We try to compensate by storing data on our laptop computers and tablets and smartphones. But that works only if we trouble ourselves to enter the information in the right place in the right file in the right form, and even then it can be hard to track down where that crucial nugget of information is hiding. Is the name of that restaurant on my laptop or my phone? I could ask that guy from the conference who told me about it, but what did I do with his e-mail address?
Libin began to think about what a better electronic memory would be like. You could put in information in any form, be it a typed document, a handwritten note, a photo, a webpage, a spoken conversation. And you could instantly get the information into any of your devices on the fly without worrying about how to organize it. "When people want to capture a thought, they don't want to stop what they're doing," he says.
More important, you would be able to find whatever it is whenever you need it, as effortlessly and intuitively as we now dig up stuff via Google. "Google is great, but it only knows about public information," says Libin. "We needed something that could handle your information." It would be as if Google were indexing your life on an ongoing basis and putting it all at your fingertips. What's more, you wouldn't need to remember much about what exactly you were looking for. As with your brain, what you would need is only a vague clue, like a person, a place, a word, a time.
How great would that be for productivity? Especially if it worked well on smartphones, which more of us are pulling out more often throughout the day. As we do an increasing amount of our work outside of the office, realized Libin, there was a growing opportunity to make the bits of free time away from our computers count. But so far, says Libin, smartphone apps have been more time killers than productivity tools. "They've been great for wasting time on Facebook and Zynga when you have a couple of minutes," he says. "I wanted to make smartphones great for getting work done in those minutes." And, finally, Libin thought it was crucial that this memory tool be fun to use. "In the past five years, there's been a huge emphasis in giving us great tools for entertaining diversions," he says. "But no one has applied the same great user experience that we see on something like Facebook to productivity tools. Microsoft Office isn't fun to use."
Put it all together, and you would get what Libin calls "a ubiquitous platform for lifetime productivity." Now all he had to do was build it and get a billion people to use it.
They Go Way Back
Many of Evernote's managers worked with Phil Libin at his previous companies, Engine 5 and CoreStreet.
1. The Friend of a Friend
Dave Engberg is friends with Evernote programmer Brandon Volbright, who worked at Engine 5, Libin's first company. After Volbright made an introduction, Libin hired Engberg to work at CoreStreet. Engberg is now Evernote's CTO.
2. The College Buddy
Phil Constantinou—or Phil C., as he is called at Evernote, to differentiate him from Libin—lived across the hall from Engberg in their freshman dorm at Stanford. Engberg introduced him to Libin, who hired Constantinou as vice president of products at Evernote.
3. The Loyal Leader
Phil Libin, whose second company, CoreStreet, made high-tech security systems for the government, decided to ditch the slow-moving world of contracting. But he held on to his team.
4. The Childhood pal
Andrew Sinkov has known Libin since they were kids. Sinkov was working at a real estate firm—and knew zip about marketing—when Libin hired him to handle marketing at CoreStreet. Now, Sinkov is Evernote's vice president of marketing.
In 2006, Libin pulled the crew together again with the intention of starting a company called Ribbon, as in, tied around your finger. (As a big fan of Japan, Libin notes, it was a nice bonus for him that the name was similar to how people pronounce his name there.) But shortly after throwing himself into researching electronic memory aids, he discovered there was a tiny, two-year-old stealth start-up in Silicon Valley called Evernote. It was creating tools for extracting text from photos so that you could take pictures of notes and make them searchable. "I had thought of that," says Libin, "but these guys were already pretty far along with the technology."
In fact, this Evernote team had previously developed some of the key software for Apple's visionary but ill-fated Newton personal information manager, a sort of primitive iPad that came out in the late 1980s. It was a primarily Russian crew of talented coders, not unlike Libin's own team, and it was led by a brilliant techie named Stepan Pachikov. Libin flew out to meet Pachikov, liked what he heard, and suggested they merge the teams rather than compete. Libin became CEO of the company, which retained the name Evernote, while Pachikov gradually shifted his focus to other projects.
