Most of us have sat through work meetings that seem pointless and drag on forever, stealing valuable time for other tasks.
These time sucks also represent one of the biggest costs for business, says entrepreneur Ed van Roosendaal, whose AI-powered platform Project Manda aims to clamp down on the problem.
“Anybody that’s worked in corporate before can just relate to that frustration when you walk out of a meeting and it’s a waste of time,” says van Roosendaal, Project Manda CEO and co-founder.
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“There’s no mechanism to solve that, no feedback loops, and no way to upskill people to run better meetings.
“If you look at the amount of time people are spending in meetings, it’s about a quarter of people’s time and it’s a huge untracked expense.”
Van Roosendaal and co-founder Ash Farrugia this week revealed they have raised over $2 million in pre-seed funding for Project Manda, designed to cut wasted time in meetings and boost work productivity.
The round was led by Tech Labs Capital and Black Sheep Capital, with participation from investors including Paul Limbrey, vice president of global agencies and partners at Google, and Melbourne-based investors Peter Yunghanns and David Williams.
Tackling the “big problem” of meetings
Van Roosendaal and Farrugia are no strangers to developing technology-driven solutions, with van Roosendaal co-founding real estate review platform RateMyAgent, and Farrugia co-founding email marketing automation platform ActivePipe.
Their new enterprise, Project Manda, analysed data from 15 million meetings across over 200 organisations. To date, they say it has cut unnecessary meetings and meeting time by 10-15% without compromising outcomes, equating to $8 to $12 million in savings.
The meetings that do proceed are more productive, thanks to AI-driven coaching, feedback on agendas, and follow-ups that can be integrated into platforms like Teams and Slack.
The cost of unproductive meetings is staggering, says van Roosendaal, typically accounting for an $80 million annual investment in a 2000-person organisation.
“It’s amazing — for all the businesses I’ve spoken to, very few have any internal process for what their meeting culture is, how to educate people to have better meetings, and the expectations of meeting organisers,” he says.
“It’s a big problem.”
Domain, one of Project Manda’s largest clients, staged about 160,000 meetings last year, accounting for 14% of annual operating expenses.
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According to Domain’s chief data officer Pooyan Asgari, the Project Manda platform has freed up $600,000 worth of people’s time out of meetings, with the impact tipped to grow tenfold as it’s rolled out.
Putting a dollar amount on every meeting can help shed light on unnecessary meetings and where improvements can be made.
“It’s just crazy in this day and age of capital efficiency, where if you wanted to buy a MacBook for somebody in your team, you probably need the CFO to sign off on it, but I can go and organise a $5,000 meeting with no accountability, no preparation, and basically burn everyone’s time,” van Roosendaal says.
In one company Project Manda assessed, an employee organised $400,000 worth of meetings annually, without executives knowing.
“I was catching up with the exec team, and they all look at each other and go: ‘Who is this guy?’ None of them knew who he was, yet he’s basically spending $400,000 worth of people’s time each year. Getting visibility on that is just crucial and nobody’s been able to do it so far, so it’s a massive step forward for productivity, we think.”
With Project Manda exceeding its initial $1 million fundraising target, the team is now focusing on cracking the US as well as Australia.
“There are so many 50,000-plus organisations there — it’s a massive opportunity if we can get that right.”
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