Evernote’s new CTO is former GoDaddy exec Anirban Kundu

Notetaking software company Evernote today revealed the identity of its new chief technology officer: Anirban Kundu, a 10-year veteran of Yahoo who most recently worked as vice president of engineering and distinguished engineer at GoDaddy. Kundu is starting his new job just after Evernote announced major pricing changes that permit people to sync notes from only two devices at once, prompting some users to start exploring alternatives.

But Kundu — who replaces Dave Engberg, Evernote’s CTO for nearly nine years — is optimistic, even given the pricing changes, Evernote’s layoffs, and other recent leadership appointments following the departure of cofounder and former chief executive Phil Libin.

“The best thing about Evernote is we already have a large number of users and a tremendous amount of data,” Kundu is quoted as saying in a press release. “The challenge is evolving the current infrastructure so that we’re better prepared to reliably scale for the growth of both our users’ data and our service. Laying those foundations for our core service will not only allow us to grow, but will also allow us to focus on building applications that enable our users to retrieve and consume their data in the right context, which is very exciting.”

Kundu also said he “couldn’t be more excited” to work on recommending content to users using machine learning.

Mr. Kundu, good luck. Yes, Evernote has data to work with — it has 200 million users, as Evernote pointed out exactly three times in today’s press release, who have made 5 billion notes and attached 5 billion files. But it will take a lot for great numbers of people to try out or come back to Evernote at this point, given the changes and the other options available. CTO of Evernote will not be the easiest job in Silicon Valley.

While Evernote has not released recent download numbers, data from app tracking company App Annie shows that Evernote’s rankings in the Google and Apple app stores are trending downward, suggesting that new user growth has slowed down.

Above: App Annie statistics on Google Play Store downloads of Evernote app.

Image Credit: Screenshot

Above: App Annie statistics on Apple App Store downloads of Evernote iPhone app.

Image Credit: Screenshot

But hey, it’s only fair for Evernote to think positively about what’s to come.

Kundu’s “vision for scaling our infrastructure will allow us to create a stronger Evernote that helps unlock the potential of our 200 million users’ ideas by providing just the right information at just the right time,” Evernote’s new chief executive Chris O’Neill said in the press release.