Meetings Are A Huge Drag

Worst Question Inside a Company-"Want to go to a meeting?"

Yesterday, an investment I made came out of stealth mode and into beta. You can sign up here. They were getting a sign-up every ten seconds because the pain point is so severe.

Aaron Klein started Riskalyze which became Nitrogen. He stepped down as CEO a bit ago and took a break. He called me with an idea that became a company. I invested, and it will be my last angel investment.

The pain point is so darn severe (repetitive, I know). I have watched CEOs of companies I am invested in struggle with meetings, calendars, and other HR operations that get in the way of production. When Aaron told me his idea, I understood right away. He was spending 70% of his time in meetings.

I remember once chatting with entrepreneur and VC Troy Henikoff. He told me, “I love starting companies. I love growing companies. I hate it when they get to 150 people because as a CEO, all you are doing is going to meetings. You push paper, not product.”

In Wealth Management, Aaron was quoted. He said, “I went back and looked at my old calendars, and it added up to over 37,000 meetings over the course of 12 1/2 years,” he said. “There just has to be a better way than your agenda being over here and your notes being over there and your documents being spread around everywhere.”

Since then, we’ve seen the rise of AI meeting note takers, including several specifically designed for the financial advisor market.

“I just think that those products really kind of have it all wrong,” Klein said. “They do nothing to actually improve the meeting. They just record the misery, and then they send us emails about it. To me, what’s really, really meaningful is, how do you actually help people become elite meeting strategists? How do you help them get way better at running snappier meetings, smarter meetings and more action-packed meetings? Because then, the notes that come out of that are actually much more actionable and useful.”

Klein said his technology goes beyond the existing tools, focusing on the preparation involved before a meeting.

“We’re really starting at the end front-end of the problem, thinking about how to shape the meeting, plan the meeting, use AI to give people their game plan for the meeting,” Klein said.

That preparation is a lot of work; it can take three times the amount of time you have scheduled for the meeting.

“We’re building AI that’s going to do 95% of that work for you, so that we can kill broken meetings entirely off your calendar,” he said.

Existing “meeting tech” records the agony instead of making you productive.

I have been in meetings where the other side is unprepared. Or, there are action items at the end that stay unfulfilled. In many companies, people fight to get into meetings just to get face time. It’s not about productivity, it’s about power or vanity.

If you want to become 100x more productive, sign up for the Contio beta.