In the nearly five years since we started Xconomy, I’ve looked forward to few events more than our Silicon Valley “Xconomy Xchange” forum last night with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, and Morgenthaler Ventures partner Gary Little. I’m a longtime power user of Evernote’s online notekeeping application—it’s installed on my Mac, my iPad, and my iPhone—and interviewing Libin and Evernote’s biggest investors in front of a live audience was a little bit like being a Trekkie on stage with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Gene Roddenberry. Except, Libin is funnier.

We’ve got photos from the event in slide-show form below. Many thanks to Hanno Botha, newly wedded husband of Xconomy San Francisco’s director of business development Rachel Botha, for playing Peter Parker. (Hanno and Rachel are no relation to Roelof.)

While I’m thanking folks: I want to extend a special thank you to Microsoft Silicon Valley for hosting the event, especially to BizSpark evangelist Brett Laffel, operations manager Sherree Curtiss, and Paul the A/V technician. We’re also grateful to event sponsors Silicon Valley Bank and Turnstone (which showed off its forthcoming iPad app, complete with Evernote integration), event partners Dealmaker Media and Plug and Play Tech Center, design sponsor Mixtur, and Xconomy’s regular lineup of underwriters and venture members. Ching Wu at Morgenthaler Ventures, Andrew Sinkov at Evernote, and Mark Dempster at Sequoia Capital provided invaluable help spreading the word about the event.

Quite a few people tweeted from the event. You can get a look at the conversation by searching Twitter for the hashtag #xcevernote. One of the most tweetable gems of the evening was Libin’s formulation of Libin’s Law: “In a startup, you have to multiply Moore’s Law by Murphy’s Law. Every year, there are twice as many things that can go wrong.” On the final page in our photo gallery, you’ll find a Storify compilation of notable tweets from the event.

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	L to R: Wade Roush (Xconomy), Gary Little (Morgenthaler Ventures), Phil Libin (Evernote), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital).
	Photo by Hanno Botha

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Perhaps you’ve been meaning to buy a ticket to our big Silicon Valley event with Evernote CEO Phil Libin tonight, but you keep forgetting. Well, now’s the time to take action. We still have some tickets available online for $50 ($40 if you work for a startup)—but a walk-in ticket tonight will cost you $95.

Of course, if you’re one of Evernote’s 20 million users, you’d be very unlikely to forget something like that. The company is all about remembering the important stuff in your life—hence the elephant logo.

Now, if your promise to customers is that you’ll protect their digital memories forever, then you sort of have to plan for the long term. But that’s not how most startups think—they’re usually focused on the next product release, not the next decade or the next century. So the message Libin has been sharing lately about wanting Evernote to last 100 years or more is logical, but at the same time pretty radical.

That’s why I wanted to get Libin on stage at an Xconomy event—so that I could ask him how a startup CEO manages to think about the long-term even as he deals with the here-and-now demands of employees, customers, and investors.

And when you have an entrepreneur who says he’s not too concerned about getting acquired or planning an IPO, it takes a pretty special type of investor to back him. That’s why I also wanted to bring in Gary Little from Morgenthaler Ventures, one of Evernote’s earliest backers, as well as Roelof Botha from Sequoia Capital, which recently acquired a larger stake in Evernote by buying out previous investor Troika Dialog.

It’s this very pattern of secondary trading—with newer investors buying out older ones—that could help Evernote get really big without having to worry about going public. Tonight, I’ll be asking Little and Botha how working with Evernote is different from working with their other portfolio companies—and whether Evernote’s serial fundraising strategy can work more broadly.

Of course, we’ll also geek out a bit about Evernote itself, which is one of my favorite online tools. So register now. Meanwhile, for your reading pleasure, here’s an archive of all of my major pieces about Evernote.

Can Evernote Make You Into a Digital Leonardo? (July 2008)

Online Notebook Smackdown: Evernote vs. Springpad (April 2010)

The Rise of Evernote: An Interview with CEO Phil Libin (June 2010)

Evernote Opens a Trunk of Goodies for Online-Notes Fans (July 2010)

Sequoia Leads $20 Million Round for Evernote—Q&A with CEO Phil Libin (October 2010)

Xconomist of the Week: Phil Libin, Evernote, and the Death of the Exit (October 2011)

“Independent of Exit”: Talking Evernote with Morgenthaler’s Gary Little (January 2012)

Evernote Wants to Make Your Memories More Magical (January 2012)

How to Be a 100-Year Startup (January 2012)

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Xconomy held its first Big Apple tech event (well, mostly tech, since there was one life sciences company on hand) on Wednesday. We called it New York’s Venture Emergence, and a fantastic crowd of nearly 250 turned out to the Apella Center on East 29th Street for an afternoon of startup snapshots, VC-entrepreneur stories about building great companies, and keynote chats featuring some of New York’s hottest emerging companies and investors.

