Stepan Pachikov, Evernote: "The task of Evernote is to make a person smarter and better"

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The first prototypes of Evernote appeared in 2001, and the full version - in 2004. For 11 years of its existence, the program has become an integral part of the life of almost every person actively working on the Internet. "MakRadar" contacted the founder of Evernote Stepan Pachikov and talked with him about the creation of Evernote, as well as Stepan's participation in the development of Apple Newton.

You took part in the creation of the Apple Newton PDA. Since when did you join and what did you do there?

It is not entirely correct to say that I took part in the creation of the handheld. It would be more correct to say that I participated in the creation of the key technology of this handheld. At the time, I was fascinated by the idea that spelling is a very important aspect of a child's brain development. When a child writes the letter "a", he is using about 200 muscles associated with the cerebral cortex. And we wanted to make a game to motivate kids to spell. The child would think that the computer is trying to understand what the child wrote, but in fact it was training for the development of the brain. It so happened that we showed our technology at Comdex in 1990. We were the only company from the USSR. A line of journalists lined up for us, CNN recorded a long interview with us. We quickly became popular in America. And it so happened that Apple came to us.

What was Apple like in those years? Was there, for example, the same high level of secrecy regarding the release of new products as it is now?

Nothing changed. We showed our technology to Larry Tesler (Apple Newton project manager - Ed.). We used The Beatles songs as an English dictionary. The demo was a success, and Apple offered us a contract, but with one condition. Their employee must live in Moscow for a month and stay in our office. They were afraid that at some point we would suddenly disappear. Apple ended up signing a multi-million dollar deal with us without telling us how they would use our technology. Apple until the last moment hid the development of its handheld from us. We worked on specs without seeing the devices and almost not knowing about anything.

When Apple announced the Apple Newton, we were horrified. I tried to explain to Larry Tesler that if we knew what we were doing the technology for, we would have done everything differently. But it was too late.

Why did Apple Newton end up in the dustbin of history?

Apple has always had a penchant for making hype around its products. They raised the hype around Apple Newton but overdid it. They promised too much. At one of the conferences, I sat on stage with Esther Dyson (American venture capitalist - Ed.) And answered questions. My English is not very good now, but then it was just awful. And some person in the hall shouted indignantly, swore, accused me of something. I hardly realized that he was cursing because Newton did not understand his handwriting. I suggested that he turn off the recognition and leave handwritten notes - it's still very useful. To which he quite sincerely said that he himself did not understand his own handwriting. The man was convinced that the computer should better understand handwritten text. This was the expectation from Apple Newton. In addition, the technical capabilities of Newton lagged behind the modern iPhone by a thousand times.

How did the idea for Evernote come about?

The idea came to me in the spring of 2000. One of the most handy features of Apple Newton was the endless feed. Such a digital manuscript that could be wound up and down at different speeds. I really liked this idea of visual search for information and, with the disappearance of Newton, I wanted to recreate it. And in the very first version of Evernote for Windows in 2004, I did this thing. It was called the "winder". It all started with the fact that in the spring of 2000 I tried to seduce Zhenya Veselov (developer of the text editor "Lexicon" - Ed.) To quit Microsoft and take up this project. Zhenya did not dare. And I postponed the project for two years. After moving to New York, I told about the idea to Edik Talnykin, then CTO of my first company ParaGraph. He wrote the first prototype of Evernote. And I decided to make a company. Collected, as they say now, a certain amount of "angelic" money. In 2003, I hired Petr Kvitek (creator of the DOS 866 and Windows 1251 code table, founder of FIDO in Russia. - Ed.). The project began to grow at the expense of ParaGraph employees who worked with Apple Newton. In 2004, they switched to Evernote from my other company, ParaScript, which deals with address and check recognition. All US mail uses our text recognition technology.

In 2004, we held our first public demonstration of Evernote in La Jolla, California. I wrote the text on the board, then photographed it on my phone and sent it to Evernote. Then I typed a word on the keyboard, and the computer found the note. At first we only worked with Windows. The work was going very slowly, we did not have enough money, and I could not raise the required amount of investment. In 2007, I met Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote from 2007 to 2015 - Ed.) And invited him to lead the company. Phil quickly shoveled the entire company, found money, brought in a strong team of architects, marketers, and we quickly went up the hill. Somehow everything coincided successfully: I hired Phil, a convinced Yabloko player, the first iPhone came out, and money from investors appeared. At that moment, we realized that Evernote should not only remember and find information, but also help make decisions. That is, from the idea of expanding human memory, we moved on to the idea of expanding the human brain, over time - to the creation of artificial intelligence.

Would you agree to record information in Evernote continuously, for example, using Google Glass?

