Evernote founder Phil Libin on designing All Turtles to jumpstart tech AI and innovation

All
Turtles CEO Phil Libin thinks Silicon Valley’s focus on startups
is stymieing innovation.

Troy
Wolverton/Business Insider

• Phil Libin, a longtime entrepreneur and the founder of
  Evernote, thinks the technology industry isn’t doing a good job
  of promoting innovation.
• He’s particularly critical of the startup model,
  because its focus on building companies leaves out worthy ideas
  and talented technologists.
• Libin new startup, called All Turtles, is hoping to
  disrupt that model by funding the development of ideas and
  turning them into products before their developers teams have
  to worry about building companies around them.
• All Turtles is intended to promote innovation globally;
  it already has offices in three countries, with more
  planned.
• Some of the first ideas it’s fostered will effectively
  graduate from its process this fall.

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If you ask Phil Libin, the
tech industry doesn’t do a very good job these days at promoting
innovation.

They may seem a strange thing to say, given that the industry has
a reputation for being the most innovative in the country, if not
the world. But Libin’s not just some crank.

He’s been in the industry for more than 20 years, founding a
succession of successful startups — including note keeping app
Evernote, the one he’s most known for — and working as a venture
capitalist. He’s seen how the business works from the inside.

“The structure for making innovative tech products … is old and
inefficient and broken in lots of different ways,” Libin, All
Turtles’ founder and CEO, told Business Insider in an interview
earlier this month.

Libin’s solution is a new kind of company called All Turtles that
he’s designed specifically to address the problems he sees in
tech innovation, particularly in the area of artificial
intelligence. If his bet is right, the result could be not just a
bunch of new AI-based products and services, but a better way to
foster and develop new technologies.

“If this works, you can copy and spread it” widely, said Abhishek
Nagaraj, an assistant professor at the Haas School of Business at
the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on
entrepreneurship and innovation. He continued: “The potential is
tantalizing.”

Neither of tech’s two innovation models is working well

The way Libin sees things, the tech industry has two basic models
for promoting innovation — and each has its own shortcomings.

The first, he says, is through the research efforts of the giant
tech companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
The problem with that model is those companies tend to be very
conservative, focusing on small-bore innovations that won’t
disrupt their core businesses. When they are more forward
thinking — such as Google with its X lab — they tend to be
focused on moon shots that, by definition, have will likely have
little near-term impact on the real world.

The second model, by his reckoning, is built around startups.
While entrepreneurs are often more willing to focus on disruptive
technologies than the tech giants, innovation in the startup
world is thwarted by the very focus of trying to create new
companies. That fixation is fundamentally flawed.

By necessity, that model self-selects for founders who are good
at fundraising and managing, rather than those skilled at solving
important problems, Libin said. By contrast, technologists with
good ideas or product development skills can fail simply because
they have no talent for building companies.

What’s more, because entrepreneurs and startups are frequently
working by themselves, they often don’t and can’t learn from the
mistakes of others. Instead, they end up reinventing the wheel
over and over again at the expense of time, money, and often the
ideas themselves.

“It’s a total s–t show,” Libin said. “Like everything’s on fire,
no one knows what they’re doing, you have to scrounge around for
resources and everyone makes the same 10,000 mistakes over and
over again.”

But there are other problems with the startup model, Libin said.
Again, because it’s so focused around companies, it tends to
exclude innovative people and ideas from areas of the world
outside of Silicon Valley that don’t have the kind of ecosystem
found there for funding and supporting startups.

And with the growing size of funding rounds, Silicon Valley has
become increasingly focused on ideas that have the potential to
be billion dollar companies or larger. That’s started to leave
out practical innovations that are worthwhile but don’t have that
promise.

“Not everything has to be a multibillion dollar outcome,” he
said.

Libin thinks he has a new and better way to jump start innovation

Libin thinks there’s a better way. With All Turtles, which he

launched last year, he aims to bring together talented
technologists working in AI and help direct them to solve
particular real-world problems with the technology. All Turtles
will fund the technologists, assist them in developing their
solutions, and then help them figure out how to go to market with
them.

It’s already a global effort. In addition to its San Francisco
headquarters, All Turtles has offices in Tokyo and Paris to fund
projects in those cities. It plans to open a Mexico City office
next year. Within five years, Libin would like to have outposts
in eight cities, including ones in Eastern Europe and Africa and
potentially in India and China.

Libin plans to have each All Turtles office oversee 10 local
projects at a time. Each year, the offices would each graduate
about three projects and replace them with three new ones. Libin
wants to keep the total number of projects per office fairly
small to keep things manageable and to maintain quality control.

All Turtles is flexible when it comes to both originating ideas
and eventual exits

The projects will come from any of three places.