On the VC side, speakers included Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures’ Eric Wiesen, Nick Beim of Matrix Partners, Todd Dagres from Spark Capital, Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures, Michael Greeley from Flybridge Capital Partners, and Dennis Purcell of Aisling Capital.

Companies presenting included bitly, Gilt Groupe, Armgo Pharma, Simulmedia, BarkBox, and Gotham Greens. We also heard from HackNY and Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of SecondMarket—on the day Facebook filed to go public.

We snapped a lot of pictures of the speakers—and our audience. Following is a selection of shots of both. We hope you enjoy them.

A great thanks to our venue host, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, and our fantastic event sponsors: Cooley, EisnerAmper, Halloran, IDA Ireland, and TriNet. Special thanks as well to the National Venture Capital Association and New York Angels, which went above and beyond to help with this event.

And thanks most of all to all of you who came to see it, and made such a great crowd. I hope we got a picture of you.

(Xconomy digital media intern Teddy Worcester contributed to the production of this slideshow)

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	New York’s Venture Emergence — The crowd gathers
	Photo by Keith Spiro Photography courtesy of Kendall Press

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We’re just a few hours away from the start of Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence. But there’s still plenty of time (relatively speaking) to get your tickets. We have nine left and up for grabs, which you can get by clicking here.

We have a great lineup of speakers planned, including Fred Wilson, founder and managing partner of Union Square Ventures, Todd Dagres, founder and general partner of Spark Capital, the Gilt Groupe startup team, and representatives from Armgo, BarkBox, Simulmedia, and other great New York success stories.

New York’s Venture Emergence happens today from 2 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Apella Event Space at Alexandria Center for Life Science at 450 E. 29th Street. There will be plenty of time for networking, too. We hope to see you at this exciting event.

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Here’s a quick update on the agenda for Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility, the annual half-day mobile conference we are organizing here at Xconomy Boston. The event is taking place on the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge, MA. We are looking forward to a packed house and some outstanding talks, discussions, and networking.

I’m pleased to announce a few more startup participants:

—Apperian founder and chief strategy officer Chuck Goldman will join us for a discussion of mobile business strategies, along with Mobiquity founder and CEO Bill Seibel. Goldman is a former Apple exec who leads Apperian’s strategic and business development efforts in enterprise mobile apps. Seibel, for his part, was a founding partner at Cambridge Technology Partners and went on to lead ZEFER, Demantra, and Gumball; he currently leads Mobiquity’s efforts to help businesses develop mobile strategies.

—Fiksu CEO Micah Adler joins us to talk about his company’s approach to marketing mobile apps. My colleague Erin recently wrote about Fiksu’s consumer-facing service, which lets people try out apps from various brands and stores for free.

—Paydiant co-founder Chris Gardner will be on hand to discuss his vision for the future of the mobile wallet—banking, shopping, and e-commerce via your smartphone.

Other confirmed speakers include Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper, Chris Lynch from Vertica/HP, Chuck Kane from One Laptop Per Child, and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR. We’ll also have a special panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” including Lars Albright (Quattro Wireless, Session M); Mike Baker (Enpocket, DataXu); Tom Burgess (Third Screen Media, Linkable Networks); Jeff Glass (m-Qube, Bain Capital Ventures); and Ryan Moore (GrandBanks Capital investor in Enpocket, Where, and Nexage, now with Atlas Venture).

There are more announcements to come, and I will be posting the detailed agenda soon, so stay tuned. Meantime, you can still grab the early bird rate if you register today.

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“It is the ‘silver’ age of VC/entrepreneurship. It would be the ‘golden’ age if we could fix the liquidity issues.”

Those are the words of Michael Greeley, general partner of Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston and treasurer of the National Venture Capital Association, referring to the very tight IPO market that is limiting capital-raising options for emerging growth companies. It is also an issue Greeley intends to explore this Wednesday afternoon, at Xconomy’s conference: New York’s Venture Emergence.

That’s because Greeley will be the moderator of a keynote chat with Barry Silbert, CEO and founder of SecondMarket, the hot New York broker-dealer that is doing its share to fix the aforementioned liquidity issue, in large part by creating ways to trade shares of privately held companies.

The chat between Silbert and Greeley is just one part of a fantastic afternoon of discussion and stories from some of New York’s—and the country’s—leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, including Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, the Gilt Groupe founding team, 1stdibs CEO David Rosenblatt, RRE Ventures’ Eric Wiesen, Internet advertising pioneer Dave Morgan (now CEO of startup Simulmedia), Todd Dagres of Spark Capital in Boston—and a whole lot more.

If you don’t have your tickets already, get them fast—time is running out, and space is limited.

