BRIGHT IDEAS
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INDUSTRY
G
rammarians have long argued that people who
overuse the term “awesome” need to experience
more actual awe, but now there’s good reason for
everyone else to look into it as well. In a recent study,
people who were made to experience the emotion—which
the researchers say is caused by encountering something so
vast that you have to update your worldview to accommodate
it—felt that they had more available time. This led the subjects to
say they felt less impatient, and to choose experiential goods (such as movie
tickets and massages) over physical ones (like clothes and TVs). They were also
more willing to donate time to help the needy. Because these last two effects—
volunteering and choosing experiences over material goods—have been shown
to improve well-being, the researchers believe that having regular awe-inspiring
experiences might lead to an increase in life satisfaction, which, if you’ll excuse
the phrase, is pretty awesome. —JACQUELINE DETWILER
a voracious curiosity and a drive
to accomplish things. A er moving from
the Soviet Union to the Bronx at age 8,
he taught himself English by devouring
Thor comic books. Day and night, he
playedwith anAtari 800XL, aRubik’s Cube
and Dungeons & Dragons in his family’s
modest apartment. But his interests went
well beyond the borders of conventional
geekdom. Literature was a big thing. “He
would fall asleepwitha bookonhis pillow,”
sayshis younger brother,MarkAyzenshtat,
who recently joined Evernote as head of
data products.
Following four years at the prestigious
BronxHigh School of Science, where Libin
was considered excessively nerdy even by
his brainy classmates’ standards (“The
chess team wouldn’t even hang out with
me”), he enrolled at Boston University.
And then, to his mother’s disbelief, he quit
school one course shy of graduation.
After starting and selling two suc-
cessful if unsexy businesses—software
firm Engine 5 and identity management
company CoreStreet—Libin and his team
began working on archive apps in 2007.
That year, he ran into entrepreneur Stepan
Pachikov, who was developing a program
he called EverNote. The two merged their
teams and Libin became CEO of the
restructured company, whose name was
tweaked to Evernote. (Pachikov is now an
adviser and board member.)
Evernote launched inauspiciously on
June 24, 2008, in the very depths of the
Great Recession. After the collapse of
Lehman Brothers caused amajor investor
to pull out, Libinwent into panicmode. He
stopped taking a salary and pumped his
own money into the business, but still it
hemorrhaged. Finally, onenight inOctober
2008,
he decided to throw in the towel and
shut the companydown thenextmorning.
At 3 a.m., as he was about to go to bed,
Libin got an email. “I really like Evernote.
It changed my life,” a Swedish man wrote.
That made Libin feel be er, but it wasn’t
going to pay the electric bill. Then he did a
double take at the words “I am writing to
see if you guys need money.” Libin seized
the keyboard. “As a ma er of a fact …,” he
typed. Over the next 40 minutes, the two
brokered a deal in which the anonymous
benefactor would save the company with
an infusion of half a million dollars.
Though the appearance of this angel
investor from Sweden makes Libin sound
like the luckiest CEOever, he had alsodone
his analytical spadework. Fromthe start, he
insisted that Evernote be a global company.
“
We launched it in 20 languages in the first
year and a half,” says Andrew Sinkov, vice
president of marketing. “You see 10-year-
old companies that haven’t done that.”
Libin also predicted that the app would
have 2million users within 18months. “He
was right almost to the day,” Sinkov says.
On top of everything, Libin solved a
perennial conundrum in e-commerce:
how to profit froma free product. Though
newspapers and other industries have
80
Awe Flux
COULD PEERING INTO THE GRAND CANYON
ALTER YOUR PERCEPTIONOF TIME?
this month’s
AMAZING
FACT
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