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Phil Libin

Co-Founder & CEO, All Turtles · 3 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@plibin ↗LinkedIn ↗all-turtles.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Phil Libin is the former CEO of Evernote, which he led from 2007 to 2015 before joining General Catalyst as a Managing Director. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of product studio All Turtles and video platform mmhmm.

40statements → 11claims → 2claims resolved → 4.05/5average certainty → 2.73/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 5said about them ↓

0 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 9 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

8 predictions · 3 assertions · 4 opinions · 20 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 9 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. 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 Phil argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Prediction Didn’t hold up
Libin: All Turtles will expand to eight global cities within five years
“So the vision is, you know, in five years, we'll be in eight different cities. We're in three. Now we're opening up the fourth one next year. We'll be in eight cities, eight world cities, each one working on a number of very practical products that solve real …”
Phil Libin Oct 26, 2018 ▶ 19:38 20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit VCs, Why The Very Structure of Companies Is Outdated and Inefficient & What It Means To Build The Netflix of Product

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

4.4 / 5 directness 4.7 · coherence 4.8 · precision 4.3 · compression 3.7

answered every one of 12 assessed questions directly

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? →

278 words/min while actually speaking · 26.4 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,521 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 →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 3 rated episodes:

host pushback ▾ 2.7/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 4/10
setup questions received 53%

