As we mentioned earlier, Evernote CEO Phil Libin gave a fantastic presentation earlier today at The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam.

After doing other companies, Libin now leads a company offering an eponymous ‘memory-enhancement’ service that has attracted nearly 30 million users to date, which means many budding entrepreneurs (I happen to hate the word ‘wantrepreneurs’) turn to him for advice on entrepreneurship and whatnot.

Surprisingly, Libin asserts that it’s probably not a good idea for them to become entrepreneurs at all – or at least not for the wrong reasons.

Below are my notes from his talk (slightly paraphrased), but you can also watch the full video above – it’s more than worth it.

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I’m here to talk about entrepreneurship. I travel around quite a bit, and I’m lucky enough to be able to coach and mentor lots of entrepreneurs worldwide, and the common question I get asked is what advice I have for someone who is thinking of being an entrepreneur.

I’ve narrowed it down, really boiled it down, to one core piece of advice. If I can only say one thing, and I don’t know you any better, it’s: don’t. Don’t do it. Seriously.

It’s a very bad idea. Almost certainly, it’s a bad idea. You should not try to start your own company, or at least not for the wrong reasons, which is why most people actually do it. If I know someone is thinking of starting a company for the wrong reasons, I try to discourage people even harder.

There’s an infinite number of wrong reasons. The single most common one is:

1) Money

A lot of people think that they want to be an entrepreneur because it’s a good way to make money. It just isn’t, that’s just wrong. Depending on how you count, 95% to 99% of companies fail.

If you think starting from scratch is a good way to get a financial return, you’re just bad a math. And you kind of need to be good at it to become an entrepreneur.

If you’re smart enough, if you’re talented enough, if you have the drive, if you have the ability, and you’re motivated by making money, then you should just get a real job instead, like become a banker or an investor or a consultant or something. You’ll be much more likely to make a lot of money over the course of your career than by starting a company.

The second most common wrong reason is:

2) Power

People have this vision of being the CEO of a company they started and being on top of the pyramid. Some people are motivated by that, but that’s not at all what it’s like.

What it’s really like: everyone else is your boss – all of your employees, customers, partners, users, media are your boss. I’ve never had more bosses and needed to account for more people today.

The life of most CEOs is reporting to everyone else, at least that’s what it feels like to me and most CEOs I know. If you want to exercise power and authority over people, join the military or go into politics. Don’t be an entrepreneur.

Wrong reason number 3 is:

3) Boredom

This kind of poorly formed idea that you’re bored from work and want to do something different may be a good start, but it’s not sufficient. If you’re bored at your job, I strongly advice you to stay at your job and keep collecting your paycheck while you figure out what you want to do.

Wrong reason number 4:

4) Flex time

People tell me they want to become entrepreneurs because they want more flexibility in their schedules. They’ll say: “I want more time to spend with my kids, and more time to travel and spend more time with my family”. That’s stupid. It doesn’t work like that at all.

If you’re going to be entrepreneur, you will actually get some flex time to be honest. You’ll be able to work any 24 hours a day you want!

In summary: there’s lots of bad reasons to start a company. But there’s only one good, legitimate reason, and I think you know what it is: it’s to change the world.

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To see the rest of Libin’s talk, I urge you to watch the video above.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin took the stage at The Next Web Conference earlier today.

We took notes and will have a longer post for you later on, but here are some interesting tidbits about Evernote that Libin shared at the end of his talk.

The affable chief executive said Evernote currently boasts over 25 million registered users, and is in fact closing in on reaching 30 million.

Last number we heard was 20 million in December 2011, so things are obviously moving fast for Evernote.

Libin explained that the first step is for users to actually sign up for Evernote, which people are obviously doing. The second step is to make people stick around longer, which is also happening. Libin said 40 percent of the people that signed up for Evernote 4 years ago (when it started) are still using the service today.

The third step is to make people pay for Evernote, which Libin says comes naturally.

The company tries to not push people into paying for a premium service, instead giving them value from the get-go and only making it more valuable over time.

After 4 years, more than 25% of users pay for the service today.

His exact words: “It’s more important for an Evernote user to stay than it is to pay.”

