I’ve worked in tech for my entire career and one of the lessons that I have learned, often the hard way, is that software needs to serve three basic needs:
- It’s got to be novel and smart
- It’s got to save time or stop waste
- It’s got to make people’s lives better
When tech markets go all frothy and valuations surge, many companies can get away with just #1 with some vaguer promises on #2 and #3.
Thing is ‘…..my tech is just lovely, it’s shiny and quite brilliant, you just need to use it and all will be well’ isn’t a terribly sane proposition.
In the recent past, and in truth still today, this approach results in valuations that simply beggar belief. It’s not long ago that an office rental company was valued at more than the combined GDP of 35 of the world’s poorest countries(1), and that business maybe achieved part of #3 and it wasn’t even a tech company.
This is still happening. There’s a well-known EV company still valued at $725B (that’s 94 countries on the GDP metric I’ve now taken a shine too), and only three years ago it was worth 110 poor country GDPs. Now I like an EV – I drive one, but $1,000B? Seriously? With irritating ranges, poor charging infrastructures and knowing that there are 75% less parts in an EV compared to its gas-guzzling cousin – why they hell is this depreciating asset worth that much?
There have been a few times in my life when I’ve had an epiphany. Mostly it’s because I’m being made to do something that seems like a pointless waste of my time. Meetings are one of them.
It used to be hard to organise a meeting, coordinate diaries, prepare an agenda, brief the chair person and write up the notes. Now though, and this has been building for years and accelerated post-pandemic, it’s too easy. The online meeting is my newest and most passionate efficiency enemy.
I’m spending three quarters of my time in pointless, unproductive meetings. We have all taken leave of our senses. Meetings must be made better.
That’s what Meeting Canary has done. It’s a revolution and you need to join us on the barricades (unless you’ve just been hooked directly into another pointless [lack of] brain storm, obviously). But hold on, let’s not forget the holy trinity of successful tech companies because we don’t want to just be smart tech – what about the waste, what about the making life better bit?
Well that’s the thing you see. This bird’s found that holy grail. $400b is wasted in the US alone on unnecessary meetings (67 GDPs worth). We can stop that waste. We ask people if the meeting was really needed, we prove how much money is being wasted in real-time and we optimise the unoptimised.
Better than that we take the remaining, useful and productive meetings, and make them better too. We can show how long your energy-sapping colleagues bore you for, we can show you the energy draining from a meeting as he (come on, allow me a bit of misandry) drones on, we can show that your company’s claims of being an equal-ops employers with equality at the heart of what they do, is demonstrably untrue. We are the saviour canary that will help pull us back from this insanity brink.
So in summary Meeting Canary:
Smart tech ✓
Saves wasting time ✓
Makes life better ✓
Join our flock and make meetings fly!
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)