All right. Welcome, everyone. Great to see you. This was a very quick pause, and we're

ready to start with working in the on-demand economy. What does that mean? I have with me Linda Kozlowski of Evernote. She flew in this morning from Silicon Valley to share some insights, and she's got a great career behind her and ahead of her, 18 years of marketing in the global digital eco space. She worked with Alibaba in Hong Kong, so

she's got some insights also on the Asian market and the global perspective in general. I want to start with a question. In a recent article, The Economist looked at how digitization has changed services and products, and they basically coined the term on-demand economy. And when we look at the United States, how do companies like Uber, TaskRabbit, Instacart, how do they change the

landscape? Well, I think they're just starting to change the landscape. I think when you talk about the on-demand economy and particularly services like that, this is really a new concept, and there's a lot of things that companies are trying to feel out about legislation and regulation and all sorts of other aspects that mean we're just in the beginning of what the

on-demand economy has to offer. You know, there's going to be a couple of hiccups on the road as we go through, but at the same time, the basic concept is on one side, you're letting people who really want the opportunity to work flexible hours and take advantage of excess capacity to be able to work and maybe even create their own businesses,

and on the other side, you're giving people like ourselves the chance to take advantage of something when we need it and not necessarily have to have long-term subscriptions. So there's a lot of promise there in how you can actually be more efficient as an economy,

but I think it's just in the very early stages, and we're just starting to see some of the missteps of regulation and insurance and things like that that are going to have to be ironed out as we move through. Right, and I think this is one aspect, as you said, the on-demand services and products, but these companies, they will have to reorganize, grow fast, and they will have to reorganize the

workforce and look at maybe workers on demand. How does that play out for you? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I actually was in an Uber a week ago in San Francisco, and the driver was training to be an American football player, a professional football player. So he's training for the NFL on one side, but then he's making money by driving Uber on the other side.

And I thought that was a really interesting example of how when people are really trying to figure out what their life's work is, what their dream is, and what they want to achieve with their careers, having that flexibility to be able to make money in different ways from the traditional nine-to-five job is really a benefit to all of us, to give them the opportunity to try something new,

and also the rest of us the opportunity to have some resources that we didn't necessarily have before. All right, but we're also looking at new models of, let's say, individual growth and the aspiration to work for one company for a whole lifetime that has been replaced by flexibility and dependence. So how do companies attract the best qualified individuals?

You know, attracting talent is one of the most important things that any company can do now, and it's interesting when you look at the difference between, say, large corporations that are trying to feel more like startups. They're trying to promote innovation and innovative opportunities to people who want to be a bit more creative

and a bit more aggressive, and then smaller companies are trying to attract people that sort of have mature talent that can help them go to the next level. So you get an interesting sort of mix there where they're sort of meeting in the middle, and they're creating a series of tools and services that really attract people and make it much more interesting for them to work.

But really what most workers are judging now for thinking about their next career or their next job is about where are they going to have an impact, where are they going to make the biggest difference. It's not about the benefits, it's not about the building, it's not about the workspace anymore as much as the physical surroundings, it's really about what am I going to have the opportunity to do. And the on-demand economy for freelancers really gives people the chance to specialize

and say this is what I want to be an expert in, and this is where I excel, and I can really make my own career. And with companies that are constantly innovating and individuals that are constantly changing, how can they ensure that they're up to speed?

Well, there's a lot of interesting ways that people can ensure they're up to speed. One of the things that's come about from the on-demand economy is really the concept of online learning as well. So there's a lot of sites now that let you learn at your own pace, let you develop your skills well beyond university.

And this gives people a great opportunity to really expand on their own and not necessarily be subject to a traditional structure. But in addition to that, when you have a freelance type of mentality and you have a freelance economy, those people can choose and prioritize here is what I want to be an expert in and here's how I want to develop my own career and my own skill path.

And that enables them to create a specific set of skills that companies may not necessarily be able to hire a full-time person just to do that, but they want to actually hire someone who has that expertise. So it's a benefit for both sides. As a freelancer, you get to actually develop your own skill set and really make your mark and make your own brand.

And as a company, you get access to expertise that you may not necessarily be able to afford as a full-time employee or need as a full-time employee, but you can still have that skill set as a part of your company. Right. So sourcing talent globally is a given now. Basically, you have a designer in zero-gear product in China and distribution somewhere else.

