Jason Shah is founder & CEO of DO.com that helps netizens run productive meetings. The application provides a private cloud for each meeting – the files, realtime and collaborative notes, private notes, followups, outcomes, and more all live in one ultimate, reliable, secure place.
One can set an agenda to let others know what the meeting is all about. Meetings can be related to one another in order to increase continuity in work. It also allows you to search meetings, have the notes automatically sent out when meetings end.
On mobile, user can quickly email other participants, schedule a followup, or jot down important notes connected to the meeting.
I welcome you Jason at SANGKRIT.net, please tell our netizens about yourself, your story? My story is a long and complicated one! But the story of Do began when I was working at my previous company, Yammer. There we built a collaboration product meant to improve communication at work. Ironically, after Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012, our own communication and culture at work began to degrade as part of a much larger organization. I grew frustrated with this, including all of the unproductive meetings we were having. This seemed like a common problem everyone faces at work: endless meetings that don’t produce results. This got the ball rolling, and 2 years later, we have had more than 1.5m people participate in hundreds of thousands of meetings across tens of thousands of companies – saving time and energy through using Do for their meetings.
How exactly your idea sparked? I was sitting in a terrible meeting at work. I didn’t think the organizer knew what they were doing. I glanced around the room and saw a dozen long faces, wondering why they were here or dashing off emails to people in the next conference room. It just dawned on me then that things didn’t have to be this way, and I haven’t looked back since then.
How you disrupt? We are a company focused explicitly on meetings – not your tasks or calendars – meetings.
How many people got associated for working together? We are a team of 7 based in San Francisco.
How it works? How someone can make use of it online? You sign up with Google, Office 365, or your work email. Do automatically pulls in all your existing calendar events into a beautiful, endless scrolling timeline with all your past and upcoming meetings. Every morning, you also get a daily email outlining all your upcoming meetings for the day. Before a meeting starts, you can set and share an agenda with your coworkers, so they know exactly what will be discussed beforehand, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
When the meeting begins, all the participants can take collaborative real-time notes on the meeting page. They can mark follow ups and outcomes, assign tasks by @ mentioning people, upload files, and more. The file canvas prevents you from having to scramble through files or old e-mails looking for presentations, documents, and spreadsheets.
When the meeting concludes, the tap of a button sends out the meeting summary to all the meeting attendees via email. You can also export the minutes to Evernote, Slack, or other note-taking apps such as Google Docs and OneNote using Zapier. You can track all your past takeaways and outcomes in the hub, which is an archive of all your past meetings.
Followups can be pushed to task management and to-do apps such as Wunderlist, Asana, and Trello, using our Zapier integration. Moreover, you can set recurring agendas (or pin agenda items to all future meetings), copy agenda items and notes over to future meetings, and more.
What philosophy drives you doing this? Our philosophy is that people should love work. It’s the #1 activity we all do, taking up the most time in our day, yet many people do not even like work. We want to change that. We believe if people like work, then they can have a much greater impact on the world and be happier in the process. Meetings are a key negative part of the work day, and we are improving them.
What is your ultimate message for netizens? Work is how things get done and progress is made, but people don’t like work. Think about it. People don’t enjoy the process by which they can make their mark on the world. We don’t accept that.
We want to make people love work. That means understanding what is bad about work, and building a company that reimagines each building block.
We’re starting with meetings. Meetings take up so much time at work and tend to be inefficient and miserable. We don’t accept that. Meetings can be a productive, enjoyable time when people with a shared mission in an organization come together and execute on a shared vision. It is is possible, and sometimes it happens. And it’s when people get together and work together. We want to make a million stories like that happen, every day.
But meetings – the main way people get together in the workplace – as we all know, usually are not like this. We are going to change that. We envision meetings where people get things done, feel engaged, and walk out excited about the work that they do. We want to build that and help expand the positive output of the work everyone around us is doing.
shardulpandey@sangkrit.org