been updated since it was clipped, and maybe an ad of some sort if I run ads on my site. Phil was very receptive to this idea and he has some other ideas that will be launching in the next few months. Evernote is the first company I’ve met to actually want to work with content publishers when they scrape content. Most don’t care (I won’t name names but you know who they are).

The last topic we discussed was data portability. If I am sticking potentially thousands of elements into Evernote, what happens if I want to get them out? Phil explained that they have full XML feeds which contain all of your data that you can take at any time. You can also export any of the images or other content. I was a bit shocked by just how much they’ve thought about data portability. In fact, they will be launching something soon (again he swore me to secrecy) that will take this to the next level – should be out in a couple of months.

Phil also shared a variety of upcoming additions to the service which he asked me not to write about yet. The news should be out in about 2-3 weeks. There is an API coming which will allow publishers to pull information out of Evernote and to extend the application.

I was extremely impressed with Phil’s openness to my suggestions about his application and on our discussion about content publishers thoughts on his application. I look forward to watching how he implements many of the tools and ideas he has for Evernote. It’s the action I want to see.