But how do you manage to foster a corporate culture or some sort of common culture when you say we're looking also at individual branding? You know, we had exactly this challenge at Evernote. We have 11 offices around the world and they're not just sales and marketing offices. They're also development offices in many instances. And in fact, one of our key features, which is our presentation mode, was developed in Zurich.

It was designed in Zurich. It was implemented in Redwood City and it was rolled out through Austin and China and several other countries. And this is where I think technology can really be an advantage. Because if you harness the power of technology correctly, technology lets you share the information and discover the knowledge of your colleagues so you can work more smoothly,

then the people themselves can actually focus on the verbal and the face-to-face communication that lets you bring that level of culture to the organization that is above and beyond what the technology is doing for you. So if you start with a technology base that lets you more efficiently share the information across people,

they're spending less time sending files around and managing like who has gotten what and do you have the latest version and all of that sort of stuff. And they're spending more time talking about the philosophy and the theory and the execution of the work. Well, that's wonderful, but on the other hand, it's like how do you create loyalty with a workforce that again can choose wherever it wants to work?

So there's the offer of a culture at the same time. I'm going to look at my personal benefits and how do you manage to create loyalty within that global workspace? You know, I think it's an interesting mix. And the question is whether you should create loyalty, first of all. So Amazon and Google have recently released the fact that now the average tenure of an employee is only 13 months

because people are moving around quite a bit. It's very common for people to shift from company to company. That has its disadvantages and that you're constantly bringing in new talent. But if you've actually created a structure that allows for that new talent to make an impact quickly, then what you actually get is the advantage of lots of new opinions, lots of new ideas,

lots of fresh thinking and innovation all the time. So it's really about thinking about how to adapt your structure to make sure that you're building the best opportunity for those people. That being said, if a company is constantly innovating and they're constantly changing and they're constantly growing, then you can give employees enough sort of new challenges that they can stay loyal for a long time.

I mean, Evernote has employees we launched in 2008. We have employees that have been there since day one. And we continue to have like two, three, four, five-year tenured employees for a company like ours. That's quite unusual in Silicon Valley. That's quite impressive knowing that lots of workers switch after only a year or two.

Here in Germany, we're very fond of the idea of work-life balance and in an on-demand economy where services and work is basically used all the time. Can you separate these aspects and how do you separate these aspects? You know, I'm very fond of work-life balance too. I just think I look at it a little bit differently.

I do what I love and that's part of what creates my work-life balance. I think one of the mistakes to think about technology is people look at technology as something that controls their life. You know, if they have technology then they're constantly on, they constantly have to look at email. That's not actually true. Technology is there to work for you and you can control it.

So, for example, for me, I turn off most of the alerts on my phone. I decide when I want to look and when I want to work based on what's the best schedule for me, what's the best schedule for my life. That might mean that I'm doing something personal at 10 a.m. in the morning and I'm doing something that's work-related at 8 p.m. at night because that's particularly how I want to work at that time.

But it doesn't necessarily mean that one outweighs the other. I think we're at a point in time where we need to learn how to take technology and take it for what it was meant to be, which is something that actually helps us be more efficient, not necessarily something that we're a slave to. I'd like to take another critical look at these developments.

So, in an on-demand economy, do we really create more freedom like you were describing with your personal choices or also are we catering or creating actually cheap labor and a glass consumer? You know, it's interesting. The term glass consumer is something that's sort of fairly new to me and I think it's an interesting concept

because there is an idea of, with the on-demand economy, there's a lot more data out there about consumers and their needs and their wants and therefore it's more transparent. I feel like it's a little bit different. I feel like we're actually creating glass companies in that the consumer is now in charge of what they want. They decide when they want a car. They decide when they want their groceries.

They decide when they want them to come from. So, it's really an opportunity for the consumer to create the demand rather than for the consumer to be the target themselves because we have much more of an opportunity for mass customization. It's no longer about I can only get this when this particular store tells me I can get this

or I can only do this when this particular company tells me I can do this. It's now an economy where the consumer has a lot more sway over what the corporations do and what the companies do and we should use that to our advantage. We can create the products that we want. We can get what we want if we just demand it.

So, I think I would turn it a little bit on the opposite direction of one, it does create freedoms because it allows people to do what they want to do but with that comes responsibility. As an individual freelancer, as somebody who's creating your own path, you need to decide for yourself what you want your brand to be, what you want your focus to be and you have to learn to say no

to the things that don't fit into that mentality and that's new. That's hard for people. But then I also think that it does create a lot more customization amongst what companies offer to consumers. It's not necessarily about exposing the consumer. It's about making the company adapt to what the consumer wants because they now have the chance to push a button and get exactly what they're looking for.

