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That Didn’t Need to Take an Hour

feld.com

176 pointsmooreds52 comments

A common thread:

When someone starts this way, I break in and say as politely as I can, “What’s on your mind?”

From the Comments:

Question: do you in any way prepare people before they meet with you for the first time, with guidelines for how you like meetings to go?

Answer: It varies. I used to send out a "how to meet with me" note but there's now so much on the web that it should be easy for the person to prepare by just doing a quick search on Brad Feld Meeting"

This is pretty haughty and I see this type of junk a lot with the VC/Angel investors out there. They are implicitly saying, "clearly my time it too valuable to waste it with courtesy or respect." Yes, I see that he said "as politely as I can" however the whole idea that I need to google how to meet with someone ahead of time is insane. These people aren't holy figures.

Maybe a better option is to not schedule time with people that you don't plan on being courteous to.

I dunno, I think Postel's law ("Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.") is about as relevant to interpersonal relationships as software design.

Maybe it's the Brit in me speaking, but I think it's fair to recognize and accept when someone is higher up the totem pole than you and to handle the etiquette properly, even if they're being brusque. A personalized "how to meet with me" rider sounds pretty ridiculous to me, but having an idea of the etiquette around how to meet with an investor in general sounds reasonable.

"How to meet with me" could be less pretentious phrased as something like "the meeting style I try to aim for". It's more "let's try to do it like this" and less "here's how you have to act with me", IMO.

The Aussie in me says that if someone wants you to accept and recognize that they're better than you and give deference, they will be impossible to work with and are a poison you should avoid.

Different strokes for different folks, but I look for partners, not bosses.

Spot on. There are tons of those guides available too, so people are taking that advice seriously.

You shouldn't need to google how to meet with a specific person ahead of time. But you should have an idea of how to meet with someone whose days are packed -- how to be courteous and respectful without taking a lot of time. Whether you're meeting with a VC, potential business partner, potential employee, or a client...

Don't be like http://www.drivecomic.com/archive/141219.html . Everybody's time is more valuable than that. Have an agenda, and a plan to discuss that agenda at a reasonable pace.

100% agree, everyone on each side should be respectful and understand how to interact. If the people that they are interacting with genuinely don't know how to do that because they are so amateur, then help them along - be a mentor.

If these VC and Angels really want to be taken as stalwart leaders and mentors they claim to be, they should be taking the time to help the people that they are investing time/money into learn how to interact in the fast paced/high stress world. If they want to act like asses then they can be treated like the rest of the finance world as the money hungry nihilists that they are.

I doubt most/all of that applies to Brad individually, but I have run into waay too many Angels and VCs who think they are demi-gods that have no time for people and then claim all day how they are the role models for tech startups, moral lighthouses etc...

That could be the case, but I don't think it's necessarily so.

If I go into a favorite restaurant when things are slow, I will happily chat with the staff. But if they're in their busy period, I am all business: I briskly give my order and otherwise work to minimize my time demand.

That is not them being haughty; it is them being busy. And it's me being respectful of that.

That is not them being haughty; it is them being busy. And it's me being respectful of that.

Sure it's not but it doesn't relate to what I was saying was Haughty - specifically sending someone a tip sheet on how to meet with you or expecting them to Google how to have a meeting with you.

To extend your example, it would be more akin to going to the Soup Nazi's restaurant [1] - albeit likely without the hostility.

[1]http://youtu.be/uVqBzP0xdKk?t=23s

I understand his sentiment, but I think there's something to be said for leaving a meeting open-ended beyond simple courtesy. When I was consulting, I found it was best for me to just let my clients talk as long as they wanted to, and rarely if ever interrupt. I learned a lot of really interesting things about peoples' professional and personal lives by taking this approach. While I appreciate that one can't do this all the time, I don't think that exploratory quality should be discounted, and I don't see how it would work if there's never any slack time in the schedule. I'd think it's even more important for a VC who wants to see through the pitch and get to the real story.

When I was consulting, I found it was best for me to just let my clients talk as long as they wanted to...

Your clients were paying for your meeting participation, right? In that case it's entirely appropriate to let them talk as much as they want. I think Feld is in a different position...

I'm lucky if I can get invitees to actually read the agenda before the meeting in order to be prepared.

Thinking of anyone having to google how to meet with me provided a great laugh...

Small talk is orthogonal to courtesy/respect.

The google expectation is haughty. Not the avoidance of talking about things unrelated to the meeting.

Hmmm....

When I'm meeting with someone about a job or contract, I do a bit of research (check on linkedin, look for a blog or twitter account, google to see what else pops up). I hope I'm not being overly reverential.

