Last Thursday marked our first meetup in Bangkok where we were pleased to have Evernote’s Tiang Lim Foo for a coffee chat to share with our participants some interesting insights on the company’s culture – and to give some valuable startup lessons.
We know that Evernote has a lot of users in Asia, especially in the Southeast Asia region, so it’s a company to watch.
Tiang Lim now heads Asia-Pacific market development at Evernote, but has previously worked with startups in Singapore prior to his stint in Evernote. He mentioned several key differences between working in a Singapore-based startup and a larger-scale one. Funding and cash-flow were the first issues to be brought up (see the whole chat in the video below).
He explained more about the changes he experienced being in Evernote:
We’re quite lucky in the fact that we are at the position where we are pretty well-funded – that allows us to be at the position where we could take more creative risks. Not just in terms of product design, but also in terms of marketing and expansion. And that’s a really exciting phase for us to be in. And to me, it’s learning very fresh new things at a very fresh company cycle.
Key startup lessons learned from Evernote
One of the key things that Tiang Lim shared was the need for startups to be consistent, be it in leadership or communicating the brand, business, or product to the users.
In the case of Evernote, it has kept the message really consistent over the years, such as making privacy their top priority and treating all data seriously. He emphasized that building trust with customers takes years of effort, and this can only be achieved through consistency.
He advised startups to always keep in mind the core mission and the promise to deliver:
You can have different products, different services, or pivot, but at its core, you need to have some principles and values to stick by as this builds trust – and trust builds brands.
Evernote currently has about 270 employees in eight offices around the world. In Asia specifically, there are 25 employees across the Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China offices.
Watch the full video below to understand more about Tiang Lim’s role at Evernote, the company culture, and expansion into the Asian market:
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