WorkLife (YC W15) launches to end bad meetings | Hacker News Reader

WorkLife (YC W15) launches to end bad meetings

techcrunch.com

47 pointsdkash30 comments

Great idea. There are few things more frustrating in business than unproductive meetings, and so often they could easily be fixed with better preparation, focus during the meeting itself, and/or follow-up. This seems like the kind of tool that could genuinely help and could pay for itself very quickly while still generating plenty of returns for you.

I have two hopefully constructive and slightly meta suggestions:

1. Your tour page could benefit from some TLC. I looked at it on a large monitor, and it was so spaced out and the text so large and poorly rendered that it was actively unpleasant to read through. I’m happy to give more specific feedback if it would be useful. (I’ve just realised that despite being interested in your project and having reached the end of that page, in the time it took to write this comment I have already forgotten almost everything it said except for a couple of features I guessed would be there anyway.)

2. You’re writing a tool where business people are presumably going to discuss work, potentially including all kinds of sensitive information about current status and future plans. I lost track of how many deal-breakers your current privacy policy contains in that context, but it was lots.

Thanks for the feedback, Chris.

You’re welcome. Best of luck with the project, I’m sure a lot of people will appreciate it.

Dave Kashen, co-founder here. Happy to answer any questions.

What integrations are you working on? I could see this being very useful with an Asana integration.

Asana integration is on our roadmap, along with a number of others.

Why would I use this instead of Google Docs?

It's built specifically to help you adopt meeting best practices - hooks into your calendar and prompts you to add agenda items, provides structure to encourage decision-making, enables you to assign action items, makes it easy to send out meeting summaries to invitees, helps you close the loop on action items, etc.

Slack integration please? I am spending significant effort weaning everyone off email; this would end up getting everyone back to internal emails.

roger that.

Are you hiring? :)

We are! https://jobs.lever.co/worklife

Are you remote-friendly? I don't get that vibe from the postings there, but I thought I'd ask anyway. :)

Would love to see calendar sync for MS exchange supported :)

Yep, us too! On our roadmap.

Hi Dave, I read that you were a CEO coach. I would be interested in knowing more about it. Can we have a quick email conversation? simone.brunozzi at gmail

sure, will email you.

There are a number of integrated strategies that can support meetings to either be more productive or not run at all (one of the big newspapers here in Australia actually called me a meeting olympian for the sheer amount I've worked with [1]). A clear Agenda at the outset is by far the biggest bang for buck - in part, because it requires a system not specialised skills (like, say, energy curve management).

Good luck to Dave and the team. Let me know if I can help with guest blogs etc.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/managing/supercharge-yo...

Thanks Jacob, will do.

Site: https://www.worklife.com/

Great problem to tackle. Meetings aren't going away, and they can be improved.

Two questions for the founder:

- How much of this is process vs the tool itself? (How much is this an improvement over Shared Google docs?)

- The company name isn't MeetingLife. What's next on the agenda?

- We think the tool can shape the process. We're hearing from teams that use it that meetings that used to have no agendas now have agendas consistently, meetings that used to go in circles now stay focused and end with clear next steps, etc.

- There's plenty to do to fix meetings (and doing so will help improve people's work life), so that will be our focus for the foreseeable future. Funny enough, we did change the name from MeetingHero, we felt WorkLife was more in line with our fundamental purpose and long term aspiration.

MeetingHero has a ring to it, but I suspect it would wind up with too many Snarky connotations to the person who introduces the software.

What's the big benefit above and beyond using Google Docs?

Again, I'm a big fan of the concept, as fixing Poorly Run Meetings is a solvable problem.

Love this! Tracking deliverables from meetings is challenging. Would love to see an "Old Business" list of deliverables (action items) from the prior meeting in a series (e.g. weekly one-on-ones with direct report)

I just tried it out. Its very slick, how ever I assigned action item to myself and under action items nothing showed up.

Also the meeting summary was never generated. At least I thought it would be.

Hope this helps

The action items show up for past meetings, so if you were just playing around and added it to a future meeting, it will show up once it's in the past. You have to click Send Meeting Summary, and it will send it out by email. If you're still having issues, pls email me dave AT worklife

Great work here. Is this primarily focused on physical meetings, or is it in any way also optimized for remote/teleconference meetings?

Dave is incredibly skilled and capable. Looking forward to seeing where the business goes.

Thanks man, you're too kind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com