Meeting matters

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Time is money. Everything and everyone’s measured by it.

In the book The hard things about the hard things, Ben Horowitz narrates a rule at Andreesen VC – anyone who's late for a meeting should carry $10 per minute to pay the waiting entrepreneurs (paraphrased). They established this rule to differentiate from other VCs and show how much they valued entrepreneurs looking for investments.

Meetings are scheduled to make a decision. If key people do not turn up for it the decision gets postponed piling up technical (and potentially organizational debt). How often are we on time for meetings?

Interactive

Use the Interactive to calculate your own cost due to late meetings.

Calculating the cost

Consider the scenarios I’ve been part of at Gramener in a single week

• a 30 mins meeting (session) with 30 people with the key speaker not turning up for 15 mins. Assuming all 30 are developers with a billing rate of INR 2200. Due to one person’s hold up, the organization has to absorb (2200 / 4) * 30 ~= INR 17000.
• a 2 hr meeting (with a stakeholder) where the stakeholder couldn’t arrange for a conference call until the 48th minute thereafter I cancelled the call since I wasn’t the right person to be part of the call. With 2 more developers in the discussion, thats about 2200*(2+1) ~= INR 6600. There were at least 5 people from the stakeholder side. Even if we assume their rate to be half (INR 1100), the cost comes around INR 10000.
• and then there are meetings with no specific agenda.

To quote the book It doesn’t have to be crazy at work – a 1 hour meeting with 4 people isn't 1 hour, it's worth 4 hrs.

Time is money. Literally.

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