Stepan Pachikov, founder of Evernote, is a fascinating individual and very much the model of the Russian intellectual who was driven by sheer curiosity to create the concepts behind Evernote and thus one of today’s most successful startups. A founder of ParaGraph, ParaScript, he studied at the Academy of Sciences of the old USSR where his dissertation was the use of fuzzy logic. And in some sense his work has pre-figured what Evernote eventually became.
In the mid-1980s he doubtless helped foster the growth of the Russian tech scene by founding the Moscow Children Computer club. ParaGraph, in 1988 was one of the first Soviet-American Joint Ventures which eventually signed a multimillion contract with Apple to develop digital ink software.
ParaGraph’s handwriting recognition technology was eventually acquired by Microsoft and incorporated into the Pocket PC.
In 1993 he created software for a virtual “time machine” to allow children to experience Syracuse in 212 BC and Rome in 80 AD, eventually leading to 3D VR technology and a leadership in VRML langauge.
In Moscow I caught up with him at LINT. Here he talks about Evernote came about, how he handed the reigns over to Phil Liblin, a CEO he considers more than capable of taking the company to the next stage, and what he sees in the future for Evernote – including the eventual merging of recording devices into the brain.