Evernote, the memory app people forgot about, lays off entire US staff

Evernote, the app that has sought for two decades to find a large paying audience for its "external brain," is moving its operations to Italy, home of its parent company Bending Spoons. It's yet another big shift for a company that's been useful, but not quite profitable, since at least 2004.

Bending Spoons, which acquired Evernote in November 2022, had laid off 129 workers in February 2023, stating that Evernote had been "unprofitable for years" and "unsustainable in the long term." Whatever unspecified number of remaining employees remain in the US (and Chile) received notice of the move on June 23, then the layoff on July 5, according to a company blog post. Staffers typically received 16 weeks of salary, one year of health insurance, and a pro-rated performance bonus, along with assistance for those working on visas.

"Our plans for Evernote are as ambitious as ever: Going forward, a dedicated (and growing) team based in Europe will continue to assume ownership of the Evernote product," wrote Francesco Patarnello, Evernote's CEO. "This team will be in an ideal position to leverage the extensive expertise and strength of the 400-plus workforce at Bending Spoons, many of whom have been working on Evernote full-time since the acquisition."

Many people today, especially younger people, may have never heard of Evernote, which is part of the problem. Evernote's core pitch—an easily accessed, tag-friendly, searchable notebook that syncs everywhere—was novel and ambitious when it publicly debuted in 2004. Founder Stepan Pachikov, who had been developing the project since 2000, had also worked on handwriting recognition for both Microsoft and Apple; at the time, an app that could keep everything paired up between a Pocket PC and a Windows XP computer, without any cable fuss, was novel.

As iPhones, Android devices, and tablets arrived, Evernote showed up on them. As other apps appeared, Evernote almost always had an official API integration with them.

Ars interviewed then-CEO Phil Libin in 2008, after Evernote launched an iPhone client, a new web UI, and a premium membership. The company wanted to "downplay client version numbers" and charge instead for Evernote as a service, an idea that would later resonate with legions of app developers. "We want people to be comfortable with Evernote as their external brain," Libin explained. "Platforms and apps change, but people will always need access to the service."

Evernote was more flexible than the words-on-a-page name suggested. The app gained traction with the context/tagging/folder-focused Getting Things Done crowd, and Evernote welcomed them. Ars' Casey Johnston wrote in late 2013 about how Evernote helped her overcome an irrational keep-everything mentality. By that point, there were note-taking apps in the ecosystems of Google (Keep), Apple (Notes), and Microsoft (OneNote), but Evernote's multi-platform nature and generous freemium model maintained its appeal. I had one friend who, around that time, kept his Evernote password in a fireproof safe for his spouse; it was a key part of how she could settle his estate should the unexpected happen.

At one heady moment in 2013, the company had 75 million users, with 3.1 million of them paying. The company was reportedly valued at around $1 billion, and it was eager to expand. At its user conference that year, documented by Harry McCracken, it pitched Evernote integrations with 3M's Post-It Notes, backpacks, messenger bags, wallets, luggage, Moleskine notebooks, scanners and cameras, and Google Glass. Evernote was growing internationally, looking toward an IPO, and toying with side projects like Evernote Hello (remember people), Evernote Food (recipes and ingredient shopping), and Evernote Peek (flashcards for students).

Libin told Fast Company in 2013 that the goal for Evernote wasn't a typical startup exit, like a sale or IPO. The company also wanted to be around for 100 years. "We said, 100-year startup, we still want to be a startup in 100 years," Libin said. "Even as we get bigger, we don’t want to stay small, we want to get quite large, but we want to be a 100-year-old, very large company that’s still operating like a startup, people are still in love with, that’s making innovative decisions, that’s acting decisively."

Soon after that, however, Evernote started appearing in the news for things other than new features and novel uses. The company was criticized for substandard cryptographic practices after a major breach, as it was using MD5 tools to hash passwords, a system that could easily be overcome with brute computing power. The company announced big changes to its pricing in 2016, primarily by limiting free users to two devices. Later that year, Evernote's new privacy policy raised eyebrows, given that it seemed to imply employees could look at your notes and you could not opt out. Later on, then-CEO Chris O'Neill apologized and said it actually involved machine learning correction.

That same year, the company lost four executives in one month, sought funds on a lower valuation, and started pruning non-core businesses, including Evernote-branded gear, Food, and most of the other things McCracken wrote about in 2013. The company had dropped from the No. 1 slot in productivity apps in Apple's App Store to No. 55 by then. The employee who tipped off TechCrunch to the executive departures described the company as "in a death spiral."

The market for a memory-storage app got tougher after that, as the tech giants improved their default apps' capabilities, and collaboration-focused newcomers like Notion gained attention. Bending Spoons, maker of other lifestyle and productivity apps like 30 Day Fitness, Splice, and Remini, acquired the company for an undisclosed amount late last year. At that time, Evernote was reportedly pulling in $100 million in recurring revenue from 250 million users.

It's unclear what the next phase of Evernote looks like as an internally managed project at Bending Spoons. The company's longevity remains impressive, especially for its industry. Hundreds of millions of people still have data with Evernote and can hopefully make use of it—or export it—should future headlines suggest further changes.

Listing image by Evernote