#28 - Prerequisites for Starting a Company - Phil Libin

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Phil Libin, and it's from our 2013 Startup School.
At the time, Phil was the CEO of Evernote, so he shared some advice about running Evernote, but more importantly, advice from starting startups in the past. So if you want to check out this video or all the other videos from past startup schools, they're all on our YouTube channel, and we'll be posting the transcript at blog.ycombinator.com. All right, here we go.

**Phil Libin** (0:29)
I'm super psyched to talk to you. You know, Paul asked me to come in and talk a little bit about what we went through at Evernote, especially in the early years and the mistakes we made and the lessons we learned, and I'm happy to do that. You know, Evernote didn't come out of nothing. It was our third startup, and we learned a lot kind of all the way through the process. The first real startup that I was involved with, I started with a few college roommates of mine, you know, my best friends in Boston. We called it Engine 5, and that was, I think, kind of the first and probably the most important lesson to me right there was that I had great co-founders. The most important thing, and this is very much the same team of people that was with me at the first startup and then the second startup, and then many of them are even at Evernote. And so I think the most important thing to do at as young an age as possible is to just cultivate this group of really, really brilliant, high energy, willing to work for free, best friends for life. And it's super important to do that. And you kind of have to pay attention. Like I got lucky, I got lucky that the people that I happened to meet in college in the computer science department of Boston University are people that have stuck with me for, at least so far, the rest of our lives, and I fully expect much longer. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you shouldn't even make friends with people that you don't see starting your company with.
Like, it kind of sounds dickish, I guess, but to be honest with you, why bother? You only have so many best friends that you're going to have, and if you can't imagine counting on them in a pinch as a co-founder, use those resources wisely. And so I just lucked into it. I happened to get these great people, and I've been able to get really great people in every other company. So basically, we started our first company, Engine 5
The core group of those people went on to found the second company, Core Street. The core group of those people went on to found Evernote. Evernote, I really hope, is my life's work. I don't intend to really work on anything else, but if I ever do, I already know that the 50 or so people at Evernote that are gonna hopefully be with me for whatever the next thing is. And so developing this crew is super huge, and I can kinda tell from most of you, you look like you're right at about that age and area of life where you're making these connections, you're making these friendships, and it's gonna go by really fast. So make the most of it. So Engine 5 was a, we were consultants. We started this company, there was originally gonna be five of us, but then two people chickened out, but we already had the domain name.
And it was just all three of us were computer programmers, we were all developers. And we literally didn't know that there was such a thing as investors. This was a new concept to us. We didn't know that there were people who would give you money so that you can build something. We just assumed that the way you build a business is, you know, you just start working, and you get paid, and you make more money than you spend, and so on. And luckily, this was right at the lead-up to the original dot-com bubble in the very late 90s, and so if you could program, people would just throw money at you. And we didn't have much motivation in starting this company, other than we just wanted to work together, and we wanted to see what it would be like to have a company, to be our own boss, to call the rules.
And so we did a lot of programming, consulting, mostly around e-commerce stuff. And what we learned, and this is probably the second most important lesson, is being your own boss, and having your own company, and making the rules kind of sucks.