Greeley says he is really looking forward to his chat. Some questions he intends to ask Silbert include:

—What is the future of stock exchanges, and how companies raise capital and generate shareholder liquidity?

—What does Second Market look like in five years?

—What are the greatest risks to the business going forward?

—What regulatory issues do companies like Second Market face, and what should the government do?

And last but not least, says Greeley (who remember is from Boston): Who will win the Super Bowl? (I personally feel it will be the Patriots’ revenge).

There will also be time for you to ask Silbert a few questions of your own. We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday afternoon. Register here.

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Rising stars in the local startup community BarkBox, HackNY, and Gotham Greens will be on hand at Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence event on Feb. 1. They will enlighten the crowd with “burst” presentations, during which they’ll describe their companies and their growth plans. It’s all part of an exciting half-day event that will also feature speakers such as Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures, and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, founder of fashion e-commerce website Gilt Groupe.

Here’s our lineup of up-and-coming companies:

BarkBox: Since its launch last November, BarkBox has been shipping boxes of hand-picked dog treats and toys to pet owners. Carly Strife, Matt Meeker, and Henrik Werdlin co-founded the company, which sends each subscriber four to five items per month based on the size of their dogs. Strife was New York operations manager for Uber, a San Francisco-based startup that created an app to connect passengers with on-demand car services. Meeker is a co-founder of Meetup.com, and Werdlin is managing partner of product incubator Prehype and previously entrepreneur in residence at Index Ventures.

HackNY: This program was co-founded by Evan Korth, faculty liaison for technology entrepreneurship at NYU, and Chris Wiggins, associate professor in the department of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia University. HackNY invites college students from across the country to work with New York startups. The program’s objective is to nurture a network of young innovators with its epicenter in New York. HackNY also hosts weekend hackathons to encourage the creation of new technology.

Gotham Greens: This startup brings a touch of cleantech to the New York landscape. Gotham Greens, co-founded by Viraj Puri and Eric Haley, established its first rooftop greenhouse in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn as part of a plan to grow fresh produce for retailers and restaurants in the city. Jennifer Nelkin heads up greenhouse operations. Gotham Greens operates year round, growing its crops through the winter, as well. The first harvest began last June, with basil and lettuce the main crops.

The New York Venture Emergence forum starts at 2 p.m. and runs through 6:30 p.m. on February 1 at the Apella Event Space at Alexandria Center for Life Science. A networking reception will follow. Registration and other details can be found here. And if you’re a startup currently in one of New York’s many incubators, check with your program’s manager to find out if you can get a free ticket. There are 50 free slots up for grabs courtesy of the New York Angels.

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The life sciences industry is booming in the Boston area. Witness some of our headlines just over the past few weeks: Flagship Ventures closed a $270 million fund to invest in new biotech companies; startups RaNA and Warp Drive Bio raised significant VC rounds; pharma giant Merck led a $10 million financing of diagnostics firm Daktari. And last year, Pfizer built up its Kendall Square R&D hub and hired 400 new employees there.

So who are the entrepreneurs to watch over the next 10 years, and what can they teach the newest class of biotech executives? We’ll turn the spotlight on five of the region’s biotech CEOs at our next Boston life sciences event, “Xconomy Forum: New England’s Emerging Biotech Stars.” We have a great lineup of biotech up-and-comers, who will give presentations on their emerging companies at this event, which will be held April 4 at Biogen Idec’s campus in Kendall Square:

Chip Clark, CEO, Genocea Biosciences
Doug Fambrough, CEO, Dicerna Pharmaceuticals
Tillman Gerngross, CEO, Adimab
Joanna Horobin, CEO, Syndax Pharmaceuticals
Joseph Yanchik, CEO, Aileron Therapeutics

This afternoon conference will also feature keynote talks from George Scangos, the CEO of Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB), and Mark Levin, co-founder and partner at Third Rock Ventures.

And that’s not all. We’re also planning a panel discussion that will provide advice for securing research grants from non-profit foundations. We’ll hear from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, and Dana Callow, managing general partner at Boston Millennia Partners a member of the board of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

We hope you’ll join us for what’s sure to be a stimulating afternoon of discussions and networking on April 4. Register today for our special super-saver rate.

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Boston has no place for “serious, venture-backed startups” to grow from five employees to 25 employees, akin to San Francisco’s RocketSpace, or New York City’s General Assembly, says Mark Kasdorf.

Enter Intrepid Labs, the co-working space he recently established in the former digs of another co-working space (Dogpatch Labs) at 222 Third Street near Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA.

Intrepid Labs comes as the answer to a problem Kasdorf himself was facing. His mobile development company Intrepid Pursuits started with three people in the co-working unit (C3) of the Cambridge Innovation Center around the spring of 2010. It grew pretty quickly to eight people, so was kicked out of the C3. The building gave them an attractive “transition” rate to move into the more grownup office space, says Kasdorf, but they outgrew that, too, hitting about 15 employees last fall.