In other news: I had a brief chat with Libin before his talk and asked about the rumored $100 million round at a $1 billion valuation, and it was dismissed swiftly.

Libin said they are indeed working on a follow-up financing round, but the negotiations are ongoing and nothing has been closed or decided yet.

In other words, Evernote probably will end up raising funding, but how much, when and at what valuation is pretty much unclear even to Evernote management and current shareholders at this point. To be continued, no doubt.

Also read:

Sweet: If you work for Evernote you get your house cleaned twice a month and unlimited vacations

Evernote launches new developer site to grow its ecosystem

Evernote enrolls Socialatom and SclBits to expand across Latin America

One of the handiest tools that I use daily is Skitch for Mac. Most of the screenshots that you’ll see in my articles are taken with the popular tool that Evernote scooped up last year. The companies are a match made in heaven and the Mac version of Skitch has finally gotten the ability to share things directly to Evernote.

Until now, you’ve had to manually share your Skitch-taken screenshots when using the Mac version, but thankfully with this latest release, it’s seamless:

Today marks a major moment in the life of Skitch for Mac: you can now share through Evernote. With a single click, send your annotated images, screenshots and ideas directly into Evernote and share them through our beautiful Skitch sharing interface.

Ever since we launched Skitch for Android and Skitch for iPad with Evernote sharing, you’ve asked us to bring it to Mac. Well, here it is.

As you’d expect, the Evernote share button gets prominent placement on the top left of the app:

You can still upload your photos to Flickr or directly to Skitch’s site, but that the idea that the app could have its own “social network” of screenshots never really panned out, thus the sale to Evernote. The company doesn’t plan on phasing out the Skitch.com site anytime soon, but does say that it is working on an export tool that will allow users to send all of their old Skitch screengrabs over to Evernote.

How married am I to this app? I immediately wanted to Skitch a screenshot of the new Evernote share button, even though that’s not possible using Skitch.

➤ Skitch for Mac

If you use the popular information management platform Evernote, you probably save all types of things to browse at a later time. One major use is to store recipes for future cooking enjoyment.

What if those saved recipes could be automatically turned into future shopping lists? It’s not a what-if anymore, thanks to an integration with Say Mmm, a meal planning site that organizes recipes.

By simply adding a tag to your stored recipe on Evernote, Say Mmm will generate a grocery list with everything you need to make the meal. The app will even show nutritional information along with all of the new items on your shopping list. It’s a brilliant idea, and quite cool.

Let’s make a cake

Recipes are all over the web, and Evernote is definitely a great way to save them for later. I’ve noticed that with any information storing service, it’s easy to hoard things digitally but do nothing with them. That’s why this integration stood out to me, because it seems like the hoarding could pay off and turn into action.

By logging into Say Mmm with your Evernote account, you can start collecting recipes and add the tag “Say Mmm” which will then tell the service to parse out the recipe and generate a grocery list for you. You don’t have to wait for new recipes though, just go back to all of the ones you have stored on Evernote and drag them to the “Say Mmm” tag.

While the shopping lists based on recipes will be created individually, you can combine them into one big list for the next time you go shopping. Say Mmm even categorizes the items for you so that you can plan your attack for the grocery store.

In addition to the Evernote integration, Say Mmm lets you plan meals on a calendar and share recipes with friends. It’s a pretty sweet service, and the Evernote features make it that much better. If you’re already an Evernote user, this is a no-brainer for you to try out. Even if you’re not, this might be a good way to get introduced to both services.

Say Mmm

According to a tweet from the Biz Dev Manager at Evernote, the photo editing app Skitch has been download over one million times since its submission to the Android Market just seven weeks ago.

Skitch is currently featured in the Android Market, which more than likely helped them pass the million mark so quickly. It’s still an impressive feat, though.

Taking screenshots isn’t an easy thing to do on the Android OS oddly, so Skitch is the perfect quick editor that compliments Evernote’s desktop and mobile suite of products. Evernote purchased Skitch in August, and made the full product free for all users.

The Android Market has gone through re-designs and is attracting more developers to its platform. Success stories like this will most certainly draw more iOS focused developers to port their apps over to Android. Evernote also demoed its Windows Phone version for the Mango OS at last nights HTC Radar release party, perhaps they’ll find similar success with it.