I imagine if I was meeting with someone to convince them to give me a significant chunk of money, I'd do more research.

BTW, this is the same guy who does (or used to do) random meetings with anyone who signed up on a wiki: http://www.feld.com/archives/2006/01/random-meetings.html

When I'm meeting with someone about a job or contract, I do a bit of research

As you should, that is courtesy on your end. If however you end up finding a stallman-esqe[1] rider, then it will be clear you are dealing with someone who will probably not respect your time.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysoci...

Wow that is epic. I got to the bottom and saw there was a show trimmed parts notice making the list even longer.

And it's absolutely worth reading beyond that.

I LOLed at this bit:

"I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up."

Reminds me of a book I read to my two year old called "I want my hat back".

Wow, that is an intense list of expectations.

> [1] https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysoci...
This should be its own HN thread.

I really can't stand when people get caught up in formalities. As far as I'm concerned, all meetings are time-wasting leisure activities where people revel in their ability to bullshit their accomplishments of the past week. We have piles of technology surrounding us and people still insist on meeting face-to-face to do reintroductions, round tables, and small talk. Sorry, but after the ten-thousandth time of introducing myself to you, "talking a little about myself", and hearing about whatever you were doing at work for the past week, it gets exhausting and infuriating thinking about how much time you're spending in meetings when you could be doing actual work.

I’m always experimenting with new things. What do you do to keep meetings manageable and sane?
1. No phone calls. Use email. I'll respond when I can, almost always the same or next day.
2. No texts. Use email. See #1.
3. No status meetings. Email me your status report. I'll email you mine. Column titles should include: Item#, Project#, Title, Beneficiary, Responsible, Phase, Promise Date, Status, Disposition, Questions.
4. No "standing meetings". If you need regular (as in weekly) meetings, just send me an email with status, problems, questions, etc. the same time every week. I will answer you. My answer may include a meeting request.
5. No "all hands" meetings. Send us all an email.
6. Schedule any meetings that really require 1 hour over lunch. I hate to eat alone. Two birds, one stone.
7. 15 minutes is a waste of time to stop, meet, restart.
8. 30 minutes is usually good. (OP was right)
9. Meet in my office. I'm too busy to travel.
10. If our meeting is scheduled for 10:00 and you're not there by 10:01, I lock the door. No meeting. If it's with several people, I will only meet with those on time.
11. Every meeting requires some form of written agenda, with appropriate content and length, that must be emailed ahead of time. Agenda topics: Date, Time, Length, Required Attendees, Business Problem, Topics to Cover, Expected Result, Expected Next Steps (if possible). There is no such thing as "Optional Attendees". There is no such thing as a meeting to determine the agenda for the meeting.
12. Your best bet: my regular happy hours double as "open office hours", usually from 5 to 7: Tuesday: Bar Louie, Wednesday, B.J.s, Thursday, Tony Romo's. These "meetings" have always been the best.

Agree with 10/12.
> Schedule any meetings that really require 1 hour over lunch.
For the love of God no. This almost always ends up turning into an excuse for managers to make your lunchtime into work time.
> If our meeting is scheduled for 10:00 and you're not there by 10:01, I lock the door.
I get that it's important to be punctual, but isn't this a bit extreme?

> I get that it's important to be punctual, but isn't this a bit extreme?
If your meeting is scheduled for 30 minutes, then 1 minute of delay is already 3.3% of the meeting wasted. 5 minutes of typical courtesy buffer is almost 17%! It may be important if your schedule is full. Also it sends a clear message: value time of everyone, and if you can't be bothered to be exactly on time, then your meeting is probably not that important and maybe shouldn't be held at all.

I don't know ... Maybe if we are going to war or something but if your life is that serious to get into 1 minute == 3.3%, that just feels weird like maybe those people the drop out and disconnect from society have a point. :)

agreed. was just thinking about the shuffling in/out time of a few people - getting seated, checking if a projector works, etc. that's easily 1-2 minutes at the start or end - 6% of the time gone!!
edit: the time to get up and lock the door, then unlock it, and to likely admonish the person who was late - that's also wasted time.

If time is that precious, then don't waste travelling to the meeting room and do a video call instead.

