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Looks nice. The hardest part about scheduling meetings as a project manager in my org is when there's no timeslot available for everyone needed for a meeting. I have to check each of their schedules and weigh the importance of their attendance vs my guess of the importance/reschedulability of their conflict in order to decide who will need to reschedule/cancel/skip something. Sometimes this is simply a "do not book/focus time" block which (depressingly) works out best.

It looks like Zynq currently works based on the "available" slots on calendars, which is probably convenient for many meetings, but not really a big deal for me. Do you think any tooling/features could help address the issue I've described?

One way we try to solve this problem is by prioritizing more urgent meetings (marked ASAP in our tool) and dynamically moving flexible ones around if possible to free up space. This is enabled by default on our paid version. Would that be useful to you? We don't currently book on top of existing meetings and have thought about a priority system but the challenge is keeping that updated as it would require everyone to rank thr importance of their meetings

The company I work for uses Outlook/teams for booking meetings and it works incredibly well. The scheduling part you talked about is almost exactly like the scheduling assistant feature in outlook and teams. Sorry if this comes across as a negative question, but what exactly does zync offer over outlook and teams which have scheduling assistant?

Can you also briefly talk about your traction? Eg- no of users, growth rate and at what stage you were in before YC and currently. Good luck.

I haven't used teams, but from my experience Outlook's scheduling assistant just shows you a few open time slots. The biggest problem is when there aren't any acceptable open slots within a reasonable window into the future (e.g., this week), and the only way to make the meeting happen is to move stuff around. This then becomes pretty problematic if you have to start asking other folks if they can move conflicts around.

(I don't know to what extent Zynq resolves these issues.)

There isn't a general solution to this, which is why the typical scheduling tools just punt back to user.

I suspect the real difficulty for a company trying to offer something more powerful is balancing effort/input the user has to take against dynamism and principle of least astonishment.

I don't think it would be hard to write a scheduling algorithm in this space that basically works but everyone hates, for example.

The scheduling assistant shows you the timeline hour per hour, with a line for each employee and any meeting they have anywhere. You can even view what any meeting is, if their meetings are not set to private.

I think it's quite good to find a time, with the least conflicts. However given any meeting with more than 3 people in a large organization, it's simply not possible to gather everybody at once, without planning 3 weeks in advance.

one screenshot: https://technology.ku.edu/outlook2013/scheduling-assistant

Our algorithm doesn't just try to find an open slot, it tries to choose a time that's most productive for everyone. This means maximizing everyone's focus time (stacking meetings as close together as possible) and in the future respecting preference as well (eg if you prefer meetings in the morning instead of the afternoon). As far as I remember, scheduling assistant still requires you to pick and time and room yourself although it gives you a view to do so more easily.

We came up with this idea halfway through YC and our paid version of the product has paying 2 customers and several others in the pipeline, including some big tech companies.

When I schedule a meeting with more than a few people, the number of open slots within business hours quickly converges to zero. So I have to manually make the decisions as to who is most important to have in that meeting (based on the topic), and who will be conflicting.

Curious how an automated algorithm can make that decision.

One way we try to solve this problem in our paid product is by prioritizing more urgent meetings (marked ASAP in our tool) and dynamically moving flexible ones (marked "This Week / Next Week / etc.") around if possible to free up space. If the meeting is scheduled manually via Outlook/GCal, we assume it is high priority and don't move it. We experimented with more complicated priority systems but ultimately that required too much work from the user

Aside from everyone marking their own meetings as IMPORTANT! you could also delete all meeting requests that are "flexible" or deemed not critical - why are they being held in the forst place?

We think of priority based on time sensitivity - not importance. For example, if I have a 1:1 with my direct report, it is very important but not time sensitive. This allows us to move that 1:1 if needed to accommodate a more urgent meeting

We work in resource scheduling and this is a continual tension between "algo optimized" and "manually tweaked". We have lots of very smart people working on both the technology and the workflows, but none of them have ever been able to explain to me how you resolve this in a consistent, universal way. I see the same problem here.

If you're expected to gather many people (more than 10), or really need to work with few specific people on a specific project. One trick is to schedule a weekly or biweekly meeting for that.

If you really need it one specific week, send an update with topics that must be covered. If you really don't need it one week, cancel it in advance.

Assuming that you work with regular people or on regular projects. You or other participants will always have something to share, but maybe only 15 minutes out of the hour, it's fine.

Edit: this makes me realize. It's obviously not a software algorithm for scheduling, because this ain't a technological problem. So to make it a technological problem, the issue might be to identify groups of people who interact and prepare them regular timeslots together. Now that's a plan for a SV startup that will disrupt how meetings happen.