“We had to get real office space, which was more expensive than we could afford as a bootstrapped consulting company,” Kasdorf says. “As we started digging into commercial real estate, we realized how bad it is for startups.”

The Boston area has its share of coffeehouse-style co-working spaces for pre-seed companies with a few employees, but nothing for the more mature (revenues, funded, five employees and up) crowd, says Kasdorf. Traditional office spaces require three-year leases, a time period in which a lot could change for a startup, says Kasdorf. They also require companies to get their own furniture, printers and scanner, and the like. “This whole litany of things that CIC had been offering to us became obvious, but it was still really expensive,” Kasdorf says

In October he started checking out other office space in The American Twine Office Park at 222 Third Street, and saw the vacant fourth floor. “We walk in here and I’m blown away,” he says. “Everything about it screams, ‘This would be a fun place to work.’”

Inspired by General Assembly, he signed a lease for three years, with the intent of creating a co-working space for growing startups like his. Kasdorf and his team moved in during November. While Intrepid Labs has the long lease it originally wanted to avoid, it’s subletting to other startups on a month-to-month basis. So what about that big expense? Kasdorf says it is pre-paying some of the rent, while the “landlord has taken a real interest in what we’re doing and is really flexible with us.”

For startup tenants, a dedicated desk costs … Next Page »

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When most startups reach a certain age—seven years, maybe nine; certainly, by the time they get acquired or go public—they stop being startups. They get slow and cautious. They lose the will to wow customers with unconventional ideas.

Evernote hasn’t reached that age yet. And CEO Phil Libin hopes it never does.

In a video released yesterday by Evernote, Libin says he wants the booming online-notekeeping company to be alive 100 years from now—but as a nimble, fast-moving competitor, not a museum relic.

Evernote made the video to help Xconomy spread the word about our February 7 event in Mountain View, “The 100-Year Company: An Evening with Evernote, Morgenthaler, and Sequoia.” If you’re a Silicon Valley startup founder, engineer, product manager, or investor, this is a must-attend event where you’ll hear Libin, along with key Evernote investors Roelof Botha from Sequoia Capital and Gary Little from Morgenthaler Ventures, share the company’s secrets for staying young while getting big. Here’s Libin in his own words:

There are two passages in the video with particular potency for startuppers. If you’re going to throw yourself wholeheartedly into building a company around your idea, Libin asks, why settle for the standard Silicon Valley exit scenario of getting acquired by a bigger company?

“Making any kind of company is so much work, and you put so much time into it and so much energy, any kind of a startup, it becomes your main passion, it becomes your quest, your mission, for years, for you and your co-workers and for your founders. So I think if you do anything other than try to build for the long term, you’re frankly selling yourself short,” Libin says. “It’s going to be just as much work to make a company that you’re going to sell in three years as to make a company that’s going to last for 100 years.”

But Libin isn’t promoting longevity for its own sake. “Of course our big challenge isn’t just to make a company that’s around for 100 years,” he says in the video. “It’s to make a company that’s a 100-year startup.”

If you want to go long in this way, it helps to build a team of investors who believe in the 100-year philosophy—and it really helps to show the kind of explosive growth that justifies the big bets being put on the table. At the moment, Evernote is doing both. We’ll delve deeper into the company’s success strategies with Libin, Gary Little, and Roelof Botha at Microsoft Silicon Valley the evening of February 7. Register for the event now—while you’re still young.

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The speaker list for Mobile Madness 2012 keeps getting better and better. I’m still plugging away at the agenda, but wanted to post a quick update here.

Boston’s premier conference on mobile software and devices, if I do say so myself, takes place the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square. The theme for Mobile Madness 2012 (Xconomy’s fourth annual spring mobile event) is “total mobility”—the idea that mobile is finally everywhere in our lives, and is impacting a much wider swath of technologies, businesses, and industries than ever before.

To that end, we are assembling a cast of compelling characters the likes of which I haven’t seen before in one place. Already confirmed are folks like Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper; Lars Albright, CEO of Session M; Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu; Jeff Janer, CEO of Spring Partners; Michael Schreck, CEO of Zmags; Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook; and many more.

Here’s a sampling of new speakers we’ve just recruited for the event:

—Tom Burgess, CEO, Linkable Networks. Burgess, the former CEO of Third Screen Media (acquired by AOL in 2007), will join our distinguished panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” which will discuss our region’s rich history in mobile software and the areas in which local companies can continue to lead the world. The panel also includes the founders and former CEOs of m-Qube (bought by VeriSign), Enpocket (Nokia), and Quattro Wireless (Apple), all recent success stories.

