Evernote raises another $85M

I'm an Evernote user, but I feel like I'm just plain missing something about Evernote. Why is it worth $1 billion? Am I using it wrong? I've never even came close to needing to upgrade.<p>On another note the app seems to get heavier and heavier each update, it takes as long to launch as MS Word on my Mac.

To all those asking what they are spending the money on: <i>secondary</i> financing means that the money is not going to Evernote. Instead, the new investors are purchasing $85M of shares from existing investors. Evernote's bank account does not grow by $85M.

According to crunchbase they have raised $251m. What have they spent that on? Evernote is a note taking application. If you developed 25 different native apps (this is an overestimate), and spent $1M on each of them (to hire 4 developers full time per app for one year) it would cost $25m. Add another 3m for infrastructure, and you have $28m and nothing left to spend money on other than advertising and marketing.<p>Why isn't this considered absurd? What a joke!

It's pretty killer as a library. I use it to clip books (with its web clipper) from my browsings around the web. With the tag feature, it's bloody simple to build a highly organized library.<p>Its architecture applied to any data store (books, websites, articles, thoughts, poems, art, jokes), with easy storage, easy tagging and easy retrieval, makes for an excellent thinking tool.<p>I'm a fan.

&#62; The longer [people] use, the most likely they are to convert<p>That is why Evernote is worth so much. Few, if any, other products can make that claim.<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204755404578101270204307986.html" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020475540457810...</a>

I've actually found Evernote to be pretty helpful in turning my random internet readings into more long term knowledge. I read a lot of random articles about tcpdump or economics and read them but don't apply anything immediately. In my head that knowledge goes into a place where I sort of remember things but not the details. With clipping plus the google search integration, it's nice to search for a vague idea and see the actual article and my notes about it. Helps a lot with completing ideas and turning things into long term knowledge.

I really, really hope this means they can implement 3-way merge on sync for text-only notes. Any time one of my clients silently decides to stop syncing, I'm then stuck doing a hand baseless merge on every device.<p>It wouldn't be an issue if it was infrequent, but this is a weekly problem with multiple OSX and iOS clients (maybe not on Windows?).

I noticed late this year that Evernote seems to be trying hard to increase the number of paid users: 1. I got a coupon for a year of Evernote included in the MacHeist bundle 2. Evernote sent an email a few days ago for "two years for the price of one"<p>I never like to see a company change behavior like this right before an IPO.

I don't get the hype around evernote. I find their app rather clunky, but more importantly their security story is a disaster waiting to happen. Last I checked encryption was only available selectively for individual notes, and again the UI was so clunky that it's probably hardly being used.<p>Thus it takes only one disgruntled employee or motivated cracker to make many people very, very unhappy.

That is refreshingly honest, Phil Libin sounds like someone I could get along with. Too often people at that level of the company focus on the exit (theirs, the companies, etc) and lose site of the product. Great companies don't do that, they focus on the product even if it means they don't get to cash out this year.

I love Evernote. I use it as a kind of 2nd brain. I have tabs for personal development, book summaries, business notes..<p>And I just search for things when they're needed. It's like Google, but instead of searching for information out there in the world, it finds information related to my personal life.

Am I alone in feeling what a person needs Evernote for? Sharing files? I use Dropbox. Clippings? I just use bookmarks. I downloaded it a couple of years ago, but what are the common use cases from the HN crowd? I visited their website and was disappointed.

What would be awesome: a way to sync my nvALT/Simplenote notes (in Markdown) into Evernote <i>along with</i> mixed-media content (scanned receipts, web clippings etc) that I'd create in Evernote only

They could buy and destroy a lot of products with that money.