Evernote's Exits Continue As VPs Of Partnerships And Brand Both Move On
Context & Ripple Effects
Evernote's leadership bench keeps emptying out. In September 2015, newly arrived CEO Chris O'Neill cut 47 staff and closed three offices in pursuit of a 'smaller, more focused team'; by mid-November, freshly minted COO Linda Kozlowski had already left. Now the VPs of partnerships and brand are both gone within days of each other.
The pattern matters because these aren't performance-driven firings but senior voluntary exits from a company that was once a consumer-software darling. Each departure removes an institutional pillar just as O'Neill tries to reposition the product business around a leaner core.
First-order effects
- Evernote must backfill two VP seats covering revenue-critical functions — partnerships drive integrations and distribution, brand drives the consumer identity that differentiated the product — while a restructuring is still underway.
Second-order effects
- Successor-hunting now competes with the company's own cost-cutting narrative: candidates weighing offers see a shrinking org chart and a steady stream of departures, which raises the price and lowers the quality of hires Evernote can land.
Third-order effects
- The exodus extended all the way down to the founders' generation — by March 2016, founding CTO Dave Engberg announced his own May departure, forcing O'Neill to announce entirely new heads of product, marketing, brand, design and China. If that sequence holds as the template, O'Neill-era Evernote becomes effectively a rebuilt company occupying the old one's brand.
The trend: Mature venture-backed consumer companies installed with outside CEOs are entering multi-year rebuild cycles in which executive attrition, not hiring, is the leading indicator of how deep the restructuring runs.