Optimizing scheduling in a system that is already at or over capacity (i.e. double bookings) is a very challenging problem and we don't claim to solve that problem. It would require manual user input which doesn't work very well. Instead, we focus on solving rearranging meetings based on urgency and also to optimize for individual focus time

How about something like "required" and "optional" participants? Also a feature of outlook meetings :D

Good idea, this is also a feature on Google Calendar. IME it is not used much unfortunately, and the challenge is balancing the work a user needs to do up-front vs. the benefits. Definitely thinking about creative ways to get this information though!

I can tell you I'm working in a F50 bank and it's heavily used all the time.

If someone ain't marked required, then that person probably ain't coming up to the meeting, and they won't tell you that they couldn't make it because they assume they're not needed.

Similar thing as in To and Cc for emails. No need to reply to emails where one ain't in the To line.

Ah. Social conventions in large organizations. An infinitely complex topic. But you're probably not trying to cater to Fortune 500 so nevermind.

Thats a good point! Every company (F500 or not) has different cultural/social norms about how they treat attendees (and even cc on emails!)

Stacking meetings is helpful until it is harmful. How do you balance that, out of curiosity?

we define focus time as 3+ hours of uninterrupted time chunks. If you already have less than 3 hours of free time during the day, we prefer to give you a break than to further stack meetings together.

Ah I see, do you mean in case you need to do some prep/post-meeting work for a meeting and if its sandwiched, there is no time to do it? I can see that being a problem as well, we are adding functionality to cycle through suggested times to avoid that situation if the default time we suggest causes issues like so

It's both pre/post work, and focus.

Some meetings need more mental focus than others, so stacking them can in fact can cause the same sort of problem you are trying to avoid with other work (i.e. "focus time").

cycling through sounds like a decent approach.

I cans see how that helps with protecting some focus time but not with meetings themselves

For example there are lots of situations where 4 1 hour meetings in a row is just a bad idea even though it could be done to protect a 3 hour block. Problem being knowing which situations those are depends on both the type of meeting and your role in it.

I guess the problem is splitting your day into "focus time" and "meeting time" will work well for some roles, but is overly simplified for others. Not obvious how to solve that, most of the simple approaches would involve significant user input.

How do you handle the fact that not everyone needs big blocks of uninterupted time (example: IT vs Developers) or that all employee-hours are not equal?

For our paid product, we allow the company to set priority based on roles (mostly for executives) and also to tune the algorithm to work differently (prioritizing meeting space utilization vs. individual focus time)

It took me a while to realize that this has nothing to do with FPGAs (or APAC, as they are trying to rebrand). Also, given that Zynq is not a common word, Xilinx really could hurt you bad if they want to.

Same; HN titles are already notorious for overloading existing words, and this just exacerbates it. HN is exactly the place I'd expect to find interesting FPGA news.

Re: the comments on the name 'Zynq' being used for something else already: I had never heard of the SoC company before. I'd expect most of your target customers to have never heard of them before either.

Isn't what you're describing already built into Google Calendar via the 'Find a Time' tab?

Find a Time tries to find the most recent upcoming free slots and suggests them. We try to be smarter - by automatically picking the most productive time for everyone. This means picking a time where everyone's uninterrupted focus time is maximized and their preferences are respected (eg if you're more productive in meetings in the mornings vs afternoons)

So have you talked to Xilinx yet about sharing the trademark "Zynq" ?

> please let us know your honest feedback and how we can improve!

Don't name your business after a well established product? Because as soon as I saw Zynq I thought Xilinx FPGA SoC. And many people searching for Zynq will find the same.

https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc.html

+1! As someone who works with Zynq devices, I was thinking the exact same thing. Also, your name is the same as the product of a really large company, so it's probably easier just to change it now and not have any conflict with them later on.

Been in software for 20 years. Never heard of Xilinx or their Zynq product. I expect most of Zynq's intended customers will be the same.

that's a separate problem and unrelated.

zynq is a trademarked product name for another technology company that makes both software and hardware, and a major one at that. your never hearing of it, which while surprising, doesn't change that fact.

from a search result perspective alone, it is a terrible idea. unsurprisingly, searching for "zynq" will bring up results for xilinx zynq. the name is terrible from both legal and business development standpoints.

> the name is terrible from both legal and business development standpoints

I guess someone should tell UberConference and Box about that. They seem to have mistakenly thrived despite using extremely well-SEO'd software brand names.

This will tend to skew with how high up the stack you've spent your career.

Zynq will probably be familiar to anyone who has been dealing with SOC and FPGAs at all recently.

im well acquainted with fpga development so recognized the name from that context.

regardless of that, they will have to up their seo game if they wanna outrank...

Xilinx are the FPGA pioneers.

I knew about it, but I happen to have a close family member who owns Zinq-emblazoned clothing so that might skew things a bit ;)

You might want to consider a new name - Zynq is Xilinx's flagship family of FPGA/ARM SoCs. With Xilinx being a pretty large corporation I'd be surprised if they don't immediately try to defend their trademark.

