Evernote CEO Phil Libin is planning to step down, and working to find his replacement
CEO Change Brewing at Evernote — Evernote CEO Phil Libin has long said he wants to build a 100-year company. Now he's actively looking for his own replacement to take the startup into its second decade.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2015 Evernote had raised $290M and spent 18 months rebuilding all of its apps, but the founder-led era was winding down: Phil Libin, who long talked about building a 100-year company, began an active search for his own successor as the startup entered its second decade.
The search resolved quickly and set off a chain of departures — Chris O'Neill arrived from Google Glass within a month, Libin shifted to executive chairman before moving to General Catalyst that fall, and the exodus then reached the bench: newly hired COO Linda Kozlowski left within months and founding CTO Dave Engberg followed in 2016.
First-order effects
- Libin's own replacement search ends his CEO run at the company he built, with him expected to stay on as executive chairman while a new chief takes over day-to-day control.
Second-order effects
- The handoff triggers a wider leadership rebuild rather than stability: within roughly a year Evernote replaces its COO, its founding CTO, and installs new heads of product, marketing, brand, design and China under O'Neill.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — O'Neill himself was later replaced by Ian Small in 2018 — founder transitions at maturing consumer-software companies become revolving-door restructurings, with successive outside CEOs each attempting their own reset of strategy and staff.
The trend: Maturing venture-backed startups are trading founder charisma for professional management, accepting repeated leadership churn as the price of trying to grow past the founder era.