Evernote
Founder(s): Stepan Pachikov
Year founded: 2005

Meta Description
The Evernote family of products help you remember and act upon ideas, projects and experiences across all the computers, phones and tablets you use.

Background
In 2007 Phil Libin (current CEO) and team were looking to start a new company. Based on the teams past startup experience they came up with two guiding principles for the new company. The first was to build a product for themselves, something they would want to use. The second was to build a company they would not want to sell, a 100 year startup. After various brainstorming sessions they decided to focus on productivity software. The team felt the software at the time was archaic and lacked a good user experience. During due diligence research Phil discovered a team in California working on a product called “EverNote” (created by Stepan Pachikov). EverNote was a product that addressed the same problem Phil’s team wanted to solve. The two teams merged, rebranded the company to “Evernote” in 2007 and launched the product in 2008.

Problem(s)
As we meet new people, learn new things, and experience life these moments get stored away in our brain automatically. However it is impossible for us to remember all of these moments. The Evernote team felt productivity software tended to have a bad experience. It was difficult to use, poorly designed, and would not sync your data across multiple devices. Furthermore there wasn't a tool that could help us store all the information we wanted to remember. The team envisioned a tool that could mimic and become your external brain. A tool that would make you feel smarter. Your brain does not organize things as appointments, people, events, recipes, etc. — it is all just “stuff” stored in your brain. They wanted a tool that could behave in a similar way. A tool that could bring you the moments or data you wanted to remember on any device at any time.

Solution
A software product to remember everything in your life. Content is stored in notes which can be organized in notebooks and tagged. With powerful search functionality Evernote is able to quickly and efficiently find the content you are looking for. Mimicking your brain you can dump information into Evernote with limited organization and then use search to find what you need. All of your notes are synced to the cloud and can be accessed from your computer, mobile app or any device with an internet browser. This makes Evernote your external brain that can store your digital data that is always with you.

Source(s)
Phil Libin at Startup School 2013
Foundation 32 // Phil Libin