

Pachikov’s vision of the future has always been a step ahead of the technology of the day. It wasn’t until 2002 that Pachikov began working on what would later become Evernote.Īside from his lifelong obsession with preserving and expanding human memory, Pachikov’s career has been defined by the ambition of his ideas. He embarked on a range of projects in the ’90s, including a cutting-edge virtual reality product that allowed children to learn about history by traveling back through time to the age of the ancient Greeks.

Undeterred, Pachikov once again turned his attention to educating children. Pachikov left the frigid temperatures of Moscow for the warmth of Cupertino in Northern California, and made a new home in the United States.Īpple’s Newton project-and, by extension, Paragraph-ultimately failed.
#EVERNOTE SUPPORT TEAM SOFTWARE#
The results of Pachikov’s educational experiments were mixed, but his work attracted the attention of Apple, Inc., which asked Pachikov to develop his handwriting recognition software for the Newton handheld computer. This game ultimately became Paragraph, the world’s first commercial computerized handwriting recognition software. Pachikov and Kasparov devised a way of encouraging Russian children to develop their handwriting skills under the guise of a simple game. To that end, Pachikov began working with his friend and world-renowned chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1986, and the two men formed the country’s first computer club in Moscow. Pachikov saw computers as a means of not only preserving individual and cultural memories, but also as a way to empower children growing up in the political and social turmoil of Russia in the 1980s. But pictures from before that are lost.” - Stepan Pachikov, founder of Evernote In the past 20 years, I have put 75,000 pictures into my photo database. I can study and re-learn what I have forgotten, but I cannot go back to my school years, my college years, and recollect what I knew. “Even 30 years ago, I had already lost so much information. With few ways to preserve them, even key moments from his own past had been lost to the march of time. He saw firsthand how generations of culture and collective memory were jeopardized by the gradual collapse of Soviet Russia. As a scientist living and working under Communist rule in Soviet Russia, Pachikov was no stranger to the forgotten. Trained in economic mathematics, Pachikov earned his doctorate in fuzzy logic from the Academy of Sciences of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Moscow. A pioneer of virtual reality, computerized handwriting analysis, and optical character recognition, Pachikov has spent much of his life working to solve some of computing’s most challenging problems. Pachikov is one of Silicon Valley’s most visionary technologists. Stepan Pachikov wanted to remember everything. He aimed to solve a giant problem: overcoming the limitations of human memory. The idea for Evernote began with the personal quest of its founder, Stepan Pachikov. How Evernote lost sight of its original vision and how this almost doomed the company.How the company resisted investor pressure and remained true to their convictions about the value of Evernote as a freemium product.Why timing was so crucial to Evernote’s success, and how co-founder and former CEO Phil Libin’s vision for the product created vital tailwind for Evernote’s growth.

Here are some of the things I’ll be exploring in this article:
#EVERNOTE SUPPORT TEAM SERIES#
Despite this, Evernote has been plagued by a series of managerial missteps and failed product launches, and the company’s future is far from certain. Evernote was and remains one of the best examples of what a freemium product can be. It was an extension of the human mind itself that would let users remember everything.Įvernote has come a long way since Pachikov began working on the app seventeen years ago.

To Pachikov, Evernote wasn’t just another app or a way to capitalize on Silicon Valley’s burgeoning obsession with personal productivity. Legendary investor, programmer, and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham once wrote that one of the best ways to come up with ideas for your next startup is to ask what product you wish someone else would make for you.įor Stepan Pachikov, founder of Evernote, that product was a way to help him remember things.Īlthough Pachikov first began working on what ultimately became Evernote back in 2002, his fascination with human memory stems from his experiences growing up in the former Soviet Union.
