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Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

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Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#511

Post by kstrauser »

fastball wrote: post #448
msoad wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never stopped using the Notes app in my Apple computer and phones. I know it lacks a lot of features that typical HN reader thinks is a must-have but the fact that I don't have to worry about feature creep and crazy monetization schemes is a strong enough motives that keeps me on this ecosystem. Plain text FTW!

You also don't need to worry about running it on Windows or Android! But yes, if you are already locked in to the Apple ecosystem, free and pre-installed can be hard to compete with for a large set of users.

I see that as a feature, in that it removes the temptation to release a cross-platform Electron app that runs anywhere and feels awful everywhere.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#512

Post by charlie0 »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #202
PhoenixReborn wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Obsidian is a small team (< 5 people IIRC?) and they don't have to monetize as aggressively to make back the money that VCs have funded them with.

I think this is the key issue here. There are a lot of VC funded start ups that have a good product and a solid market fit, but they were never supposed to become 500+ employee companies. If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company. In this context I think it is important to note that Ycombinator was fou…

I'd like to agree with you, but the issue then becomes this smaller company is competing with a much larger company, which then has a larger marketing budget. The smaller company's offering becomes just another set of features the larger company offers.

It's not fair because the larger company continues to get VC funding which allows it to subsidize features or even give them away for free. Remember, all these companies are effectively racing to become monopolies and part of that process is "price dumping" to kill of smaller competitors. Again, this sucks, but those are the incentives VCs provides and companies have to oblige or get swallowed up by bigger fish.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#513

Post by tombert »

WonderBuilder wrote: post #491
tombert wrote: post #468

I really hope that this endless wave of layoffs ends soon. I've been let go twice in the last year. Every tech place is going through layoffs and is pausing hiring. I wrote a browser plugin to automatically fill out a lot of the job application forms, so that I can apply to more jobs in a day, and I get maybe one interview for every three hundred applications. I watch endless tutorials on YouTube about the best way t…

I have little to offer but my acknowledgement. The "song and dance" routine of getting and new job (especially in the tech industry at least) is dispiriting, embarrassing, exasperating, and disempowering. Even with an impressive amount of skill and dedication to the interview process, the method is indistinguishable from a particularly unrewarding lottery. I'm sorry, you're in this situation. Eventually, as you said,…

I appreciate the kind words; I was feeling particularly upset this morning, I'm feeling a bit better now.

I know I'll find a gig soon enough, and I have enough money saved to survive for quite awhile, but I guess just the dozen or so rejection emails I get every morning are getting to me.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#514

Post by CoffeeOnWrite »

rcxdude wrote: post #509
CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For the founders in particular though, who had the most influence early on in taking the VC path, odds are they took some money out along the way, perhaps quite a bit more than had they stayed small.

Is this typically possible? My understanding is that most VCs insist on being paid first in the case of an exit, at least to the point of getting back what they put in. Founders and employees are typically last in the line.

Yes, during the rounds where VCs are stepping over themselves to invest, founders can negotiate terms that permit them (and their employees and early investors) to sell some of their stock as part of the deal, in a secondary sale (https://rizstanford.medium.com/secondary-sales-in-vc-backed-...).

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#515

Post by CoffeeOnWrite »

adra wrote: post #462
CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For the founders in particular though, who had the most influence early on in taking the VC path, odds are they took some money out along the way, perhaps quite a bit more than had they stayed small.

Sounds like perverse incentives? If your best coarse is to ruin your company and product to make a buck, you may as well be a telemarketing scammer or some other vulture of society that make bank off the mystery/rent seeking of others. I have to hope that the original owners really wanted to make the best product possible and lost their heads with the power to create that they thought the investments would bring.

Theoretically it aligns the incentives of the founders with those of the VCs putting new money into the round (eg the founders are OK with the company taking more risk, because they have diversified their personal net worth somewhat). Now, the incentives of the VCs putting new money into the round, there's certainly an argument that they don't always benefit society or deliver the best possible product...

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#516

Post by heywhatupboys »

ghaff wrote: post #359
IMTDb wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You conveniently forgot to define what really is "your data".

If you send an email from gmail to me, you don't get to ask that it be deleted just because you decide to delete your own gmail account. (Well you can ask but it would be unreasonable to comply. Same, if arguably less strongly, for comments you've made on posts or in threads on social media.)

only companies are subject to GDPR

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#517

Post by [deleted] »

sib wrote: post #415
coldpie wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine not being "satisfied" with a ~85th percentile wage[1]. Anyone who earns more than $150k/yr should be forced to spend 6 months every 5 years working a minimum wage retail job. They can keep earning their normal salary in escrow until they're done with their "get some damn perspective" temp job. [1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...

I think most of the founders on HN are far above the 85th percentile in intelligence (let's not get into the philosophical arguments about it), so why would they be satisfied with that?

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#518

Post by FreezerburnV »

This REALLY SUCKS. I’ve been using Evernote as a catch-all app for a bit now: scanning documents for paperless, archiving website snapshots, notes for various things (I love being able to make a note tied to a calendar event!), the super good OCR capabilities, task management (even if buggy…), etc. It does a lot for me, and it has great capabilities for bringing information/content into it. There is literally nothing else out there that has the unique set of capabilities I actively use in the same package. (And no, Joplin is not “just as good”) Unbundling to multiple places that don’t have the same capabilities (not to mention not having their supposed upcoming AI search I was really looking forward to) is going to be an absolute downgrade for me and make it harder to manage my life.

If someone knows of something that can fill the void of Evernote so I don’t have to like, use Apple Notes with Reminders (which while you can access them on Windows via the browser, it’s a mediocre experience at best) and like raindrop.io for website archival all at the same time.

And I’m not moving to OneNote which while it might have most of that stuff, I hate using it.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#520

Post by Zambyte »

bosie wrote: post #459
Zambyte wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blows my mind that Apple can tell you how you're allowed to copy your plain text files from one of your computers to another one of your computers. If you look at the behavior sans the branding, it would not be hard to label it malware.

not sure we have the same definition of 'malware'. the problem isn't copying/syncing the file from one computer to another, that works just fine. but obsidian can't read outside its own app folder IIRC. i sync files with dropbox to my ios devices all the time.

I define "malware" to mean software that intentionally subverts the desires of the owner of the computer (unintentional subversion is a bug or a miscommunication).

Apple arbitrarily restricts you from using your applications (obsidian) to read and write your data in a way that you can sync, to no fault of its own, your own, or the syncing service.

I strongly encourage you to try associating this kind of behavior with an unfamiliar organization as a mental exercise. How would you feel about that? Someone else restricting your access to your computer such that you cannot use your applications how you want, through no technical fault of their own? I bet that would see that as a problem you would want to fix right away.

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