As his third company, Phil Libin was ready to commit for the long haul with Evernote. He had “built two companies for other people” and wanted to settle down with a startup that would last for 100 years. Libin highlights a very different mentality when founding a company for 100 years and explains the three main points that he considered during this process.

1. Do something that you love enough to devote the rest of your life to.

“If you’re not completely infatuated with the idea with the company, why would you want to spend a hundred years doing it? So If you’re going to attempt something like this, it’s got to be in the field that you feel you can devote the rest of your life too, which is just a good idea anyway whether you want to do it for a hundred years or not.”

2. Make sure that all of your investors feel the same way.

“If your goal is to get the craziest possible person to pay you the most amount of money for your company, you can do that and you can maximize some short-term gain, but then you’ll have a crazy person on your board. And that’s not going to be consistent for being around for a hundred years. You’ve got to make sure you have fully aligned interest with the investors — That they’re along for the ride. And you should be up front while raising, ‘Hey, we want this to stick around.’”

3. Surround yourself with people you want to spend the next hundred years with.

“It’s all about getting the team. So the whole secret of Evernote is we have this fantastic team. Many of the people I’ve been with for 10, 15, 20 years. Others are new. The first two companies we made, we sold. We sort of felt like we built them for somebody else. Then we said, ‘Okay, the third one is the one for us.”
Interview courtesy of TechCrunch

More about Evernote: Evernote allows users to capture, organize, and find information across multiple platforms. Users can take notes, clip webpages, snap photos using their mobile phones, create to-dos, and record audio. All data is synchronized with the Evernote web service and made available to clients on Windows, Mac, Web, and mobile devices. Additionally, the Evernote web service performs image recognition on all incoming notes, making printed or handwritten text found within images searchable.