IANAL but the idea of trademarks is to avoid consumer confusion. I don't think there's much consumer confusion between the name of a SoC and a startup offering to manage your calendar. They're in completely different industries.

Now if you were Dell coming out with a Zynq line, that would be a different story.

Seems like there's a bit of room for confusion in the stuff surrounding the two. Would you guess "PYNQ - Python Productivity for ZYNQ" is a set of python bindings for this Zynq's API or for the FPGA? Especially seems like it could be related to this startup with its site being at pynq.io, at least until you see the photos of the pink PCBs :)

I don't know. Given what FPGAs are commonly used for -- i.e., I/O -- using a .io domain for this seems potentially confusing/contentious.

Lawyers are as hungry these days as anyone else. They need to pick a new name, or at least a new domain name. It's a terrible name for SEO, if for no other reason.

They're both tech companies selling software solutions. It's quite similar.

If I were Xilinx and reading this thread. I'd be preparing the lawyers already. Just my two cents.

My first thought was Xilinx. I'll live.

thanks for the heads up, noted!

I want to add, having worked in electronics engineering before. This will be highlighted by any people (future customers) who has worked in a hardware software company.

You should really consider renaming the product. Even if you don't want do, your product is going to loose the Google game, it will never popup when people will Google "Zynq", "Zynq planning", "Zynq trial", "Zynq API", etc... and if it does, Xilinx will sue you as soon as they notice.

I've worked for a startup before, whose name was systematically getting auto corrected by Google (it was too close to another word and was interpreted as a typo) and it made it really hard for people to find it even when they were specifically looking for it. In retrospective, they should have changed name. Don't do the same mistake we did.

Obviously that's not the feedback you were anticipating, so sorry about that. ^^

thank you for the feedback! we are certainly not married to the name, but simply prioritizing the product/features ahead of it currently

i am curious. do people not google their product name ahead of time before the final name to get a sense of how searchable it will be?

"just tell us who you want to meet & how long you want your meeting to be and we’ll find the best time that works for everyone."

FWIW, I used to have a very competent EA and would tell them basically exactly this and they would work everything out. But the amount of effort and intelligence (and phone calls) that went into that behind the scenes was, er, significant.

Absolutely, especially if it required others to move meetings around to accommodate. We've spoken to a few EAs at big tech companies that spend 3+ hours on some days doing just this and they were incredibly excited to try out the product

I bet. The tricky part here is the metadata. A good EA will know importance level of various meetings, flexibility, etc. in a way that is not typically encoded in calendars.

Zerzar - this looks awesome! Right now we're a small team in the same timezone, but can definitely see value as we expand our team!

Thanks Jay!

Isn’t this a trivial feature for Google to add to all Apps accounts? I can’t imagine the logic for picking a meeting time being that complex and “next available” is likely the right answer for most people any way.

Shared calendars could easily be done by them as well for the entire GSuite ecosystem with one off “approve picking a spot” on a per meeting basis.

Google/MS can certainly add this feature (for enterprise accounts) but it would not be trivial. IME "next available" means urgent, and that was not true for 80% of my meetings at work. There were many times I booked a meeting one or two days/weeks ahead, so that I could spend X hours today/tomorrow getting something important done without interruptions or waiting for some progress to be made.

The paid version of our product adds another dimension to optimization by improving room availability/utilization. Our goal is to build an E2E product suite including room tablet SW, guest check-in experience & real estate utilization analytics, which would be more of a challenge for Google/MS to trivially add to their suite. By doing this, we are also able to gather more high-fidelity data about office spaces that doesn't currently sit in G Suite or Exchange.

Which HDL do you use ?

Looks like a great tool and would certainly help if it can intelligently suggest changes across calendars to facilitate meetings.

One question I have is all the permissions it requires. Amongst others, it's asking me for:

* View and manage the provisioning of calendar resources on your domain

* See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access using Google Calendar

I've no idea why it would need the first permission there? I'm assuming the second relates to seeing co-workers calendars, and perhaps it also needs to be able to move meetings. However "permanently delete all the calendars" seems a bit over the top.

Thanks @indigomm! The first permission is needed for us to book meeting rooms (not relevant in the current WFH environment, but historically what we have been doing)

The second permission is just read & write on your calendars (since we are booking meetings on your behalf). When we request "write" access, it automatically gives us delete access and there is no way for us to turn that off unfortunately.

If this proves to be a feature that people actually want, what would stop google/microsoft from building it directly into their calendar? How do you plan to make this product defensible?