Interesting. My experience (as someone low on the totem pole) is pretty much the opposite. E-mail requires the recipient perform the critical "three Rs": Read, Remember, Respond. This is, apparently, a significant barrier to conversation for many people in the workplace.
If I had $5 for every time I've sent an E-mail, re-sent as a reminder, then re-re-sent as a final reminder, then found it was not read by anyone on the To: line, I could probably retire today. My favorite is sitting down in a meeting, with someone projecting their screen, and seeing the little "unread mail" badge on their mail icon that shows they have 12,802 unread E-mails in their inbox. So THAT'S why I never get a response from that guy--it all makes sense!
I've pretty much given up on E-mail for anything important. For folks in parallel with me on the org chart, generally, I'll send an E-mail (which will go unread) so I have a "Cover My Ass" record of communication, then immediately have either a face-to-face or telephone conversation. For folks above me, I'll send the C.M.A. E-mail, then work with their assistant to get a 5-15 minute slot on their calendar wherein I can deliver the message face-to-face.

Different things work for different people. However, I think this really overestimates the efficiency of email as a communication method to replace meetings. Personally, I think for the most part phone meetings with occasional screen sharing is usually sufficient but so much either gets lost in email or requires more effort to communicate effectively that I feel like this is more like "I don't want to deal with people" than about efficiently completing tasks. Also, I agree with the other person the lunch time thing and after hours thing just kind of makes me sad. If you replace email with phone calls, I mostly agree with it. Definitely agree with throwing out the all hands stuff, it's just a vestige of some Methodology fad.

Communicating by email is very effective as a way to promote rubber-ducking (http://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/). Unless you want to look like an idiot, you generally take the time to think out and present your ideas in a cogent way when it is through email. Get somebody in a face-to-face or phone meeting, and things go all hand-wavy way too fast.

Most of these are great if you can get away with them; of course it depends on how much authority you have to set the rules. (For example, I would love it if my workplace followed the "no all hands meetings" rule, but it ain't gonna happen in my lifetime, and I certainly can't make it happen.)
> If our meeting is scheduled for 10:00 and you're not there by 10:01, I lock the door. No meeting. If it's with several people, I will only meet with those on time.
I sympathize with the desire, but I have never worked in a workplace where everyone always had control of their time to the minute. If they do in your workplace, great, but I doubt this advice will generalize very well.

...and who wants to work with you , seriously ?
In real world its not you who always set the rules , otherwise you won't be commenting on this wishy site offering get-rich-quick advice, would you ?

No "all hands" meetings. Send us all an email.
Plenty of people ignore group emails, and there are times when there are things that all hands do need to know.

I am the worlds biggest flake when it comes to email.
If you send me a chat, I'm liable to just tap you on your shoulder and talk to you in person instead of chat back.

Are you the person who calls someone after a text message? Cause that's how you end up with a silent ring tone.

I don't use text messages much (typing on a phone is too low bandwidth); and about 25% of my work-related instant messages will turn into a phone conversation (at least 50% of those calls will add VNC to look at code). Both parties can talk with much lower latency and higher bandwidth than they can type.

It's about more than "I can save the most of my time by arbitrarily interrupting people because my talking is faster than my typing".

Ouch. How are you planning to fix that?

I cannot imagine accepting arbitrary inbound phone calls without scheduling, unless your whole task is being phone support.
A few years ago, I worked at company which somehow felt because my salary was a sunk cost, it was fine to have me do phone support for customers all day (as front line support too, since we didn't have a good triage system, although our customers were all pretty high end), while also nominally developing. There were fairly reliably several calls per day, ranging from 5 minute small issues to 2-3 hour serious problems.
Needless to say that in addition to being 10% as productive as usual, I left as soon as I could.

I don't, and it's something I try to teach people by example. I just don't accept inbound calls unless I feel in the mood for them. When I'm busy or tired, I just mute calls unless I really care about them (e.g. family & SO). When someone really wants something from me, they will text / mail me, and I will reply on my own schedule. I try to actively fight this idea that communication means random people triggering interrupts in your life.
I especially avoid answering random calls when I'm in a face-to-face conversation with someone; I used to date a girl that was glued to her phone (back before smartphones, or social media, were a thing), and I know how incredibly annoying it feels when your interlocutor keeps texting or receiving calls during a conversation. I find it very disrespectful.

It seems like he's mentioning Parkinson's law to a T! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law)
I have noticed the same thing, but being an Entrepreneur, I don't really find that I have his luxury.

This is awesome, if you work in that environment. I'd love to be able to work in a career where I could schedule my day instead of being thrown into indeterminable madness.

