Naomi Ionita: evaluation

Transcript context

…One thing you mentioned is Evernote. I don't know how much you can talk about this, but they just got sold, right? Someone bought Evernote. And if I think back to Evernote, it feels like they could have been Notion, which is killing it right now. Any thoughts on what maybe they missed and didn't turn into Notion along the way? Yeah. We're going to clear some cobwebs here. It's been a while. But one challenge that Evernote really struggled with was this evolution from single-player to multiplayer to team to enterprise. It's a chasm that a lot of bottom-up SaaS businesses struggle to cross. Evernote was philosophically antisocial. It was meant to be your second brain, kind of your personal tool. And I think that capped the company's growth potential. I always used to say you can't retrofit collaboration. You have to be collaboration-first. And a lot of companies now really take that for granted. But back in mid-2000s, this was kind of a new way of building product. And so we missed that bridge. If companies do that well, it benefits every metric. That bridge from single-player to multiplayer. Acquisition goes up. You grow organically through referrals and shared workflows. Retention goes up because now you have these shared workflows that are incredibly sticky. Employees are accountable to each other to say, "This is how work gets done." Design in Figma, roadmap planning and ticketing in Jira are linear. It just becomes the default platform. And modernization goes up. Revenue scales with usage. And so the more people using it, the more they use it. You start tripping the wire on paying more and more over time. And so Evernote really struggled in crossing that chasm from the prosumer tool of choice that employees wall-to-wall were using, but never became this larger high-ACV contract from a sales perspective. Yeah. It's always easy in hindsight to see what could have been better, what could have worked out, what didn't work out. So, what are you going to do? You mentioned monetization. And I know that you spent a lot of time with founders working on pricing, monetization, especially using monetization as a lever for growth. And so I want to spend some time there to pick your brain about what founders and growth teams can do and how they should think about monetization in terms of growth.…

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