This video platform will make your meetings shorter and more productive

Phil Libin didn’t always believe in remote work. In fact, he banned video board meetings when he was the CEO (and later executive chairman) of note-taking app Evernote.

“I was very skeptical of being productive while working at home or over video,” Libin says. “If you’re going to show up, show up in person.”

But in 2020, when in-person participation was no longer an option, Libin and his team at All Turtles — an AI product studio that he co-founded in 2017 — started thinking about how showing up on video could be a better experience. The result was mmhmm, a virtual camera app that connects with users’ existing video-call services to enable more dynamic presentations and collaboration.

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“The one-second pitch is: It’s instant Weekend Update,” Libin says of allowing a presenter to interact with their presentation on-screen. “It makes it easy for people to be engaging on video in a style that’s cognitively familiar.”

As organizations from Sequoia and Cisco to Boston University and Scripps College have embraced the kind of creative collaboration mmhmm enables, so has Libin.

“Communication can be better than real life,” he says. “Video was always a poor substitute for in-person communication, but that’s a bad way of thinking about it. It’s not about making it almost as good as in-person, it’s about capturing video’s superpowers.”

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Now, mmhmm is adding to that suite of superpowers with a new feature it calls Chunky, which will allow workers to record presentations and organize them by “chunks” that can be edited, re-ordered, and designed to suit a specific audience. These chunks can also be incorporated into live presentations, taking some pressure off speakers and giving them the opportunity to pause and respond to questions or comments.

“Imagine this is a sales presentation, and when I’m ready to launch, I hit play,” Libin says. “But live me is still here, and I can see the reactions to my video — and I have the power to transition, pause, explain more. And so can the customer — they can stay live with a presentation or rewind.”

That kind of functionality will be increasingly valuable as companies continue to prioritize hiring for talent over geography and teams become even more distributed across time zones.

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“We’re introducing features to allow for time bending,” Libin says. “It lets teams go in and out of synchronous and asynchronous communications very smoothly.”

Among his own team, this kind of thinking has already boosted productivity — and reduced the time spent in meetings by half. Instead of gathering all employees on a call to run through a long list of team updates, those updates can be recorded and shared with staffers, to be viewed at their leisure.

“We’re helping people be dynamic and charismatic,” Libin says. “Meetings aren’t not engaging because they’re on video. They’re not engaging because the meetings suck.”