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Say Hello to Your New Brain on Evernote, Company of the Year. Phil Libin remembers the moment he left childhood behind.

Say Hello to Your New Brain on Evernote, Company of the Year

It was nearly four years ago, when the funding for his Internet start-up fell through. He was 35. It had all been so much fun until then. But at 3 a.m., out of cash and having waited in vain for a venture capitalist or angel or CEO or anyone at all to return his increasingly desperate calls, Libin knew that he would have to pull the plug on Evernote, a software application that helps people remember things.

"I realized I was going to have to wake up tomorrow and lay off everyone in the company," he says. Exhausted and demoralized, he was reaching for the light switch when his e-mail dinged. Feeling more awake, Libin typed back: "It just so happens we could use some cash. The answer came right back: "Would half a million dollars be enough? " Today, the company is swimming in tens of millions of dollars in cash from both VCs and profits. Libin has different ways of explaining it: It's your brain offloaded to a server. 1. 2. 3. 4.

Evernote Clearly Knows How To Make Web Reading, Clipping Easier. Evernote is today introducing its first stand-alone product since Peek: a browser extension called Clearly that enables “distraction-free online reading”.

Evernote Clearly Knows How To Make Web Reading, Clipping Easier

Only available as a Chrome add-on for now, Evernote Clearly removes ads, links, navigational elements and whatnot from any block of text you’d like to read on the Web and lets you easily save it to Evernote to read later. If that sounds a lot like the core functionality of the likes of Readability or Instapaper, you’re probably thinking in the right direction. Evernote Takes $50 million To Become The Anti-Zynga. A couple of weeks ago we wrote about Evernote’s new rumored venture round.

Evernote Takes $50 million To Become The Anti-Zynga

It was a big one, said one source, putting them in the billion dollar valuation club. Today they’ll officially announce that deal – $50 million in new funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures. And while they didn’t quite get that billion dollar valuation people were whispering about, the company is still doing quite nicely, thank you. As part of the round, Roelof Botha at Sequoia will join the board of directors. He was previously a board observer. The company continues to grow like a well loved weed.

Which is a lot. And that’s exactly what the company wants to see. Evernote grabs $50M to be everyone’s “second brain” Evernote, the popular cloud-based note-taking application, has pulled in $50 million in new funding led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures.

Evernote grabs $50M to be everyone’s “second brain”

The new investment, which comes after a $20 million series C round last year October, will be used for aggressive growth and acquisitions as the company expands its offerings. The new money is another sign of increasing momentum for the popular service, which is now up to 11 million users. We reported that Evernote had just reached the 10 million-member mark a month ago after taking almost 1,000 days to reach the 5 million milestone. Sequoia Capital To Double Down On Evernote With Big New Investment.

Evernote is as hot as any startup in Silicon Valley, even if they don’t get quite as much press.

Sequoia Capital To Double Down On Evernote With Big New Investment

Last year they raised $20 million from Sequoia Capital, on top of the $25 million they’d already raised. The company is profitable with 70 employees, and has revenue of more than $1 million per month. Profitable enough, in fact, that it’s rumored they haven’t spent a penny of that $20 million venture round. Even so, they’re close to raising a new round, we’ve heard from multiple sources.

It’ll likely be in the $50 million range, and Sequoia Capital will once again lead. One source pegged the valuation at a billion dollars or more, which would put Evernote in the billion dollar valuation club. Ever-Growing Evernote Hits 10 Million Users (425,000 Paying Ones, Too) Evernote hits 10m users as premium membership takes off.

After taking 992 days to reach 5 million members, Evernote said today it has now hit 10 million members just 208 days later.

Evernote hits 10m users as premium membership takes off

It has also eclipsed 400,000 premium members, putting the company well on its way toward its goal of 1 million paid users. Evernote hit 5 million users on Nov. 10 last year and was up to 6 million users by the first of the year. It’s since grown by 67 percent in a little over five months to 10 million users with the last million signing up in 32 days. It had 3.6 million unique visitors in the last 30 days, up 70 percent since the beginning of the year. And perhaps most impressive is Evernote’s paid conversion growth.

“Ten million users seemed like an inconceivable number when we were getting ready to launch the service into open beta less than three years ago. The latest news caps off a wave of activity this year by Evernote, which has been working to improve its products across different platforms. Evernote Shows Startups: ‘Free’ Can Pay. So how do you make money if you are offering a product that has millions of users and only a small percentage pay for it?

Evernote Shows Startups: ‘Free’ Can Pay

‘The easiest way to get a million people to pay for nonscarcity product may be to make 100 million people fall in love with it.’ That’s the so-called Freemium model that many companies have bet on only to find it doesn’t turn into a pile of gold immediately. But the answer, according to Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, is that the money will come if you focus on just keeping your millions of users happy, regardless of whether they pay or not. Libin’s advice and impressive slides were welcomed by a roomful of budding entrepreneurs at The Founder Conference in Mountain View, California Tuesday. “The easiest way to get a million people to pay for nonscarcity product may be to make 100 million people fall in love with it,” Libin said, calling his users his marketing team.

Libin says the most annoying question he gets is what percentage of users are paying for the product. The Path From Apple's Newton to Evernote. Evernote is a smart phone app that epitomizes the modern day web service.

The Path From Apple's Newton to Evernote

It is used over a variety of devices, it syncs easily between those devices, it augments your daily life in ways not possible before the mobile web, it can be used equally at work or home. In an interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, I discovered that the genesis of Evernote is tied in with the Apple Newton - the innovative, but ultimately ahead of its time, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) from Apple from the late 80's to 90's.

In Part 1 of this interview, Phil Libin explains that link to the Newton and how it ultimately led to the "secondary brain" app called Evernote. In Part 2 (to be published tomorrow) we discuss Evernote's ambitious 20-year plan. Phil Libin isn't the founder of Evernote, but he joined the company before it had a product and has been instrumental in creating the Evernote service we see today. Richard MacManus: How was Evernote conceived and what was the inspiration for it? 5 Million Users: We’re gonna need a bigger boat. Posted by Phil Libin on 10 Nov 2010 Comment Twenty two thousand one hundred and thirty new people joined Evernote yesterday.

5 Million Users: We’re gonna need a bigger boat

Seriously. 22,130. Evernote. Apparently information capturing and management startup Evernote is seeing quite some early success in Japan only three months after the release of its Japanese-language version.

Evernote

Already, Japan is its second largest market after the United States, Evernote says, representing nearly 15 percent of the service’s daily traffic. Evernote Is Still Growing Like A Weed, Hits 4 Million Users. Evernote, the ‘memory enhancement’ service that allows one to capture, organize, and find information across multiple devices and platforms, is gaining new users at a fast clip. As you can tell from the graph above, the Mountain View startup needed 446 days to get its first million users, 222 days to get to its second million, and 134 days to get to its third. But it only took Evernote another 108 days to reach the 4 million users milestone, the company is set to announce later today. Chief executive Phil Libin tells me the large majority of its user base is located in the United States, but not overwhelmingly so: about 57%, followed by 18% who hail from Japan, where the startup now boasts an office.

A decent number of users comes from Spain, UK and Germany, and more than 12% of its users are located in the ‘rest of the world’. Evernote hopes to attract more users through hardware bundles (i.e. in partnership with Sony, Samsung and others) in the future.