INDUSTRY
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
DECEMBER 2012
•
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL
79
PHIL LIBIN’SDESK IS
about one stray paperclip away from
terminally succumbing to chaos. Dungeons & Dragons
rule books compete with laptops for space on a surface
otherwise thickly populated with miniature elephants,
toy robots, stick-on googly eyes, sumowrestler dolls, bacon
mints, a tiny globe and assorted travel tchotchkes. In short,
it doesn’t look like the desk of a guy who got rich helping
35
million people improve their organizational skills.
And yet it is. Libin is the CEO of Evernote, maker of the
wildly popular app of the same name that allows users
to upload notes, photos, sound and video clips and Web
pages via computer, smartphone or tablet, and archive
them in “notebooks” searchable by keywords, dates and
other tags. With its slogan “Remember everything” and
its elephant emblem, the Redwood City, Calif., company
that helps people upload their memory to the cloud gains
60,000
newusers a day and has 1.5million paid subscribers.
It’s so big in Japan that when Libin got a haircut in Tokyo,
the media showed up.
Libin, 40, whose mind is as freewheeling as his desk,
currently has 20 online notebooks containing more than
9,000
entries. They range fromblueprints of his newhouse
to great sushi he’s had in Tokyo. “I live on Evernote,” he
says. “It’s my external brain.”
Hailing from a long line of concert musicians, chess
masters and Ph.D.s, Libin has always displayed
REMEMBERS ONLY
HOWEVERNOTE SIDESTEPPED DISASTER TO BECOME THE GO-TOAPP FOR
PEOPLE LOOKING TOUPLOAD THEIRMEMORY TO THE CLOUD
BY CRISTINA ROUVALIS
