I Hate Meetings

It will be no surprise to those I work with to hear that I’m not a big fan of meetings. I wanted to lay out a few problems we had with meetings, and the ways in which we’re trying to solve them.

Startups Operate in Conditions of Extreme Uncertainty

By definition, there’s always uncertainty at a startup. You need to work out what you’re making and whether anyone actually wants it.

This uncertainty makes most people uncomfortable, which is natural. A tempting solution is to schedule meetings to debate this uncertainty endlessly, as if it can be made certain by the power of thought alone. This is particularly the case for people with backgrounds like mine, who spent time at university and jobs in which we were actively encouraged to theorise without seeking empirical evidence. Instead, work out how you can validate your assumptions as quickly as possible, and make that happen.

You can sometimes gain empirical evidence on which to make a decision whilst expending a very small amount of time & energy.

• The TripAdvisor 404 Test - Put a link to the new feature on your website, but “Before you build the darn thing … see how many people click it. It goes nowhere, it says broken link to the user [but] your log file says how many people [check it out]…It solves umpteen meetings worth of powerful debate and logical arguments.”

• Dropbox’s Demo Video - A 3 minute demo video on Hackernews prompted 12,000 digs, and tens of thousands pre-registrations. This gave Drew Houston the validation he needed to spend another year creating a market-beating file-syncing & backup service.

• An early-stage payments startup (not ours!) wondered whether merchants would use a monthly subscription billing service in addition to regular one-off payments. So they launched the service with a minimal back-end, knowing that if it took off, they’d have 30 days to build the functionality.

You wear every hat

Working at an early-stage startup, there are a thousand things to do. You’re the recruiter, HR person, accountant, office manager, receptionist, programmer & cleaner - and you have to make all the decisions associated with these roles. But it’s sometimes tempting to devote more time than necessary thinking about (and discussing!) these decisions.

In reality, the only important question for early-stage startups is almost always "does anyone want what we’re making?“ Most of the other stuff doesn’t need to be decided yet. "What shall we put in our cashflow forecast?”, “Where’s our new office going to be?”, “In 3 years, what do we want our brand position to be?” They are all important questions, but probably not yet.

If a decision doesn’t have any practical impact on what your team is doing this month, just postpone it (and the associated meetings). If you do eventually have to make the decision, you’ll have more information at your disposal. If you’re not spending the majority of your time trying to solve the one most important problem your business faces, it could be a sign that something’s wrong.

Meetings kill productivity

A lot of smart people have written extensively about this subject, and I don’t have much more to add. I reckon it takes me about an hour to really get up to full speed when developing something challenging, and it takes a minimum of 2-3 hours to produce anything meaningful. So a meeting halfway through an afternoon bazookas productivity for at least half a day.

Some thoughts

After a year of running our startup, we’ve come up with several ways of avoiding unnecessary meetings and keeping necessary meetings as brief as possible

• Ask: Is this discussion going to result in a decision that practically impacts our priorities in the next 2 weeks? If not, postpone it.
• Any discussion that goes over 5 minutes has to move to a meeting room. This isn’t because we like having meetings in meeting rooms; quite the opposite. If the discussion isn’t important enough to warrant disrupting the team, then postpone it.
• Have one meeting every two weeks at which you review any of the longer-term decisions and make sure everyone on the team knows what the company is focussing on

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