True, at the same time, the things that we're looking at in an on-demand economy is it gives us what we want at the time we want it but it also starts to suggest things that we don't even know that we want it at the time given. And I know at Evernote you're investing a lot into AI

or what you call augmented intelligence and it's supposed to give the user superpowers. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, I think for us technology is really meant to give the individual and the people that they're collaborating with what we call superpowers. And when Evernote first started and still to this day

we talk about it being your second brain. There's this concept of there's all these things that you want to remember and you know you're going to need them at some point but you can't remember where you put it, you can't remember which piece of paper you wrote it down, you can't remember which magazine you ripped it out of. But with Evernote you can collect all of that information, you can have it at your fingertips and then you can recall it very quickly.

Now what AI lets us do, which is different from how a lot of people look at AI, is we try to take what you're using in your account and we apply algorithms just to you. So we don't share that data with anyone else but we want to serve you the information that you're looking for before you even have to ask for it.

So you can imagine a day with wearables where you're walking down the hall and you run into somebody that you don't necessarily see on a daily basis and your watch says, hey you've got a meeting with this person tomorrow and here's the topic you want to talk about and boom you've got the notes so you can already start the dialogue much earlier and it may be something that you would have fumbled and looked for before

and you didn't have access to that information. So it's like a personal assistant in some way that kind of like whispers in your ear what you're going to know. From a practical point of view, because obviously a lot of us use lots of tools at all times and how can we integrate? I mean you're here now as a representative of Evernote but also in the understanding of the larger digital economy that we live in,

how can we integrate all these different channels and tools together? You know, it's definitely a challenge and I see lots of different inputs in my daily life and that's part of what we've tried to do from an Evernote perspective but I think a lot of companies are looking at this as well too.

We're not trying to force you into a new workflow, we're trying to take the best of whatever it is you're trying to do and make it easy for you to work how you want to work. So for example at Evernote we're not really trying to replace every other tool that you might want to use but rather put it into a consolidated workspace where you can have your documents from your Google Drive,

you can have your Office documents, you can link things into Evernote, make it all searchable so that throughout your day you can mainly focus on this one application and you don't have to context switch between different things to either write a memo, create a presentation or read an article that you recently clipped from the web. So it's really about trying to streamline by saying,

okay, how can we be the modern workspace that lets you have everything you need in one place but not necessarily force you to create just in that tool. You should be able to use a variety of different tools. That sounds like there's a lot of data being collected yet at a talk last year at DLD Women, you said we're not a big data company actually,

an anti-data company and yet the organization of knowledge is at the core of your business. Isn't that a contradiction? It does seem like a bit of a contradiction and we sort of joke about the fact that we're the biggest non-big data company you can imagine. We do have a lot of people's notes but we're very, very serious about privacy and protection

so we don't actually expose those notes in any way. So Evernote has a very specific direct business model in that we make a product, you pay a subscription for your product, that's it. We don't search your data for advertising, we don't monetize in any other indirect way. You know specifically that you're paying for the application

and then that money is what's going to our business model. There isn't any other way that we make money. And we do that because in order to actually be successful as a company, we need you to trust and put your information into Evernote and if we're mining it for advertising or for other purposes, you're never going to do that.

So I think that's a key part that makes Evernote very different is yes, we have a lot of this data, we do absolutely nothing with it but keep it for you. So basically I'm, as a user, the only one who profits from it? Yes, that's correct. I'll have to use that. And as an individual that's probably true but how does it work in a corporation?

As you said, you're also enabling and offering the services to big companies and how do they utilize this? So back to your point about work-life balance. Our business product is quite unique in that when you use Evernote for business, then you actually have sort of two accounts in one. So you have your personal account still and then you have your business account

and they're designated by separate notebooks. So you as a user, you see both of your accounts together. The business only sees your business notebooks. So you can clearly see which notebooks are part of your business and which are part of your personal life. So you can switch between personal and business very easily but when it comes to what's actually shared with your teammates,

that's all in your business notebook and you can clearly designate that. The advantages that that gets you is you have a few different things you can do. You have a business home where you can put up notebooks that you want the entire team to see and every time you update them, they have access to the latest information. But then we also do something called knowledge discovery.

So if you're working on an article and you're writing something in Evernote business, as you're writing, we will surface and say, you have five colleagues that know more about this topic because we can see what you're writing and we know what else is in the business. So you can quickly call your colleague and say, oh, I see that you wrote this article on this topic like six months ago.