—Ernie Cormier, CEO, Nexage. Cormier previously ran mobile gaming startup Zeemote, and before that was chief commercial officer of Virgin Media. He will bring his deep perspective on advertising platforms to bear on the recent explosion of business opportunities in mobile ads and marketing. Nexage is an up-and-coming company that represents some of Boston’s strengths in this sector.

—Chris Lynch, CEO, Vertica (acquired by HP last year). Lynch will talk about the intersection of mobile software and “big data” analytics—a hot topic as pertains to the business of mobile apps and advertising/marketing platforms. Lynch, a veteran of DEC, ArrowPoint, and Acopia, sees big data as one of the trends that will lead a resurgence in the Boston tech scene—and he’ll tell us how mobile businesses can harness this trend.

—Chuck Kane, Director, One Laptop Per Child Association. Last but certainly not least, Kane (who is OLPC’s former president) will give a special demo of the new OLPC XO-3 tablet computer that made such a big splash at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this month. Kane says he’ll also show us the XO-1.75 model (also a tablet), which is shipping now.

We’ll have more updates on Mobile Madness 2012, so watch this space. If you register by February 1, you can take advantage of the early bird rate.

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Everyone knows mobile is everywhere, and everything is mobile. Smartphones, tablets, and mobile software are transforming how we all shop, connect, get around, and lead our daily lives. In the five years since Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, the mobile industry—and the tech world, more broadly—has changed radically. So what are the emerging opportunities, pitfalls, and strategies in this sector? And how will the next five years play out?

On March 14, Xconomy will hold its fourth annual half-day mobile conference to tackle these questions—and much more. Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility will take place at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, MA. We are convening some of the most prominent mobile technology and business leaders from the Boston area and beyond—and we are expecting a packed house.

We are still working on the agenda and full speaker list, but I can share a few highlights with you now. We will have a keynote panel consisting of Boston’s “mobile mafia”—founders, CEOs, and investors from some of the region’s biggest mobile successes, including m-Qube, Enpocket, Quattro Wireless, and Where. This distinguished panel—which will include Jeff Glass, Mike Baker, Lars Albright, and Ryan Moore—will discuss Boston’s mobile history and how the region can continue to lead the world in mobile innovation.

Other themes we’ll tackle include next-generation consumer and social apps; mobile retail and commerce; the convergence of mobile marketing and big data analytics; emerging business strategies around mobile apps, mobile websites, and hybrid models; and, more broadly, how mobility will continue to change the way we all interact with content, products, and each other.

To those ends, we will also hear from Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper; Jeff Janer, CEO of Spring Partners; Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook; Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; Michael Schreck, CEO of Zmags; and Michael Putnam, director of mobile products for TripAdvisor (only the biggest consumer Web company in New England). We’ll also hear from up-and-coming startups including ByteLight, HeyWire, Kinvey, and Crashlytics. Again, this is only a partial list of speakers—we’ll have more updates soon.

If you register by February 1, you can take advantage of the early bird rate. Looking forward to seeing you all at NERD on March 14.

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Cloud-based notekeeping service Evernote found its first 20 million users through sheer geek appeal. Hardcore users (full disclosure: that includes me) love the ability to upload Web clips, documents, images, audio files, and other materials to Evernote’s online notebooks, then search and retrieve them at will, from virtually any device. They also like features such as Evernote’s ability to recognize and search the text in photos and scanned documents.

But to grow to its first billion users—and CEO Phil Libin thinks that’s a realistic goal—the company may need to stop thinking about features and start thinking about experiences.

“The mainstream isn’t looking for fantastically powerful solutions. They are looking for real, elegant, magical solutions. And it turns out it’s much harder to build those,” Libin says.

But the Mountain View, CA-based startup has begun to move in a more magical direction. In the last couple of months, the company has rolled out three mobile apps and one Web app that tie into its central notekeeping service but are designed to offer dedicated, simple solutions to common problems, such as remembering the people you meet (Hello), keeping a record of your favorite meals (Food), learning new subjects (Peek), and clearing away distractions for a more streamlined reading experience on the Web (Clearly). And last summer, Evernote hired the Australian creators of a drawing app called Skitch and came out with a free tablet version of the image-annotation tool.

It might seem to outsiders as if Evernote has taken a left turn, forsaking its identity as an online personal archive in order to go after the sexy new thing, i.e., mobile apps. But in fact, it’s all part of a deliberate strategy to “add structure, intelligence, and context” to the information people are already storing in Evernote, Libin says. “If Evernote 1.0 was ‘Whatever you put in you can get out in the same format many years later,’ the next phase is ‘Whatever you get back is better’—it has been illuminated, so to speak.”

