Editor’s Note: In this week’s “Decamped,” catching up with Phil Libin, CEO of video communication company mmhmm and former CEO of Evernote, about the realities of leaving San Francisco for small-town Arkansas.
The last straw: I needed a change of scenery—San Francisco was just stressful. So my girlfriend and I just thought, it doesn’t really matter where we live because I’m running a distributed company. It could be anywhere—we just wanted a peaceful place to hang out for a few months. So we came to Bentonville almost at random.
New morning commute: I work from a few different places, but all within walking distance. Sometimes I work from home—but sometimes I work from this amazing, breathtaking, crazy, great museum called Crystal Bridges, which is literally a ten-minute walk from my house. I work from the library there. There’s also a club [BlakeSt.] that I work from that has a great gym and a pool, so I can go swimming in the middle of the day. I wake up in the morning and I look at my schedule and, depending on what I need to do, I decide, “All right, I’m going to spend a few hours here, a few hours there.”