Can I talk to you about what your notes are and like can I talk to you about that information? So it makes you more efficient with your team without actually exposing your personal data. I mean, that sounds like a positive, seamless experience. So when you look at the future of work, businesses and organizing, how will this sharing knowledge enable people to do better?

So we're seeing a huge trend around the world that economies of all different sizes are moving from more of a manufacturing-based economy into more of a knowledge-based economy. Knowledge is actually becoming sort of the competitive advantage for different firms. Whether you're in a services industry

and so the knowledge about your customers is really important, or whether you're in more of a traditional products-based company and the IP and discussions around either the products themselves or the partnerships is more important, that knowledge is really, really crucial. And what we see happening is that the more people actually share knowledge, the smarter the entire organization becomes

and therefore everyone profits from that. I think in the past there's been a lot of competitive nature about I only want my notes to be for me because if I have all the information then I'm valuable. And people are moving away from that into more of I am more valuable if I actually share and collaborate with other people because I'm going to learn more, they're going to learn more,

and then therefore overall we're both going to be more powerful. I like that idea. So you're differentiating between the productivity as an individual and the productivity as a group. Do you think that again this is a contradiction keeping knowledge or having to share it for the bigger group?

I think they can work very well together. I think as people are trying to be more individually productive they start to spark more ideas and then those ideas get better when they're actually shared and collaborated on. So I think having both in one tool is actually quite valuable. A place where you can kind of keep your information and you want to work on something and kind of think about it a little bit more

get some ideas going before you actually share it with the group and then once you share it with the group more magic starts to happen because everyone else starts to say oh, I see this, I see that, we could do this and we could do that and they improve upon it. So I think the combination of both is really quite crucial but I think the key to that is it should be something that's fairly seamless.

In the past a lot of tools that tried to make it easier to share knowledge were very sort of ugly, they weren't well designed they were very clunky, they were built more for IT than they were for the human being and we're really trying to build something that's much more user friendly so that you enjoy working in it and therefore you enjoy collaborating in it with your colleagues.

And I think that's an interesting challenge that a lot of people are facing both when it comes to devices and when it comes to software. Now that you mentioned devices and the talk before was about wearables so the next step, is Evernote going to be on the Apple Watch? Is that something you're looking at? Yeah, so we are on the Apple Watch and we're on it when it launched and I think wearables is something that is really really interesting to watch

particularly when you talk about the productivity space because we really didn't want to take Evernote as an entire application and just replicate it completely on the watch because it's just not very user friendly. We wanted to take the subset of functionality that would make the most sense for a device like a watch and bring just that to a very simple interface

because in order for the watch to work you have to have the phone with you. So if you want to read a two-page note you're not going to do it on a watch you'd just be sitting there scrolling, scrolling. I mean Apple's even done research about how long people want to stand like this before they get tired and it's not very long. So really taking just the pieces of Evernote like checklists, like reminders

and like notifications about work chats and adding those to the watch so that you know that something's there then if you want to look at it you can pull out your phone or if you want to check off on your checklist you can see that on your watch. Being really smart about which activities happen on which device is a key part of this.

There's not going to be a tiny little keyboard for you to type a six-page note on your watch that wouldn't make sense. What makes more sense is I've just arrived in a new city I need to see what my next meeting is and that's the information I want to have and that note should be right there front and center.

But it shouldn't necessarily be like a huge composition platform. Right, and when we hear all of this basically it creates a hyper-aware, hyper-connected individual that can access all the information that oneself, let's say, gathered but also all peers gathered and how do we utilize it for our personal benefit?

I mean most people here in the room are hyper-aware, hyper-connected and yet some are struggling to make ends meet with what they're doing with all this super expertise. Yeah, I think it's quite interesting because it creates an opportunity for real knowledge

it also creates an opportunity for being completely overwhelmed. And I think this is where, again, when we think about augmented intelligence from an Evernote perspective, that's a big part of what we're trying to do is now that you have all this information, what can we develop next that lets you quickly find the information you need at the time you need it

because we can surface it for you. If we get to a point where we can actually understand what's your meeting schedule like when was the last time you talked to that person and just bring that information to the forefront so you don't have to sort through it I think it's quite positive. At the same time I think there's a certain amount of personal responsibility

and this is similar to what I was talking about before with the on-demand economy of we have to train ourselves how to use technology to best suit us and so it isn't always about trying to absorb anything, everything and anything it's about trying to sort through what is the most relevant thing for me and letting technology help you do that.

