New Evernote CEO Chris O'Neill lets 47 people go, closes three offices, aims for “smaller, more focused team”
13 percent of its workers — and closes three offices https://t.co/E67qlUW7tS
Context & Ripple Effects
Chris O'Neill had been Evernote's CEO for barely ten weeks — he was hired from Google Glass in July 2015 with Phil Libin staying on as executive chairman — when he cut 47 people and closed three offices. The move came on top of an earlier contraction: 20 employees were laid off globally in January 2015, so this was the second reduction inside a year.
The deeper arc is a decade-long shrink. The same playbook recurred under O'Neill himself — another 15% cut in 2018 — before his departure in favor of Ian Small, and it ended with Bending Spoons cutting most remaining US and Chile staff and relocating operations to Europe.
First-order effects
- 47 employees — about 13% of the workforce — lose their jobs immediately, and three offices shut, concentrating whatever remains around fewer sites.
- O'Neill converts his first weeks in the job into a cost reset, defining his tenure as 'smaller, more focused' rather than continuing Libin's growth-era footprint.
Second-order effects
- A smaller team forces triage on products and geographies; the following year saw founding CTO Dave Engberg leave alongside a wholesale replacement of heads of product, marketing, brand, design and China.
- Each round of cuts signals to talent and partners that the company is contracting, which compounds attrition — the 2018 round came amid reports of several senior executives departing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, repeated percentage cuts under successive CEOs are the visible mechanics of a company being sized down until it becomes an acquisition target — which is exactly where it landed with Bending Spoons in 2023.
The trend: Evernote's history reads as a decade-long contraction from growth-stage startup to lean acquisition target, with each CEO inheriting a smaller company than the last.