I am against this approach for one simple reason. In order to find something, you need to know that it is there. For example, you know that you have an 8 × 12 key somewhere in your house. You will find it sooner or later. And if you do not know that you have this key, no matter how you search, you will not find it. Therefore, the information in Evernote must be entered by you explicitly.

How do you personally work with Evernote?

I have over 20,000 notes. Although I am against notebooks, I still had to create them. I have all my passwords in one notebook, and my medical files in the other. I have 10 notebooks in total. At one time I was a proponent of labels. I created a lot of them, but I have not used it for a long time, because it is easier for me to find information by remembering the year the note was created and about what it says. I use the clipper a lot. This is my favorite part of Evernote. I often use my iPhone's camera as a scanner. I open the camera through Evernote and take pictures of labels, tags, product names, and almost everything. Back in 2004, I thought that a phone in a person's hand would become a universal memory device, and I got very upset when I bought an iPhone in 2007. It had a bad camera. She could not work in scanner mode. I personally spent a lot of effort to instill in the heads of Apple employees the need for a function like a scanner. I had personal meetings with them and so on. I hope my work was one of the reasons that Apple made the right camera in the next generation of iPhone.

What was the very first note?

Let's check it out quickly. The very first note I made back in the prototype of Evernote in 2001, and this is a note about my cholesterol levels. Since 2002, I have been recording regularly.

Can you share some life hacks for working with Evernote?

It seems to me that I will now say the obvious things. I am not lazy to write keywords for the note. For example, while preparing for an interview with you, I created a note about the interview and wrote down the keywords: "interview", your last name, date and time. Any of my notes has a title, which is usually highlighted in the left ribbon. And I write the key information in the title to see it in the feed.

Evernote already has over 65 million users. Is a freemium business model justifying itself?

It was Phil Libin's decision. Of course, it is very difficult to do business and develop it without making money. Many internet companies live on advertising. For example, Google. This is a good model in all respects. Evernote cannot use the ad model because we are not reading your notes. We decided from the very beginning that we would not do this. Although we could do it unobtrusively, without violating your privacy, and know what cameras you buy, where you go on vacation, and so on. We do not do this because we believe that it violates privacy. Another way is to sell something. For example, an iPhone app. Phil chose the freemium model and I agreed with him.

What is the percentage of paying users?

I can't say for sure, on average between 6-8%. We earn decently. Could have been more if something had changed. What do you think is the main feature of Evernote that you need in the paid version, but not in the free version?

Maybe OCR on pictures?

No. It’s our marketing’s fault that you don’t know about it. The point is that in the free version, notes are not stored on the phone. You need the Internet all the time to find the note you need. The main advantage of the paid version is that all notes are local and stored on your phone. Unfortunately, this is a flaw in our marketing, which I have paid attention to many times.

How do you see the future of Evernote and the IT industry as a whole?

I am a supporter of Kurzweil (futurologist, author of the concept of technological singularity. - Ed.). His book The Singularity Is Near about human-machine civilization made a strong impression on me. I believe that you, me, and perhaps our children are the last generation of mortal people. The next generation of people will already be immortal and will exist in a form that is difficult to predict now, but it will be a hybrid of biotechnology and cybernetics.

I am concerned that in this future conglomerate, there will be a small human share between the people we are and the creatures we will become in 4-5 generations. Therefore, the only way for us is not to stop progress, but to lead it. For me, the future of Evernote is, in a sense, an attempt to provide the forefront of the human mind in the struggle between the advancing computer intelligence and biological intelligence. You probably know about Stephen Hawking's warning that people underestimate the dangers of computer intelligence. We need to work on our body, our brain, to improve at a tremendous speed, so that in this future symbiosis we take a worthy place and so that our culture, history also merges there. It is precisely in the accelerated development of the human body and brain that I see the development of Evernote and computer technology.

Now for the IT industry as a whole. If I were a venture capitalist, then I would invest in biological computers. Among my many projects, there is one that is especially dear to me now and which I have not implemented. This is an attempt to understand how the programming language of a biological organism works. For example, a spider weaves a web. It is clear that some program is running. The spider did not learn to make a web, it is programmed in it. It is clear that the program is very complex. Takes into account humidity, temperature, geographic location, sunsets and sunrises, and so on. Writing a program that makes a web like a spider is a task for very non-trivial programmers. This program is recorded somewhere. Clearly recorded in DNA. In some language. This language should be a high-level language. Because evolution would be impossible if the language was too assembly language. The high-level language allows you to quickly modify the program, rebuild, improve it.

It is clear that the language is object-oriented. But how it works, what is its logic and structure - you need to understand this in order to learn how to use it. I see the future of the computer industry in this very way - in an attempt to greatly improve our biological nature.