Beeswax founders say they’ve learned to streamline meetings

Beeswax chief technical officer Ram Rengaswamy, CEO Ari
Paparo, and chief product officer Shamim
Samadi.
Beeswax/Glassdoor

• Pointless meetings are killers for productivity and can annoy
  employees in an office.
• The executives of the startup Beeswax,
  all former Google execs, say they’ve learned how to keep meetings
  streamlined and efficient.
• Experts agree that keeping meetings short and small are
  critical to keeping them on track.

A pointless, never-ending meeting is a great way to kill
productivity in the workplace.

The three founders of the ad-tech startup Beeswax seem to get that. The
trio, all
former Google ad executives, say their approach to meetings
is a little different than how it was at their former company.

“We’re all thoughtful about not having a proliferation of
meetings because one thing we all felt in our previous
careers is that there can be lots of redundant meetings,” Beeswax
chief product officer Shamim Samadi told Business Insider.

“So we try to have folks do the thinking and write things out
prior to the meeting if they can, and then have a real focus, a
discussion with a clear objective that we want to get to at the
end of the meeting. We only hold meetings when we sort of have
those things in place.”

For each of the executives, founding Beeswax in 2015 was their
first time running a startup. The Manhattan-based company makes
software that helps marketers bid for ads in real time, and in
three years has
grown to 55 employees.

Managing a team that size has forced the executives to adapt
quickly, chief technical officer Ram Rengaswamy told Business
Insider.

“We’ve done this long enough that there are certain things that
we understand about the business well enough that we can make
decisions faster,” Rengaswamy said. “That’s one thing that I’ve
noticed in our meetings: They’re very focused and drive towards
an outcome. So that’s something that I’ve seen myself improve
on.”

Experts everywhere preach the same approach to meetings as
Beeswax.

The Harvard Business Review reported in 2015 that bigger
meetings tended to be less effective than smaller ones. One
expert told the Review that meetings needed to be limited to as
few as four or five people to ensure everyone got a chance to
speak in a 60-minute session.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had a similar approach: His
“two pizza” rule says you should never hold a meeting where
two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group.

Another executive told The New York Times that setting a clear
agenda for meetings was the critical element to avoid wasting
employees’ time.

“If I don’t have an agenda in front of me, I walk out,” Annette
Catino, former CEO of the QualCare Alliance Network,
told The Times. “Give me an agenda or else I’m not going to
sit there, because if I don’t know why we’re in the meeting, and
you don’t know why we’re there, then there’s no reason for a
meeting.”