Everything Phil Libin said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Libin: CEOs face more stress during normal operations than crises
“When things are sharply going wrong, it's actually the part of the job that's, in many ways, the simplest, because you know what you have to do, and then you just do it. And you have like, you have one major objective. The objective is clear. And even if it's …”
Phil Libin Oct 26, 2018 ▶ 26:25 20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit VCs, Why The Very Structure of Companies Is Outdated and Inefficient & What It Means To Build The Netflix of Product
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Only a Couple Hundred Famous Bots Will Dominate Globally
“There's going to be a couple of hundred famous bots in the world, and everyone's going to know them, and everyone's going to be able to interact with them, and they're not going to be, it's not going to matter what directories are listed in. They're just going…”
Phil Libin Jan 4, 2017 ▶ 10:11 20VC: Evernote's Phil Libin on The Pros and Cons Of Moving To VC, The Future For Bots & Having Marc Benioff & Reid Hoffman As Mentors
Insight
Libin Refuses to Invest in Startups Not Advancing a Star Trek Future
“My entire long-term investment hypothesis is really straightforward. Like, I think the world has two possible futures. Like, there's two directions that the world can go in. The world can become more like Star Trek, or the world can become more like Mad Max. E…”
Phil Libin Jan 4, 2017 ▶ 19:35 20VC: Evernote's Phil Libin on The Pros and Cons Of Moving To VC, The Future For Bots & Having Marc Benioff & Reid Hoffman As Mentors
Insight
Libin: Startups aren't serious about talent diversity unless they spend money
“I mean, for businesses, you pretty much, it all comes down to the same tool, which is money. So if you're not spending money on it, you're not serious about it.”
Phil Libin Jan 25, 2021 ▶ 7:06 20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom
Disclosure
Libin: We pay recruiters specifically to source out-of-network candidates
“So we spend money on recruiters and we specifically tell recruiters that we are paying you money to send us people that are outside of our comfort zones and outside of our networks, because we know plenty of, you know, middle-aged white dudes.”
Phil Libin Jan 25, 2021 ▶ 7:14 20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom
Disclosure
Libin: I was not a very good VC at General Catalyst
“I don't think it was a very good VC.”
Phil Libin Jan 25, 2021 ▶ 17:12 20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom
Insight
Libin: A leader's strong conviction does not make a belief more accurate
“Just because I believe something strongly doesn't actually make it any more or less likely to be accurate or true than if some random person in the street believed in it strongly.”
Phil Libin Jan 25, 2021 ▶ 18:59 20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom
Insight
Libin: Digital collaboration tools unlock productivity from introverted team members
“When we went from being in person to doing all of these things, you know, we no longer do brainstorming in a big conference room with, you know, stick stickies, post-it notes, you know, now we do it all on Figma, and actually I started noticing, man, I'm just …”
Phil Libin Jan 25, 2021 ▶ 21:47 20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom
Insight
Phil Libin: Exceptional talent is extremely rare but evenly distributed globally
“Like, real talent is exceedingly rare, you know, one in a million. But it is evenly distributed throughout the world.”
Phil Libin Oct 26, 2018 ▶ 9:43 20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit VCs, Why The Very Structure of Companies Is Outdated and Inefficient & What It Means To Build The Netflix of Product
Insight
Libin: A CEO has only three core responsibilities
“You have to make sure you have the right people and you have to make sure there's enough money in the bank. Those are the three things you have to do. No one else is effectively going to do them. It's always those three things. Anything else you do is kind of …”
Phil Libin Oct 26, 2018 ▶ 21:02 20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit VCs, Why The Very Structure of Companies Is Outdated and Inefficient & What It Means To Build The Netflix of Product
Disclosure
Phil Libin replaced himself as Evernote CEO at 400 employees
“And I think the kind of towards the end of my stay at Evernote, you know, I basically decided that I needed to replace myself once we gotten, you know, it's about 400 people that just felt like I just wasn't the problems that needed to be solved at a medium si…”
Phil Libin Oct 26, 2018 ▶ 22:45 20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit VCs, Why The Very Structure of Companies Is Outdated and Inefficient & What It Means To Build The Netflix of Product
Insight
Libin: A CEO's core job is constant and uncomfortable over-communication
“The core job of a CEO is just to, like, you just have to repeat yourself over and over and over again. You just have to say the same thing for what feels like literally a thousand times, even though it's may only be a hundred times, but it's the constant over …”
Phil Libin Oct 26, 2018 ▶ 23:53 20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit VCs, Why The Very Structure of Companies Is Outdated and Inefficient & What It Means To Build The Netflix of Product
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Phil Libin almost entirely stopped using email as Evernote CEO
“I'd kind of stopped sitting and I stopped doing email almost entirely. Like for the past few years of my life, like I had very, very slight contact with email”
Phil Libin Jan 4, 2017 ▶ 5:56 20VC: Evernote's Phil Libin on The Pros and Cons Of Moving To VC, The Future For Bots & Having Marc Benioff & Reid Hoffman As Mentors
Disclosure
Phil Libin Only Invests in Bots With Direct Pay-For-Function Utility Models
“The stuff that we're working on, the stuff that I'm investing in or helping to build, it's all like the, these are bots that do specific functions that people pay for.”
Phil Libin Jan 4, 2017 ▶ 14:08 20VC: Evernote's Phil Libin on The Pros and Cons Of Moving To VC, The Future For Bots & Having Marc Benioff & Reid Hoffman As Mentors
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Phil Libin Maintains a Strict Personal Rule Never to Work on Airplanes
“A really quick one is I don't work on airplanes. I made this arbitrary rule where I will not work on an airplane.”
Phil Libin Jan 4, 2017 ▶ 17:24 20VC: Evernote's Phil Libin on The Pros and Cons Of Moving To VC, The Future For Bots & Having Marc Benioff & Reid Hoffman As Mentors
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Libin: mmhmm started as a joke to make Zoom calls less boring
“It started as a joke, just as a way to make our life on video a little bit less boring. So we just started goofing around with backgrounds and pictures and things you can do in Zoom, and pretty soon it became a product.”
Phil Libin Jan 25, 2021 ▶ 4:03 20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom

The other half of the tape: Phil Libin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 5 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4Federico Simionato 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011112016201720182019202020212022202320242025episodesmentions
0112016201720182019202020212022202320242025episodes it came up in
000.50.5112016201720182019202020212022202320242025episodesmentions per episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (3)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Jan 25, 2021 27m
20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit V Oct 26, 2018 18m
20VC: Evernote's Phil Libin on The Pros and Cons Of Moving To VC, The Future For Bots & Ha Jan 4, 2017 13m
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