Yesterday’s post about Apple’s view that a strong pro-privacy stand is the right thing to do now even though it may be vindicated centuries later made me think about what Evenote’s then-CEO had said years ago:
We wanted to make a company that was durable, that would be around for 100 years, and did a little research about that. There’s a little bit over 3,000 companies in existence right now that are more than 100 years old, and the vast majority of them are in Japan.
Even as we get bigger, we don’t want to stay small, we want to get quite large, but we want to be a 100-year-old, very large company that’s still operating like a startup, people are still in love with, that’s making innovative decisions, that’s acting decisively. We didn’t know how to do it; we still don’t, but we thought “This seems like a sufficiently epic quest to devote our lives to.”
– Phil Libin in “Evernote’s Quest To Become A 100-Year-Old Startup“
It was a great mission, and what a wonderful think it would have been for an Evernote employee to bear in mind as they headed in to work.
But Phil Libin is no longer CEO. As of today there have been two CEOs after him. And as far as I can tell neither of them has referred to the 100 year startup. It’s a pity, and it serves to show how it’s impossible to shoot that far when your own tenure in the hands of a board.
See this 2009 post on this blog on the audacity of Google’s and Microsoft’s original missions. Also see this fantastic 2017 profile of Evernote’s founder Stepan Pachikov, “Evernote Founder’s Impossible Mission“.