Chris O'Neill

CEO, GrowthLoop · 1 appearance on the record.

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executiveinvestoroperator@croneill ↗LinkedIn ↗growthloop.com ↗

Chris O'Neill is an executive who previously served as CEO of Evernote and spent a decade in leadership roles at Google, including Managing Director of Google Canada. He has also served as Chief Growth Officer at Xero and sits on the board of directors of Gap Inc.

8statements → 3claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 1.62/5average debate potential → 4.2/5argument clarity · the sources → 4said about them ↓

3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 2 assertions · 1 opinion · 2 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Chris argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Evernote reached 220 million users while running on a shoestring budget
“You know, we have two hundred and twenty million users and we have a very like shoestring budgets.”
Chris O'Neill Jun 9, 2017 ▶ 15:02 20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.2 / 5 directness 4.4 · coherence 4.5 · precision 3.8 · compression 3.6

redirected or did not address 1 of 14 assessed questions (7%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

236 words/min while actually speaking · 24.2 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,719 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Chris O'Neill said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure
Chris O'Neill angel invests exclusively in Canadian startups, prioritizing founders
“Like, so I do some angel investing almost exclusively, actually exclusively in Canada when I think about it. And my test is a little, little more straightforward than that. It's the people. And I almost don't care what the market looks like. And I almost don't…”
Chris O'Neill Jun 9, 2017 ▶ 22:48 20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations
Insight
Google's success stems from audacious goals and radical transparency
“Hiring great people, setting audacious goals and then really being open with them about what is important and why that's the formula for much of Google success”
Chris O'Neill Jun 9, 2017 ▶ 4:36 20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations
Opinion
LinkedIn's Jeff Weiner is the best at defining corporate vision
“Jeff Wiener at LinkedIn, I think, is probably the best at doing this, right? Really being clear about a vision, and a mission, and strategy, and culture, and values.”
Chris O'Neill Jun 9, 2017 ▶ 7:47 20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations
Assertion Supported
Evernote reached 220 million users while running on a shoestring budget
“You know, we have two hundred and twenty million users and we have a very like shoestring budgets.”
Chris O'Neill Jun 9, 2017 ▶ 15:02 20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations
Insight
Scale hiring requires selecting for specific strengths over the absence of weakness
“Being really intentional about the one or two, sometimes three areas that are required for any role to really be world-class in hiring for the presence of those two or three things, as opposed to the absence of weakness early in a startup's history, you really…”
Chris O'Neill Jun 9, 2017 ▶ 17:04 20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations
Disclosure
Evernote holds monthly product health meetings to decide what to kill
“We have a monthly product health meeting, and we talk about how products are doing in a very rigorous way, but we also talk about Things that maybe we should consider to stop doing.”
Chris O'Neill Jun 9, 2017 ▶ 12:03 20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations
Assertion Supported
Evernote has users in every country, including the Vatican
“This is a company that literally exists in every country in the world, including regions like the Vatican.”
Chris O'Neill Jun 9, 2017 ▶ 14:11 20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations
Prediction Held up
Evernote will expand its focus to team productivity software
“We've done great things throughout our relatively short history to unlock and become a superpower for individuals, and we look forward to doing the same thing for teams and really helping them be much, much, much more successful and productive and organized th…”
Chris O'Neill Jun 9, 2017 ▶ 23:30 20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Is A Team Sport & Why Leadership Should Accept The Negative Consequences In All Situations

The other half of the tape: Chris O'Neill's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 3 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4

Every mention by year

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Evernote CEO on Why You Play For The Front of Your Jersey Not The Back, Why Success Jun 9, 2017 17m
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