Our main business is improving utilization of physical meeting spaces (via the same scheduling product) - we are building out an E2E solution including meeting room tablet SW, guest check-in experiences & real estate planning analytics. The idea is that this will more than just a scheduling tool on top of calendar but rather a full suite of products to help real estate planning & utilization. This will also allow us to gather a lot more data about office space than currently exists in G Suite / Exchange giving us a moat as well

The real dream for me would be something solving the satisfiability problem of conference rooms (obviously not an issue this moment anymore). If it was possible for every meeting to have a priority the computer could figure out which meetings should be when to allow as many of us to have rooms as is possible. The current system is horribly inefficient, with the first person to book getting whatever room they happen to choose.

This is exactly what our paid product does: https://zynq.io :)

Good deal! I think this will require people to block off times on their calendar when they don't want to do a meeting. Not all available slots in my calendar are up for grab.

We let you set what times in the week you want to have meetings - no need to block off your calendar!

Thanks @zerzar. Unfortunately this changes for me, and I'd think for others, from week to week.

Ah I see, is the use case for things like doctors appointments vs more repeated tasks like picking up kids from school?

We currently look only at the logged in account, but we have been toying with the idea of looking at both your personal & work calendar -- especially during the current WFH times.

Out of curiosity, how do you currently handle the case of your calendar being open, but not being free? Do your colleagues book the meeting anyway and then you let them know that they should reschedule because you're busy?

At the moment I'm not using any auto calendaring app, but sharing my availability through external interactions. Happy to help further if you'd like. kkotak at gmail dot com.

Both, I guess. For repeated tasks, there are times when I need to take over something unexpected. Are you accounting for all calendars in the view or just the logged in account?

Will this handle the scenario of “I need to schedule a new meeting with a higher priority to me than others I’ve requested, triggering a wave of automatic rescheduling?”

Could you explain what you mean by higher priority to me vs others? Currently each meeting has an urgency defined by the organizer (ASAP, this week, etc) and automatic rescheduling will happen based on that. We don't currently support priorities per meeting attendee

Think this is something that fails Paul Bucheit's infamous "why won't Google just copy you?" test.

Looks cool. How many enterprise users are using the Google Calendar web app for booking meetings? Is it significant enough?

Office has most of the market share but there are still millions of employees using G suite to book meetings so it is a significant initial target for us. We will expand to outlook in the future

"All our team members are certified organic and non-GMO" Love it. Congrats on the launch!

Thanks Nick!

How is this different from x.ai?

x.ai focuses on scheduling meetings with people outside your company (so there is still a manual step of choosing a time) and doesn't work great for 5+ people.

We're focused on internal company meetings, and so we can automatically choose a time without any party having to pick between several available times even for a 5-10 person meeting.

Hi guys, Ammon from x.ai here!

Killer app you built, looks like it has a lot of smarts. Love the native calendar extension UX. Really slick!

We just updated out user experience for 5+ users if 2 or more are not connected to x.ai and it is proving successful. However, if everyone is connected to x.ai, whether they are internal to your company or external, we find a time for everyone instantly.

For internal meetings, coworkers do not need to be connected to you on x.ai. If you can see their calendar, we can see their free/busy info and we book it instantly as well.

Cheers!

ammon - thanks for chiming in! I have not used x.ai in a while and it looks like you guys have added some really awesome features since then. looking forward to trying it out again!

Absolutely! Installing yours, too, it has some very clever features!

This could be cool for recruiting, too, if it handles sequential meetings.

Would love to learn more about the use-case for recruiting! Are you thinking in terms of scheduling when the candidates come in / hop on the phone based on interviewer availability?

I'm just thinking for a series consecutive interviews. Like 3 people interview candidate over 3 hours, or whatever.

ah got it - yeah most large companies have proprietary systems to help with that since its not a simple problem at scale.

do you work in recruiting? If so, I'd love to understand the problem space more deeply in that domain!

how is this different than https://www.getclockwise.com/

Clockwise allows you to move existing meetings to maximize focus time for yourself (and possibly team if everyone is using it)

We're a scheduling tool that helps you create meetings and optimize for focus time for everyone invited as well as each users' preferences.

Clockwise is an intelligent calendar assistant that will automatically move meetings to open up the most Focus Time for everyone. It also has a scheduler which will find the best time for a meeting automatically while respecting users' preferences.

The only difference I can see from the description is the meeting priority inference, which you get with a paid plan. Clockwise is currently free.

Sorry for the confusion - our paid product does more than just meeting priority inference, it allows you optimize meeting room utilization and is targeted to companies to help them better utilize office space.

We launched this free version with a subset of features since some things (like room utilization) don't make sense for an individual. We're looking to port over more features as we get adoption & based on demand. Our priority inference also works a little differently than clockwise -- there's no step of marking meetings as flexible, that happens automatically at scheduling time based on your urgency

Scheduling is a tough problem. In my experience with Clockwise, my focus time has increased. Best of all, I don't have to constantly spend time to get the benefits.

Launch HN: Zynq (YC W20) – Book meetings instantly with your team