They could be ideas generated in-house by Libin and the All
Turtles team. They could come from outside corporations who are
looking for help in developing a specific idea or solving
particular problem. Or they could come from individual
technologists or teams who are looking for help attacking a
particular problem. Libin expects that within each office, new
projects will roughly be split evenly among the three different
sources.

In most cases, All Turtles will fund the development of projects
by itself. In other cases, it will bring in projects that already
have some venture or corporate funding. Regardless, the plan is
to develop the projects in-house to the point where there’s an
actual product that’s launched and has traction in the market
before worrying about where the project will end up.

All Turtles establishes all the projects as separate companies
within its corporate structure so it can easily spin them off as
standalone startups with their own sources of external funding,
as circumstances allow. But All Turtles is intentionally designed
to accommodate other possible outcomes for ideas that make it
past the development stage.

They could be acquired by outside companies, for example,
particularly those that partner with All Turtles to develop the
ideas. helped fund them. Or All Turtles could keep them in-house
and run them itself, offering their products and services as its
own.

“We’re indifferent toward companies,” Libin said. “If some of
these products then become independent companies, fine, that’s
the best outcome, but they don’t have to.”

He continued: “We don’t have the startup fetish that permeates
the industry.”

One of its first products is a chatbot designed to combat sexual
harassment

The company already has “several” projects that it expects to
graduate from its program in the fall and get outside funding,
Libin said. One of them, a product called Spot, is a chatbot
designed to make it easier for victims of workplace sexual
harassment to document and report their experiences. The system
relies on natural language processing and an interaction model
that’s intended to encourage victims to recount their experiences
as accurately as possible.

Launched earlier this year, Spot is free for individuals to
use. All Turtles charges corporations who want to build it into
their human resources processes.

“By the time Spot gets the first penny of external funding, it
will have a launched product with thousands of users, with
actual, paying large companies, with revenue, with traction, with
tons of media exposure,” Libin said. “It will be a real thing
before we ask anyone for money.”

Although All Turtles is designed to fund innovative tech ideas,
it’s set up as an operating company, not as a venture fund.
Ironically, while Libin is trying to pioneer a different model
for innovation, All Turtles is itself a venture-funded startup.
It’s raised $20 million in financing in a series A round, with
much of the money coming from Salesforce Ventures.

And while Libin thinks there’s a need to fund and develop
technology innovations that aren’t necessarily going to turn into
the next billion dollar companies, he has big ambitions for All
Turtles. He’s hoping All Turtles itself will eventually become a
public company worth billions of dollars.

All Turtles has plenty of company in trying to jump start
innovation

Libin isn’t the first person, of course, to recognize that the
tech industry has a problem in funding and developing new ideas
and technologies. In the 1990s, entrepreneur Bill Gross set up
Idealab as an
incubator to develop ideas for web-based companies, many of which
he later spun off or sold.

Christine Tsai, the CEO
and cofounder of 500 Startups, one of many startup incubators and
accelerators that have launched in the last
decade.
500
Startups

Later, Y Combinator and 500 Startups were launched to help
entrepreneurs establish themselves and get their startups off the
ground. More recently, Android founder Andy Rubin launched
Playground to help incubate innovative ideas, particularly in
technology hardware. Meanwhile, numerous venture funds and
organizations have launched with the express purpose of trying to
help entrepreneurs — including those in other countries — build
companies and develop their ideas.

Neil Cohen has had a front row seat to this movement. In the
1990s, he cofounded Camp 6, an early startup incubator that
fizzled out with the dot-com bust. More recently, he’s worked
with other incubators and accelerators from around the world.

“I can appreciate the process and the thought [Libin’s] putting
in to be better at it,” said Cohen, now an independent marketing
consultant. He continued: “Great for him to have this
organization that’s going to try to create and accelerate these
ideas. But I would say that there other places doing great work.”

Separating product development from corporate development could
prove problematic

What’s more, Libin’s idea of trying to promote innovation outside
of the typical corporate structure could prove troublesome.
Products are often shaped by the business model and goals of the
companies that develop them, noted Haas’ Nagaraj. A company that
was looking to compete with Facebook head-to-head would likely
design its product very differently than a company that aspired
to be acquired by Facebook.

“How successfully you can decouple

is a question for me,” he said.

For his part, Libin recognizes that there have been other efforts
to try to overhaul technology innovation — and that his might not
work out. The company’s name reflects that realization, he said.
It refers to a tower of turtles. Libin’s company is building on
the efforts of those who came before it, and others will build on
his and learn from his mistakes.

“There’s a rich history of people trying to change the way
innovative products get made and make who gets to make them more
inclusive,” Libin said. “We’re the next level up from that.”