User:Evernotebrian/Evernote History Draft

Foundation and early history
Evernote was founded in 2000 by Russian-American computer engineer and entrepreneur Stepan Pachikov. Pachikov sought to develop a note-taking application that featured an infinite scroll, as seen in the note-taking feature on the Apple Newton handheld computer, which he had developed software for in the early 1990s. The first versions of the Evernote app, then styled as EverNote, were developed for Windows XP, Pocket PC, and Microsoft Smartphone-based devices. This early Windows-based version of the EverNote app, at its peak, had about 80,000 users.

Growth and expansion
In 2007, Pachikov decided that he needed to replace himself as Evernote CEO and brought in Phil Libin to lead the company. Under Libin's leadership, a revamped Evernote app launched into open beta in June 2008. Later that year, it joined Apple's App Store. The app had nearly two million users by November 2009.

In October 2010, Evernote raised a $20 million funding round led by Docomo Capital with participation from Morgenthaler Ventures and Sequoia Capital. The company achieved a billion-dollar valuation in 2012. That same year, its app had over 30 million registered users. From 2010 to 2013, Evernote grew its staff from 30 to 250 employees, and opened offices in Austin, Tokyo, Zurich, Moscow, and Beijing. During this period, Evernote entered into promotional partnerships with companies including Samsung, Moleskine, and Deutsche Telekom. It acquired Skitch, Readable, and Penultimate in order to broaden the app's feature base. The company also expanded into ventures including a standalone food recipe and photo-sharing app and a retail marketplace for branded merchandise.

Streamlining
In 2015, Libin stepped down as CEO and Chris O'Neill, previously an executive at Google, took over as chief executive. Over the following nine months, Evernote laid off approximately 18 percent of its workforce, and in October 2015 announced it would close three of its 10 global offices. It also shuttered its food, flashcard, and contract management apps, stopped selling merchandise, and canceled its annual developers' conference.

In 2017, O'Neill directed his team to move Evernote's data to Google Cloud Platform and work began on unifying the app's codebase, which had previously been distinct for each client platform. In June 2018, Evernote spun off its China-based service, Yinxiang Biji (印象笔记), into its own company, retaining a minority stake. At the time, Yinxiang Biji had about 20 million users. In September 2018, Evernote's chief technical officer, chief financial officer, chief people officer, and its head of human resources left the company, and it laid off 54 additional employees.

Application redesign
In October 2018, former TokBox CEO Ian Small took over as CEO. Small furthered O'Neill's initiative to unify Evernote's codebase, ordering a stop on the development of all new app features until that project was completed. As part of his effort to fix Evernote's most basic problems, Small organized employees into teams that featured people from disparate parts of the company, such as engineering and customer service, to collaborate on the identification of and solution to various issues with the app and business. Small also led the decision to use Javascript as the implementation language for the unified version of Evernote, due to its performance across many platforms. Evernote completed the codebase unification and app redevelopment in 18 months.

In September 2020, the company released Evernote version 10 on iOS. The following month, the new version of the app was released on Windows, MacOS, and Android, with more uniform features and a consistent user interface across all platforms.