When I was an entrepreneur, the only thing I scheduled was meetings with investors (and potential investors) and meetings with customers (and potential customers.) When I went over to the investing side I had to change that: everything is scheduled (except the entrepreneurs whose companies I've invested in can call me on the phone any time they want.)
The difference is just volume. When my company was 40 people, whoever needed my attention could just walk up to my desk and talk to me, or I could walk over and talk to them. Now I get 50-60 inbound emails a week asking for a meeting. I'm not well-known like Brad Feld, I can only imagine how many he gets.
The question becomes quantity or quality? Do you have more, shorter meetings or fewer, longer meetings? Neither strategy is optimal. Brad wants more, shorter meetings (and has changed how he meets to accommodate that.) I went for fewer, longer meeting (because I invest in people and it takes me a little while to get a feel for a person.)
It's definitely a different world. There's no getting around that as an investor you're dependent on sorting through inbound and so you're necessarily somewhat reactive. As an entrepreneur, everything was proactive (because nothing happened unless we made it happen.) It seems backwards, but to be effective when you're reactive, you need more rigorous structure and process than you do when you're proactive. When you're proactive, you can make madness work.

Right. It'd be very interesting to learn how the author scheduled when he was an entrepreneur, not a VC.

This post is really surprising to me. I've always thought of Mr. Feld as the giving, caring mentor type -- the near-lone exception to the rule in VC land. I've even heard him speak twice (in Nowheresville, USA) and he was very polite when I shook his hand and introduced myself.
To hear him write in such a holier-than-thou manner... It doesn't compute. Yes, he's important. Yes, he is busy. But I think it's proper courtesy to assume people understand this fact when they come to meet. If they don't then you handle it on the fly and, what's more, you've learned something about that person's interpersonal judgement. Was this a pitch meeting that went awry? Well maybe you've learned not to invest with them.
Regardless, having people Google how to meet with you is absurd on a level that only someone in a yes-man bubble would think is an OK policy to have and then write a blog poat about it.

I agree with gist of the article, but the following passage is unclear and could use elaboration:
"Phone calls: I schedule almost all phone calls, except for ones with high priority people. This high priority ones interrupt whatever I’m doing or get done on a drive to and from the office."
Does this mean that if he does a phone call, he's usually the one who schedules it? And how does he determine who is a high/low priority person? Is his assistant a control point in this regard? Does he generally refuse inbound phone call invitations? Do people in his company know not to send him phone meeting requests?

I know people much less wealthy and busy than Feld, whose secretaries screen all their calls. Admin help isn't that expensive for someone like this. Presumably an assistant would have a list of potential interrupters...

As others pointed out he means he doesn't accept unplanned phone calls - all calls must be scheduled. Except with high priority people who interrupt everything.

Throughout my career I have met more than a few semi-professional meeting attenders. They are usually the worst type of people to be in a meeting with. And like a lot of people with stuff to do, I find most meetings a waste of time and generally avoid them.
However, I make an exception for meetings with especially interesting or sexy people. Those meetings can't go on long enough. Work (which is very important) takes second place to being in the company of very interesting people. What is life about anyway?

for project management:
* 15-30 minute ticket calls every day at 8am. very quick run-through of who is assigned what and are there any blockers? very occasionally this call will extend to 45 minutes because of some exceptional issue but usually is significantly less than 30 mins. 8am and 8pm pacific time are a global scheduling 'anchor' slots we use for us/europe and us/asia.
* long term projects get 30 minutes per week at the same time and day, usually monday or tuesday. as deadlines approach, we add thursday or fridays so twice a week.
* at the beginning of every meeting i state the agenda, usually broken into 3 phases: timeline review, action items review and preview, and Q&A.
* 'visionary' or 'general discussion' meetings take an hour or more and are planned as such. it's not uncommon for architects and executives to block out 2 hours for such discussions (we have a remote team).
for business development:
* never schedule anything on a monday or friday unless specifically requested for a good reason. these are 'catch up' days for sales and marketing people to get busy-work done or organize their data or send emails.
* lunch meetings are fine but it's not any more likely to result in anything positive. we usually use these only when we can't fit it in elsewhere and the person is local and the team wants to eat somewhere nice.
* sales review / strategy meetings can take 2-3 hours and we usually plan these at the very end of the day on Tue or Thurs when customer calls are finished. everyone goes home afterwards and there's at least one day left in the week to actually start executing.

I do think people tend to just default to "an hour" for meetings and it is really kind of crazy when many meetings are able to be resolved in a 5 minute chat and 30 minutes is usually sufficient for many things. So, I think this would be a good trend. However, all the stuff about googling to figure out how to meet with him .... I mean, OK, whatever.

I like the 30 minute rule, it is a good one. I would rather not have the meeting at all so I shoot for short 5 minute calls or emails over meetings. I ask people to email me the agenda about the meeting before I except. 95% of the time I can just respond with emails. Though I am a programmer not a VC, one day maybe :)

There is something terribly manic about this post. It seems like the present moment is never good enough for him. There must be something better to do somewhere else.
I was like this once. It ruined my marriage.

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