Company meetings are a nearly universally hated thing. No matter what line of work you’re in, most are simply a waste of time. And even when they’re important and necessary, they’re still likely inefficient. A new startup aims to show you just how wasteful they are.
MEETorDIE is an online tool that asks you to put in information about your meeting, including what company you work for, what industry you’re in, how big the company is, how long the meeting is, and who is attending. When you submit that information, you’re taken to a page that shows how much money your company wasted with that meeting. Below that, you can see the aggregate statistics for how much money your company has wasted on meetings total.
Depending on how wasteful your meeting is, MEETorDIE’s mascot, Goolah, will be shown in different precarious situations incorporating imagery from other popular startups, such as Foursquare and Twitter. More importantly, MEETorDIE suggests how the money being wasted during these meetings might be better spent, such as donating money for drinking water for Africa.
On the main page of the site you can also see other people around the world bitching about their meeting. And anyone can comment anonymously on these meeting notes.
MEETorDIE calculates the amount of money being wasted by pulling information from a number of online resources including the Department of Labor. If your company is in their database, they can also pull the average salaries for the people in the meeting to give you an accurate estimate on how much money your company is wasting.
MEETorDIE is the first project by the Mountain View-based bootstrapped startup Vaporware Labs. The company was started by former EA and Apple employees.
You call that a start-up? I call it a website with a calculator.
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If you want a real website with calculators, the best place is SimplyFinance http://www.simplyfinance.co.uk/calculatorList.html … and their 365 calculators!
I bet they compute a table of which company does the most stupid meeting, and then they know they should sell their shares in them.
My advice is don’t enter your real company name!
That creature looks like a huge rubber. Cleaver idea.
I seriously hate meetings. My boss books them all day long. I’ll try it out.
Just tried it out on my phone in a meeting. Pretty cool seeing how much money was wasted by blowhards.
Wow that’s really funny. Cool idea.
What the hell, $640 wasted spent on our teams weekly meeting. Wonder if my boss will cancel them if I show him this.
Someone should make a website calculator to calculate the time wasted by website calculators.
What a bullshit! Why the hell have you given such a site, space on your blog? They must be paying you for that.
obviously the guys have money to waste…..
Wow,… more like how much money companies lose from people browsing sites like this. A fun idea (I suppose) but there isnt much purpose. This is a site I would visit once and never return.
I like it. Its fun and could help spread “meeting waste” awareness.
Yea, this is a bit of a stretch TC. Maybe a macbook air was exchanged? kidding.
hilarious!
just forwarded to my boss.
I think it is a awesome simple website, nice job. Meetings are a huge wast of time for companies and just showing people how much $ they are wasting is a great start.
People need to spend less time in company meetings so they can spend more time at their desk using useless web apps?
http://isthismeetingreallyworthit.com/ is better.
I don’t know you have to do most of the calculations yourself, its just a stop watch.
Didn’t you make that site… ?
Yes. Yes, he did.
To be serious for a second. I don’t think all meetings are a waste of time. I think sometimes workers and managers have different reasons for liking and disliking meetings. In the morning we have a quick 15 minute meeting, a “what are we working on today” kind of thing.
Nobody hates them and its good to get everyone on the same page or at least socialize a bit. The rest of the day we use our Noodle Intranet.
This site is sick. I stopped our meeting mid meeting today and we all freaking laughed out loud. Of course my arrogant boss who set up the meeting didn’t bother showing because he was probably flirting with his secretary. Nice job TC. Good find.
This is awesome.
I use an iPhone app for this where you can calculate the cost of a meeting while you are in it: http://www.itunes.com/app/toxictime
I think this site is worth some serious consideration. Most of the time, the big wigs who bother cramming a bunch of meetings down employees’ throats only respond to dollar signs. This shows them just how cost intensive their meetings may be.
I wrote & published the iPhone app Meeting Timer: Time is Money ( http://www.eleganttechnologies.com/aboutmtgtimer?src=techcrunch ) about a year ago. I’ve attended, and hosted, my share of meetings and really think that there is some potential in apps or sites that bring some awareness to the true cost of meetings. But the current round of websites and apps, including my own, aren’t exactly useful.
These calculators and tools, including mine, are mainly for fun – don’t take them too seriously. I don’t think the the article’s featured website owner is trying to take the meeting missives too seriously, and I know my app is very un-serious, too. If someone wanted to take fixing-meetings seriously, they’d already have a job doing something more important than meta-analyzing meeting dynamics, or their job would steer them away from making a meeting calculator.
If you actually want to make a meeting more effective – search the web for meeting checklists – they are many that are actually quite effective.
My own top 5 list of things to improve meeting value:
1) Have an agenda / what needs to be accomplished by end of meeting
2) Take notes, including who has committed to accomplishing stuff, and by when. Also, make a note of any decisions that where made so as to avoid re-making them next week.
3) Before the meeting, as the host, ensure everyone received the agenda, will show up on time, and will be ready to work. Springing the agenda upon participants at the beginning of a meeting is criminally inefficient.
4) Be prepared to cut-off discussion if things aren’t going anywhere, especially if there are many non-participating attendees.
5) End early.
So a new “company” provides a product that is free, and lasts for 5 seconds before getting old?
This is awesome dudes!
Meetings that stink are the ones that don’t have clear objectives, agendas, and ground rules.
There’s a great new book in the UK called Brilliant Meetings that has some basic common sense suggestions. Should be able to find it on Amazon in the US.
Just look how important meetings are to people like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc. and yet how many companies have a policy on meetings?
It’s simple – just buy the book and take some positive action.