Evernote has over 65 million registered users in the mobile, web and desktop terminals

Absrtact: Tencent Science and Technology (Tom) Beijing time July 30 news, according to foreign media reports, in recent years, Evernote is undoubtedly the world's fastest growing cloud notebook applications, the application currently in the iOS and Android application market total download volume has been super

Tencent Science and Technology (Tom) Beijing time July 30 news, according to foreign media reports, in recent years, Evernote is undoubtedly the world's fastest-growing cloud notebook applications, the application currently in the iOS and Android application market total download volume has been more than 10 million times, and in the mobile, The Web page and desktop end have a total of more than 65 million registered users.

Phil Libin, a well-known start-up entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and Evernote CEO Fille Liebing, is often angry when he hears that Evernote is seen as a simple digital notebook, because in his eyes this application is an extension of the mind, even though the application currently has only 5% of the work done. But now, after hearing these words, Liebing is no longer as intense as it had been before, because it was the humble Evernote who made the redwood, a company headquartered in Redwood, California, a successful profit after releasing a new version of Evernote in 2011.

This year, the scale of the Evernote has been further expanded, and the company's goals have been further extended. In Liebing's view, he wants Evernote to become "Office" in mobile devices or "Nike in People's minds".

At present, a total of 330 employees have been evernote in a small team of not more than 8 people, Liebing that this size makes it easy for team members to sit at a table to eat, or to start a team exchange. Within the Evernote, no project lasts longer than 9 months, and software code is not shared between different teams within the company, which is often seen as the biggest taboo for startups inside Silicon Valley.

In Friday, Liebing took the time to receive an interview with the US famous Tech media Wired magazine. During the interview, Liebing talked about his and his company's past, present and future prospects.

The following is the main content of this interview:

Wired: Some people choose to develop immersive video applications, painting applications, music applications, or social networking applications, but you decide to develop notebook applications, this application category is somewhat boring compared to the previous few, how do you think?

Liebing: I want to do something for myself. The idea behind this application is to help users easily record all the ideas that pop up, whether it's audio, pictures, text, network clips, or documents. We would like to provide a platform that allows you to place all of your information, and you can find it anytime. For example, we might take a picture of a whiteboard with a full word and hope to search for the text in it, which could lead to other problems. At the same time, we want to redefine the word "productivity", but we never think of Evernote as a simple notebook application, but as an extension of the human brain.

Wired: Is today's Evernote a step towards the company's future vision?

Liebing: Really is a step forward, but our dream is to become a century enterprise, and now the company is just five years old, so we only completed 5% of the work.

Wired: Which direction do you think the product should be developed?

Liebing: I think the company that has the biggest impact on me is Nike. At first Nike was just starting out with Adidas, Puma and other niche sports brands, but Nike became the first sport brand to move into the mainstream. Now, Nike has become the iconic brand of people who want to move or think of themselves as athletes, so we want Evernote to be the iconic brand that sees itself as a smart and efficient crowd. We believe that Evernote will become a combination of physical and digital products, or the application can be at the intersection of the essence of the two, and this is precisely the way of enterprise Operation hundred years.

Wired: There are a lot of powerful companies that think they can help smart people become more efficient, like Microsoft and Google.

Liebing: For us, competition is an eternal topic. When the financial crisis hit the Evernote in 2008, the venture capital industry suffered an unprecedented blow. When I went to the VCs, I could only say, "We're going to develop a free product that allows you to keep a record of things on your computer, your cell phone, and you can invest 10 million dollars for me?" ”

In general, these venture capitalists will not hesitate to reject me, some investors may be polite to ask some irrelevant questions, the first question is generally: "Who is your main competitor?" "But I didn't respond well to the question, and I said," Every computer, cell phone, PDA, or other device already in the market already has a pretty good free note application built into it. ”

But we are not worried about this because from the top five technology companies that currently have the most users, the company's partners are likely to be Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, and these five companies are in some way competitive with us, which is life. If I could wake up one morning and think, "How do I make the product better?" Instead of waking up and thinking, "Who is my opponent today, and who am I to beat?" "It might be happier.

If you want to be successful in the face of these outstanding enterprises, you can do is to develop a truly excellent product. We will devote all our time to this work in the future, and want to make the product better.

Wired: The so-called "100-year Plan" sounds like Evernote is planning to develop some of the more complex products, not just text record apps, is it?

Liebing: All the things we think are stupid now, we want to make it smarter, and Evernote business's goal is to make business users smarter. We believe that the Conference is the source of all bad decisions and that the culture of the Conference has been completely subverted over the past 20 years, and that is exactly the problem we need to tackle.

Another issue we need to think about is the length of the user's session, and Microsoft's Office suite has succeeded in defining productivity over the past 25 years. In the past, people averaged 1-2 hours of conversation, and people often needed to sit in front of their computers and use Excel or Word to enter text. Later, the smartphone's presence compresses the average session length to 1, 2 minutes, or 5 minutes. I think that's one of the reasons why Microsoft has struggled to get into the mobile market because it's a very different way of thinking and people can't use Office to work efficiently in a short time.

Over the next few years, different devices will compress the average conversation time into seconds. For example, Google Glasses user session is only a few seconds long, the so-called smart watch session length can be almost negligible. As a result, one might need to redefine the word "efficient", as it did when smartphones began to take over desktop computers.

Wired: Evernote is the user who?

Liebing: Those who are hard to understand life, work balance, always thinking, and will continue to reply to corporate emails at 11 o'clock in Saturday are our users. At the same time, the modern knowledge people who will view restaurant reviews and office recommendations are also our target users.

Connection: Many journalists are your users, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Liebing: Of course it's a good thing, and that's what we want to see. We said at the beginning of Evernote that this application would be an ideal tool for journalists and investors. That is to say, when we need more investment, perhaps half of the investors participating in the meeting are using Evernote. The same is true for journalists, which we always consider to be a fruitful strategy.

Wired: How's the business going lately?

Liebing: Very good, we are growing larger and more things need to be managed. A few months ago, I could have known all of the company's employees, but almost overnight, the total number of employees increased from 100 to 300 people. Sometimes I travel for one or two weeks, and when I come back I hardly know anyone, and I spend a lot of time thinking about culture, teamwork and scaling up. We need to be very cautious when businesses are no longer part of the entrepreneurial business and start to get a little worse. I think companies need to resist the temptation to have a situation where an employee you hire doesn't know why and thinks his job is stupid.

Wired: How do you prevent this from happening?

Liebing: We will hold a weekly staff meeting in the central staircase of the company for 20 minutes to one hour, generally speaking, but sometimes other employees will speak on the stage. At this meeting, we will introduce new employees together and explain the company's current focus, and 80% of the time is used to set the tone for the company and to prevent this from happening. At a manager's meeting, I will make sure that the manager is aware of its responsibilities and that it does not engage in "mystical culture" in the office. Therefore, there should be no "I don't know what I'm doing" idea within our company. Of course, such things will inevitably happen, but we will correct them in time before the idea spreads out.

Wired: Do you have any plans for this weekend?

Liebing: My wife is out this week, so I'll keep working (laughing). Generally speaking, I only work half a day on weekends, so we will have time to do something together. But this week she went back to her New York home, so I thought, "Well, two days of working hours!" ”

My home is in the small hillside nearby, I think I will sit on the porch on the weekend, open Sonos Outdoor hi-fi sound to continue to work. As I have said before, the average Evernote user does not find a balance between work and life, so I am also one of the target customers of this product.