Libin says he means that in the medieval sense of an illuminated manuscript, such as a Bible decorated with initials, miniature illustrations, and other marginalia. “We really want your memories to be better—to have additional context and beauty in them,” he says. “One of the first steps is to start creating beautiful experiences for certain types of memories. They all live in the central Evernote location, but there are custom experiences for capturing and recalling particular things, like food, and people, and other stuff in the future.”

How Evernote designs these new custom experiences will be one of the themes of a public Xconomy event in Mountain View, CA, on February 7, where I’ll be interviewing Libin on stage, together with Evernote investors Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, and Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital. The evening’s main point will be to dissect the idea of the “100 year company,” that is, Libin’s plan to keep Evernote independent and ensure its long-term survival through serial secondary fundraising rounds. But there’s so much to say about Evernote’s app strategy that this will be a big topic as well. (Register for the event before January 24 to get the saver rate.)

I didn’t want to wait until February 7 to learn more about the app strategy, so I connected with Libin (pictured above right) for a long conversation on Friday. I started off by asking whether Evernote ever expected to have 20 million users—a milestone it announced it had reached shortly after the new year. “Yes, in the sense that when we were raising money, our business plan has us getting to 20 million right about now, so it’s exactly what we told our investors,” Libin answered. “On the other hand, we never actually believed it, so getting there is quite shocking.”

But as mind-blowing as it can be to actually hit one’s business-plan projections, Libin says he keeps reminding himself that there are still 6.98 billion people on the planet who aren’t yet using Evernote. Even if you narrow that down to the people with some access to smartphones and the Internet, “that’s probably 2 billion people right now who are easily within reach, and in 10 years, more like 4 billion,” he says. “So having a couple of billion users is not … Next Page »

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Day in and day out, venture capitalists ask questions of entrepreneurs—some might say grill them. But on February 1, at Xconomy’s New York Venture Emergence forum, former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt, who’s now CEO of luxury online marketplace 1stdibs and chairman/co-founder of Group Commerce, will help us turn the tables. Rosenblatt will be the moderator of a fireside chat with legendary investors Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Todd Dagres of Boston’s Spark Capital.

Rosenblatt knows both men well. He and Wilson served on the Twitter board together—Rosenblatt is still on it, while Wilson is no longer a director. And Rosenblatt knows Dagres through Spark Capital’s investment in Group Commerce.

He has some great questions ready for the both of them. I spent some time on the phone last week with Rosenblatt—who outlined his plans. I can’t reveal his specific queries, so as not to ruin the surprise for Wilson and Dagres and let them get too prepared. But I can say they will cover the gamut of how to start companies (and who should start them), how to mentor and grow them, the latest trends and their downside, and a lot more. The discussion should be of immense interest to entrepreneurs and hopeful entrepreneurs, not to mention anyone interested in entrepreneurship, investing, and innovation. “I’m an operator, not an investor,” Rosenblatt says. “And the questions will be for the most part from the point of view of companies—not investors, but entrepreneurs…Hopefully, they are questions that will be helpful for you in relating to investors.”

Rosenblatt plans to leave plenty of time for audience questions as well. But just in case you are shy, or he doesn’t get a chance to call on you, feel free to share yours beforehand. Just put them in the comment stream below, or send them to events@xconomy.com. We’ll do our best to make sure they get addressed.

The keynote chat between Rosenblatt, Dagres, and Wilson is just one part of a star-studded afternoon that includes another keynote chat with Barry Silbert, founder of SecondMarket, and featured talks with the founders and founding investors in Gilt Groupe, bitly, Simulmedia, and more.

We hope to see you there. Get your tickets soon—space is limited for this great event and Early Bird registration ends tomorrow.

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Earlier today I grabbed some time with Gary Little, who’s been a partner at Menlo Park, CA-based Morgenthaler Ventures since 1998 and has led the company’s investments in Evernote, the fast-growing Silicon Valley startup that aims to help you “remember everything.” I’ve long been intrigued by CEO Phil Libin’s publicly stated ambition to make Evernote into a company that lasts 100 years or more (“We don’t want to exit, we want to build a permanently great company,” Libin has said). Little, who’s on the startup’s board, agreed to share his own thoughts about that in a live, public chat on Twitter.

Little tossed off some great insights, as well as a few funny lines. For readers who may have missed the live chat, I’ve embedded a curated Storify version below. And for those interested in continuing the conversation, I’ll be hosting Little, Libin, and another Evernote investor, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, in person at a February 7 event called “Xconomy Xchange: The 100-Year Company—An Evening with Evernote, Morgenthaler, and Sequoia.” (The event is set for 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm at Microsoft Silicon Valley in Mountain View, CA; to get a ticket at the early-bird rate, register before January 18.)

If you really want to help people store their memories online permanently, you do have to think about how to make sure your company, or at least its computer servers, will be around decades from now. But there’s a problem: venture capital funds, traditionally the only entities willing to invest in risky high-growth businesses at the early stages, generally want to earn their money back on a much shorter time scale—10 years at the most.

