Startups' War on Meetings

When Paul Betts worked as a software developer at Microsoft, he grew frustrated by the number of meetings he had to attend. So he coded a program that linked up with his Outlook schedule. It checked the job titles of his fellow attendees at the gatherings he doodled his way through, estimated their salaries, and then tallied up the amount of money wasted at each scheduled sit-down. The average meeting frittered away about $500. “In a typical 40-hour workweek, I’d have maybe 20 to 30 hours of meetings,” says Betts. “Too little is accomplished.”

Betts left Microsoft in August for GitHub, an 80-person startup that stores programmers’ source code. GitHub’s software makes it easy for many decentralized people or teams to contribute to a single project, and its own employees use it to collaborate while discussing ideas in a freewheeling chat room. They avoid face-to-face meetings almost entirely.