Evernote's Freshly Minted COO Linda Kozlowski Is Leaving The Company
Evernote made a name for itself as the platform where you could store your ideas and notes for life, and beyond. But the same permanence does not apply to the people who work there. — We've confirmed through multiple sources … Tweets: @eghosao and @ericjackson Tweets: Eghosa Omoigui / @eghosao : @ericjackson @Techmeme https://twitter.com/... took a little longer than I thought. and the self-impalement strategy has been a doozy. Eric Jackson / @ericjackson : Maybe Evernote should have been worried when Phil Libin started doing Apple event analysis with @hdediu and @benthompson on Bloomberg West
Context & Ripple Effects
Kozlowski's exit lands mid-overhaul: after Phil Libin moved to step down, the board installed Chris O'Neill from Google Glass as CEO in July, and O'Neill spent September cutting 47 people and three offices in pursuit of a 'smaller, more focused team'. The freshly minted COO was part of that new leadership bench.
Her departure barely a quarter in extends a pattern rather than breaking one: within weeks both the VP of partnerships and VP of brand are gone (the exits keep coming through December), and by March even founding CTO Dave Engberg announces he is leaving.
First-order effects
- O'Neill loses his number-two executive months into his own tenure, forcing him to either backfill the COO role or redistribute operations across the remaining team while the restructuring is still underway.
Second-order effects
- A revolving door at the top raises retention risk for the rank-and-file engineers and staff who survived the September cuts — every senior exit makes the next offer elsewhere easier to take.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — CEO replaced, COO, VPs and founding CTO all cycling out — this reads as the dismantling of the Libin-era leadership structure in favor of an entirely O'Neill-built team running a deliberately smaller Evernote.
The trend: Evernote's post-Libin reset is compounding from one-off restructuring into wholesale generational turnover of its founding leadership, with each exit normalizing the next.