Phil Libin and the things worth keeping

Phil Libin was getting ready to close Evernote when a customer offered to buy it some time. It was 2008. A financing deal had collapsed, the company had only weeks of cash left, and Libin was contemplating the conversation he would have with his staff. Then an email arrived from Sweden. The sender liked the software. Was Evernote looking for an investor?

A Skype call followed. So did $500,000. A person who had used the product became the person who helped keep it alive. The rescue has the improbable timing of a screenplay, except that in a screenplay someone would have insisted on naming the mysterious benefactor.

Libin has told the story repeatedly, and its attraction is easy to understand. A business built around remembering things received a reprieve because somebody remembered to say he liked it. Yet the interesting part reaches beyond the lucky email. Here was a customer who wanted a particular thing to continue existing. In the years since, Libin has kept returning to that desire: to make something useful enough, or pleasurable enough, that people would prefer a world with it in.

A company he wanted to keep

Libin came to Evernote with experience in software that mostly stayed out of the limelight. Engine 5, his Boston development company, was acquired by Vignette in 2000. At Vignette he worked as principal architect and chief technologist for applications. CoreStreet, another company he co-founded, dealt with electronic credentials and identity management. It was acquired by ActivIdentity in 2009.

Those businesses required a different kind of imagination from a consumer app. Credential systems have to work when somebody needs to know whether a person or document can be trusted. The rewards are considerable; the dinner-party explanations require patience. Before Engine 5, he worked on software and consulting projects at ATG, Xchange and EF.

With Evernote, he wanted to build something he would use himself. He and his collaborators had considered a wearable device called Ribbon, intended to capture pieces of a person’s life. Mobile phones offered another route. In Stepan Pachikov, whose work preceded Libin’s arrival, they found a collaborator pursuing related ideas about memory. Libin became CEO in 2007. The service that made Evernote familiar to a wider public launched in 2008.

The appeal was pleasantly ordinary: a place for the material people accumulate while trying to get through a day. A thought, a receipt, a passage worth returning to. The ambition was enormous, but the unit of usefulness was small. You could understand it the next time you needed a thing you had put somewhere.

By May 2012, Evernote had 30 million users and a reported valuation of $1 billion. During its earlier financing trouble, Libin had resisted proposals to turn users’ interests into targeted advertising. He thought doing so would undermine trust. The notebook’s business depended on people continuing to regard it as theirs.

The unfinished part of success

A company, unfortunately, keeps asking for different things as it grows. The appetite for ideas that makes a founder interesting can become difficult to manage. Libin has been unusually direct about that part of his Evernote years. “I tried to do too much,” he said. He also acknowledged that execution and polish held his interest less reliably than the creative phase.

He stepped down as CEO in 2015, remaining executive chairman for a time before leaving the board in 2016. The admission complicates the agreeable version of entrepreneurial persistence. Wanting a company to last does not settle who should run it, or what its founder should spend the next decade doing.

There was other unfinished work, too. Libin had left Boston University before completing his degree. In 2019, he returned to finish. “I was holding out for an honorary bachelor’s, but they made me do the work.” It is a good joke partly because the university appears entirely unmoved by the rest of the biography.

Between Evernote and his later companies came a stint at General Catalyst. In 2017, he co-founded All Turtles with Jessica Collier and Jon Cifuentes. The product studio offered a way to work on several ideas with shared support. Its current portfolio stretches across software, design services and, eventually, dinner. The boundaries of the studio have proved more flexible than its name suggests.

A towel enters the meeting

The next recognizable Libin product began with an objection to how a working day felt. In 2020, video meetings had become tedious. Libin improvised a green screen using a camping towel. He and Steve White experimented with images and effects. There were visual jokes, photographs from Japan, and then the possibility of presenting slides while remaining part of the picture.

The important discovery was familiar to anyone who has sat through a slide deck: the person speaking and the thing being discussed belong together. Television had managed this arrangement for years. An ordinary work call still seemed capable of separating the speaker from the material with the determination of an airport seating system.

The experiment became mmhmm. The name looked like a keyboard had politely declined to elaborate. The product let people place themselves beside their slides and change the visual setting of a call. It could work alongside existing meeting software. Customers would not have to persuade every colleague to move house before making a presentation less wooden.

Libin turned again to Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, an investor whose involvement with him went back to Evernote. Their working relationship had survived Libin’s departure as CEO. In his own account of mmhmm’s early financing, Libin described Botha as a mentor, an occasional adversary and a consistent supporter. That is a more useful description of a long business relationship than a photograph of two people shaking hands.

The company raised a $100 million Series B led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in 2021. Libin’s explanation for taking on substantial funding was practical: he wanted the team to concentrate on the product rather than the swings of the video and startup markets. He also argued that raising money created a responsibility. The demonstration was fun; the obligations were real.

“Raising money is not an accomplishment; it’s an obligation and a responsibility.”

Phil Libin, on funding mmhmm

A different place to do the work

Libin moved to Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2020. In a later interview, he described walking more and fishing at a lakeside cabin. His argument for distributed work acquired a personal illustration: the location of a worthwhile job need not determine the location of a worthwhile life.

That position carries consequences for management. In 2023, he described an organization concerned with impact over months rather than the performance of being visibly busy each day. People needed clarity about their responsibilities and the autonomy to fulfil them. His four norms were clarity, confidence, autonomy and enthusiasm. The bargain required employees to deliver and managers to give them room.

He also distinguished conveying information from having a conversation. A recorded update can be watched when somebody is ready for it. A live exchange has a different purpose. His work with journalist Brittney Gallagher on the video series Degrees of Freedom explored those questions with people thinking about distributed organizations. The ambition involved changing habits as well as improving cameras.

In April 2025, mmhmm became Airtime. Camera and Creator put different jobs into separate tools: adjusting how someone appears in a meeting, and making presentations or recordings. Later came Stacks, a shared space where participants can look through material, revisit slides and focus on details without making one presenter drive every movement. The current toolkit also includes Recorder.

Airtime cut 25 of its 58 jobs in June 2025. That belongs in the account alongside the experiments and investment. An argument for better work still has to survive the running of a company.

Dinner gets a stage

Bentonville supplied another problem Libin wanted to solve for himself. He enjoyed living there, but missed the variety of food he associated with larger cities. A place can offer room to think and still leave a person wondering what to eat on Thursday.

Bentoville Food Theater grew from that gap. Working with chefs including Shinichiro Takagi and Billy Kong, and with Onyx Coffee Lab, Libin developed a venue around changing menus and food prepared in front of guests. He has described an ambition for a circuit of venues in midsized cities, allowing chefs to tour. The performance metaphor gives visiting cooks a run rather than requiring every cuisine to sustain a permanent local restaurant.

By autumn 2026, Bentoville’s own listings showed daily service, three chef counters and changing Food Concerts. Handrolls, ramen and charcoal cooking had their places. The language of stages becomes fairly literal when the audience sits close enough to watch dinner being made.

There is a family resemblance between the notebook, the video software and the chef’s counter. Each gives somebody a way to bring something to another person’s attention: a thought worth saving, an explanation worth following, a meal worth sitting down for. Their businesses are different. Libin’s interest in the experience of using them is consistent.

The Swedish customer wanted Evernote to keep going. Years later, Libin wanted a different working day, a different place to live and more interesting things for dinner. He keeps treating those preferences as reasons to build. At Bentoville, the next experiment can arrive across a counter. For once, nobody has to ask whether you can see their screen.