Libin’s strategy so far has been to raise multiple rounds of venture funding, each dramatically larger than the one before, and use part of the money to provide liquidity for early shareholders (including employees). That helps to stretch out the time before a company has to think about getting acquired or going public. And in fact, if you think of an IPO or acquisition as just another in a series of liquidity events, it can make a company “independent of exit” altogether, in Little’s words.

But it’s only a plausible strategy, he acknowledged today, if a company can justify much higher valuations in each funding round. Finding investors willing to buy in at those levels takes “either huge growth, or huge cashflow,” he said in the tweetchat. “Growth firms invest in growth. LBO [leveraged buyout] firms invest in cashflow.”

Fortunately, Evernote has been demonstrating such growth. When Morgenthaler first invested, the startup had fewer than 5 million users. When we started planning our February event last year, it had 16 million. Now it has 20 million. Word of mouth has been powering new sign-ups so far, with Japan emerging unexpectedly as Evernote’s hottest market. The main challenge for Evernote right now, Little says, is “continuing to recruit the world’s best people” to keep the growth going.

Here’s the Storify version of the chat. We hope you can join us on February 7 to keep the conversation going.

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If you tune your Twitter client to the hashtag #xcevernote this Friday at 11:00 am Pacific time / 2:00 pm Eastern time, you’ll be able to join me and Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park, for a public conversation about what it takes to build startups that will survive and thrive over the long haul.

It’s all part of the run-up to our big February 7 forum, “The 100-Year Company: An Evening with Evernote, Morgenthaler, and Sequoia,” where Little will be onstage with Evernote CEO Phil Libin and Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha for a live interview focusing on Evernote’s audacious goal to stay in business into the 22nd century. (You can register for that event here.)

Most venture-funded companies have trouble looking beyond the next decade, since the perception that is the “exit”—the day when they’ll be acquired or go public—needs to come within the 10-year lifespan of a venture fund. But Libin says he wants Evernote to be around at least as long as the digital memories it’s storing for more than 16 million users, and he envisions using serial fundraising rounds to make sure early investors see some return. That, in theory, will lessen the pressure for an IPO or an acquisition and free Evernote to focus on improving its growing collection of cloud-based memory-keeping tools.

Morgenthaler led a $10 million Series B funding round for Evernote in 2009 and also contributed to a $20 million Series C round in 2010 and an even bigger $50 million round in 2011. On Friday, you’ll have a chance to quiz Little about why Morgenthaler believes in Evernote’s technology—and also find out what he thinks about Libin’s serial fundraising philosophy. As a veteran of Apple, Sun, IBM, and TRW, Little also has more than a bit of experience working for organizations with big visions for the future. So he’ll likely offer perspectives on the tensions between short-term profitability and long-term thinking in technology companies.

So, join us on Twitter this Friday at 11:00 am Pacific. Remember, the hashtag for following the chat is #xcevernote—and we hope to see you again at Microsoft Silicon Valley, which is hosting the February 7 event.

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Hey intern hopefuls, have you been on the hunt for a sweet media gig for the new semester? You’re in luck. Xconomy is looking for a rockstar intern to help out with a mix of editorial, social media, and event-related projects we’re initiating in the new year.

On top of gaining professional Web and news production experience in a lively startup setting, and free attendance at Xconomy events, the intern will also get the choice to work either from home or join us in our sunny Cambridge digs. Interested, or know someone who might be? Please send cover letters and resumes to Erin Kutz at ekutz@xconomy.com.

We’re looking for: 
—Familiarity with video editing software such as iMovie
—Strong working knowledge of social media platforms
—Some experience hand-coding HTML preferred
—Experience with and knowledge of WordPress or other content management systems

You can expect to:
—Help curate and update event calendars on Xconomy.com
—Assist with editing and producing graphics
—Edit photos and compile slideshows
—Edit event footage and one-on-one interviews
—Measure social media analytics

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The idea behind CrowdOptic, a service that allows event organizers to figure out what a crowd is looking at by tapping their smartphones, came to CEO and co-founder Jon Fisher last year during a routine meeting. As he sat down to chat with an investor in one of his earlier companies, he caught sight of two “tombstones”—the glass sculptures that memorialize deals between companies. He noticed that his chair and the two tombstones formed the three points of a triangle, prompting him to think about triangulation, focus, and sightlines. “That’s really where the inspiration came from for triangulating between smartphone users to isolate action,” Fisher says. “And that really formed the basis of the core technology, the notion that we can record smartphone attributes in real time and compare them with other users in real time.”

With this geometrical insight in mind, Fisher (pictured above) and co-founders Jeff Broderick, Doug Van Blaricom, and Alex Malinovsky set out to build a service that would give event organizers a way to monitor a crowd’s focus at live events. It’s a kind of outdoor equivalent of the eye-tracking studies Web designers run to see what parts of a Web page are attracting attention.

