The co-founder of Evernote wants to make Zoom calls fun

When Phil Libin and his colleagues at startup studio All Turtles switched their in-person meetings to video as the coronavirus pandemic set in, something felt off. The driving premise behind Mmhmm, which lets you jazz up video calls on platforms such as Zoom or Google Meet with virtual backgrounds, slides and animations, is a belief that, in many jobs, being successful means being able to entertain people – hard to do when you’re “a postage-stamp-size head in a box,” as Libin puts it. When you use Mmhmm, you can select a virtual “room” as your background and choose to show slides featuring text, images and video, which appear either full-screen or in a box behind or beside you so that you don’t have to choose to screen-share at the expense of others being able to see your face. “Often, it's both.” Libin previously co-founded four companies including note-taking app Evernote, which he left in 2016, and All Turtles, which Mmhmm was spun out of. Libin says that the company philosophy is to only make money through direct revenue rather than through advertising or selling data: there is currently a premium option, which has more features and costs $9.99 a month, with plans for enterprise versions to offer businesses a custom “professional video presence”.