Evernote’s founding CTO Dave Engberg is leaving in May; new wave of execs announced

We’ve been documenting Evernote’s decline in the last several months, and today comes two more waves of news that speak both to how the company continues to be in turmoil, but is also trying to rebuild itself. TechCrunch has learned that Dave Engberg, the company’s founding CTO, is leaving the company in May.

The news comes at the same time that CEO Chris O’Neill —  himself a relatively new appointmentannounced several new execs. They include new heads of product, marketing, brand, design and China. The company lost its COO last year.

Evernote — once a billion-dollar “unicorn” with $205 million in funding, but more recently marked down by investors — has lost focus, faced a wave of exec departures and a string of unprofitable product closures that included Evernote’s e-commerce effort, most of the Skitch apps, and its Food app.

Engberg has been there through the good and the ugly. He was part of the team that originally built the first Evernote app in 2007 (he notes he built it “with a few friends” in his LinkedIn profile).

And it’s hard to underestimate his involvement with the startup. His current responsibilities include the groups running Platform Engineering, Operations, IT, Security, and R&D. He also built the infrastructure and teams that handle Support, Developer Relations, and Analytics.

Alongside this blow are some sigs of how Evernote is trying to rebuild its company.

Erik Wrobel is coming on to lead product management. He was most recently VP of Product at VMware, where Evernote says he started the cloud management product line. He replaces Philip Constantinou, who left in August last year and is now CPO at Navdy.

Raymond Tang is going to head Evernote’s China business, where the company now has 16 million registered users for Yinxiang Biji, its country-specific service. Tang

Andrew Malcolm has taken over marketing, and he’s actually already been at the company quietly for 100 days, O’Neill notes. He is a Skype and Silver Lake alum. Alongside him, Azmat Ali is joining as head of brand, having cut his teeth at places like HP. They replace Andrew Sinkov, who left in December 2015 and covered both roles.

Ben McCormack was appointed new head of technical operations, where he will be putting a bigger emphasis on cloud computing. Combined with Wrobel’s experience, it looks like Evernote is making some moves to go deeper into enterprise software.

Nate Fortin, who has worked at Motorola, is heading up Evernote’s design team. Gabe Campodonico, who had been head of design for product, is still at the company but now in a different role, as UI designer and creative director. Other design moves at Evernote include Adam Glynn-Finnegan, who was the lead designer on brand and senior product designer, who is now at Airbnb; and Joshua Taylor, who also departed last year.

Finally, Michelle Wagner joins as head of people operations.

Updated details of CTO departure, other staff moves.