There's a lot of different tools that can do that for you. When you look at your user base, can you say are there certain industries that are more inclined to use collaborative tools? Absolutely, so freelancers as a matter of fact is one very, very important industry for us and particularly people in the creative field and also people in journalism, quite strong

and there was recently a Forbes study that was released that said by 2020 50% of people in the US are going to be freelance workers so this is a very, very fast growing audience and the same thing is happening globally as well. So that's something that's quite crucial and has been great for us. People in financial services use Evernote quite a bit.

We also have a lot of people in any kind of consulting field where they have a lot of different clients that they need to manage and sort of go across the board but it's not even just about that. We have a significant number of people in the mining industry, in the insurance industry all sorts of different uses that you would never quite expect.

I mean one of the interesting examples on the mining side is they need to go down and they need to inspect the mines so they'll take iPads down, they lose connectivity when they're in the mines they'll take images, they'll take readings and then they'll come back up to the surface and it syncs with Evernote across devices. So even something that's very sort of down and dirty and very manual

can be improved by knowledge management. That's quite surprising and when you look at the user base internationally which countries or regions are you expanding the fastest right now? We're growing quite fast and Evernote is very unique in the fact that between 75 and 79% of our users are actually outside of the US. So that's fairly unusual for a company our size.

China is growing very quickly for us, Latin America particularly Brazil and Mexico are growing very quickly, Indonesia, Australia but still some of our top markets Germany has 3 million users alone, 4 million across all the German speaking markets and Europe accounts for about 33% of our user base.

So while different markets are growing at different speeds Germany is still one of our top markets. That's impressive. I want to open it up to the audience, I don't know if you touched a lot of points on demand, economy, services, products, freelancing, Evernote is there anybody out there who would love to, has a question for Linda?

Hold on, there's a microphone coming up. Yeah, I want to invite you to change a bit the format of talking YouTube and use the group power here of people and I'm just curious how many of you are freelancers, could you please stand up?

And how many of you would regard yourself as workers in the on-demand economy? So are you a worker in the on-demand economy?

Is there a question on this? I'm sorry to interrupt, we only have 3 minutes I would love for questions to be. Last question would be, are you users of Evernote?

Thank you for the insight, any other questions? Over here. Very short, you said the data is very well protected, is it on US servers? Is it on European servers?

I'm asking because let's say we have the data protection laws and do they apply to the different countries? Sure, so our data is currently on US servers, we own our own hosting centers so that we can protect them so we don't actually outsource the hosting. So we own our own data centers both based on the West Coast in the US.

We are considering other locations in the future, Europe is one of them because of exactly that. I have a question, what is the demand economy doing to equality in society between rich and poor? I have a feeling that the negotiating power of the employee,

in that case the freelancer, is getting lower because whenever somebody wants to hire, somebody can easily exchange. So there is no more minimum wage, there is no more trade unions, so the demand economy, what can be done to strengthen the negotiating chip

of those freelancers? You know, we've seen some really interesting things because of the way that we are able to expand. Looking at the negotiating power of a freelancer to a company is one thing, but I think also looking at the power of somebody to actually start their own business is another.

So for example, when Evernote expands internationally, one of the first things that we do when we are working in a new country is we engage the developer community to develop applications that can be built on top of Evernote that they can then run their own business on. And we recently did a program in Africa where we actually basically held a developer contest and held several workshops

to allow people to build on top of the Evernote platform and then we gave away grants to the winners so that they could build their business on top of that. So I think there is two different ways that you can look at how the demand economy can actually help equalize that. One is by allowing people to develop a specific skill set

that they can then market into an organization or into a company as a freelancer. But I think it is not to be underestimated the power of letting people actually start their own businesses using the skill sets that are very specific to their knowledge, their market and their community. The app that won the developer contest that we held in Africa last year

was actually an application that would never really have a use necessarily outside of Africa, something very specific to financing and banking that is unique to the African banking system. But because of this, he was able to develop and start his company using Evernote as kind of the step stone platform

and then getting the prize money to actually fund the business and hire people and start his own organization. So I think there is two different ways to look at the on-demand economy. Great. Thank you. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for your input. Great. Thank you, Linda, for your time and insights. Well, if you have any questions, use the hashtag SendQuestions via Twitter. We are here for you and I think now the next talk is coming up.

Thank you very much. Thank you.