CrowdOptic's software assesses where users' smartphones are pointed to determine where audience members' sight lines are converging.

It works like this: event organizers partner with San Francisco-based CrowdOptic on an event like a tennis match. Match attendees download an app—either CrowdOptic’s app or one specifically attached the event. As they take photos and videos, tweet, and share information, CrowdOptic can draw on data from the compass and accelerometer in each smartphone to determine where the person holding the phone is looking—at one player or another, at the scoreboard, or even at certain ads in the stadium.

“We’re simply tunneling in through an existing process,” Fisher says. “We’re not envisioning everyone in the stands having phones in the air. People are naturally taking pictures and video.” Taken together, the data can show event organizers where the crowd’s collective attention is focused. In an event like a tennis match, there might be two main clusters of focus, one on each player, whereas a baseball game could have far more. (There’s a cool animated version of the graphic above at CrowdOptic’s website.)

With this information, organizers can rethink their ad sales strategy. In online advertising, sales offices can use eye-tracking studies and other forms of analytics to inform their pricing structure and explain it to potential customers. In live events, it’s hard to say which ads are viewed most. It may be a safe bet that most people in a given stadium are going to see ads on the Jumbotron, but how many fans will see an ad in right field or above a stadium box? “If one asset is being viewed five times more, you can charge five times more. You might think banner behind home plate is the best asset, but what’s the third best asset? We’ll be able to prove that data,” Fisher says. “It’s a whole new advertising form.”

Organizers can also hyper-target advertising or discounts directly to users’ smart phones. If a fan at a racetrack is focusing his attention on a given car, the driver’s sponsor might want him to see ads for their products, as a kind of augmented-reality overlay. Or they can choose to build in added benefits for fans, like providing up to the minute stats when someone focuses his phone on a given player. “If you’re watching a baseball game, you can get all info about a batter on the Jumbotron. But if he’s in right field, you can get the whole Jumbotron experience right on your phone,” says Fisher. Organizers can also use the information to retool their TV broadcasts, giving viewers at home an experience closer to what they’d get in the stadium.

The technology has security applications as well. Though CrowdOptic can’t use its apps to pinpoint where a given person is sitting in a stadium or who that person is—they can determine only the sightline of a given phone—the system can detect changes in … Next Page »

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On February 1, Armgo Pharma CEO Sapan Shah will join Aisling Capital’s Dennis Purcell on stage at Xconomy’s first big New York conference to tell the inside story of how Aisling turned a Columbia University discovery into a promising biotech company. No doubt much of the discussion will revolve around a French pharmaceutical company called Servier, which Shah says was a key player in Armgo’s birth. “Armgo was formed both out of an academic lab and a Big Pharma partnership, which is a unique situation,” he says.

Shah and Purcell will pass along the wisdom they’ve gained from Armgo’s evolution at Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence, a half-day event featuring some of New York’s most successful venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Although the event will focus largely on technology startups—with presentations from NYC successes like Gilt Groupe, bitly, and Simulmedia—it will also spotlight biotech as an important part of the city’s bustling venture scene. It’s only fitting: New York leaders have singled out biotech as one of the industries that’s vital to the city’s economic future.

The story of Armgo began in the lab of cardiologist Andrew Marks, chairman of the physiology department and director of the Wu Center for Molecular Cardiology at Columbia University Medical Center. Marks developed a new class of molecules called rycals, which are designed to work on calcium channels in the body. In chronic heart failure—Armgo’s lead pursuit—certain calcium channels become leaky, causing the heart muscle to weaken. Rycals are designed to plug those leaks.

If Armgo can prove rycals work, the company could pioneer an entirely new way to treat heart disease—by getting at the very root of the problem rather than simply treating symptoms. “Most drugs [for chronic heart failure] don’t address the underlying disease,” Shah says. “They reduce the load on … Next Page »

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Attention, procrastinators! If you still have some last minute shopping to do, you’re going to love this offer. The next 20 people to purchase Holiday Special or Startup Special tickets between now and December 23rd for our upcoming New York event—Xconomy Forum: New York’s Venture Emergence—will be entered into a drawing to win one of two $50 gift codes for flash-sales site Gilt.com. The gifts were generously donated by the folks at Gilt Groupe, who also happen to be part of our dynamite speaker lineup for the event, which will take place the afternoon of February 1.

New York’s Venture Emergence will bring together some of NYC’s leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs for an afternoon of discussions about what it takes to be a hot startup in the Big Apple.

If you were already planning to go, registering early will save you a bunch of money (that you can spend on more gifts) and will get you a one in ten chance of winning $50 to spend at Gilt.com. Register here.

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