Gregg Brett: Making Sense of Meetings

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>> Vince Thompson: Hi, welcome to Dog and Pony. I'm Vince Thompson. Studies show the average worker wastes as much as 7 hours a week in unproductive meetings. That means time is usually wasted out of a lack of structure, lots of information and this mismanaged responsibilities. Gregg Brett is the CEO of MeetingSense, a company focused on increasing meeting productivity. Gregg, why do meeting suck so bad?

>> Gregg Brett: You have a number of different silo phonetic applications these days, things like documented content repositories, countering and scheduling tools, blunt tools like Word documents, spreadsheets, and God forbid the yellow legal pad. All of these silo applications are used in conjunction along with web collaboration tools to manage meetings and meeting information. And it becomes a cycle of trying to manage these multiple information silos along with your meeting life cycle in a very unproductive way.

>> Vince Thompson: Tell us about how MeetingSense works.

>> Gregg Brett: Everyone lives, breathes and works in Outlook everyday, emails, countering and scheduling. We don't want to interrupt that flow. So we integrate and allow you to launch all the components of MeetingSense directly from Outlook. There are 3 components to that Outlook add-in component. First is we enhanced the calendaring and scheduling and component of Outlook by allowing you to actually push goals, agenda, the audio and web conversing information automatically into the Outlook invite and then track any changes or updates to that so when you start a meeting, all the participants have all that information exactly as its been updated most recently. Then, we have a capture console. Think of this as a single location with a series of pods that allows you to capture every piece of information shared during a meeting, whether it's notes, document collaboration, digital audio recordings, key points and decisions or action items, we capture that all in a single user interface.

>> Vince Thompson: What are some of the benefits that people have seen by participating with MeetingSense?

>> Gregg Brett: We've seen a reduction in the amount of hours they spend managing meeting information up to 7 hours per week per user. So think about being able to get back almost a day a week, almost 2 months a year just by using this tool. Let's say venture in your office. I run to your office and I say to you, "Vince, I've got 30 seconds to get to management with the information, detailed information from that meeting we had 6 months ago. Can you get me in 30 seconds the following? One, the originals of the documents we collaborated on. I know we're on version 20, but I need the originals. Two, I want a summary of all the information that we discussed. Don't send me the 10 pages of notes we took. I want 3 key points. Three, I want all the action items and their current status. I know we assigned 30, but I need them now. Can you give that to me in 30 seconds?" Probably not. Your answer is probably gonna be, "Well, let me look in email, let me look in my SharePoint repository, let me look at some online drives, let me look at my C drive." You're probably 10 places that you can look including calling 5 or 6 people on the phone to find out the status of action items.

>> Vince Thompson: Yeah. Quick. Who can I blame?

>> Gregg Brett: Exactly. With MeetingSense, all you do is you go to your online dashboard, click on the meeting section of the dashboard and in 2 seconds, you can sort by month and day or you can actually search by search terms the topic. For instance let's say we discussed budget planning, you type in budget planning, and MeetingSense will pull up all the meeting records and the action items with links to those records and action items. So in literally 2 seconds, you'd have all that information at your fingertips that you could get to me.

>> Vince Thompson: So this company, you started this with your brother?

>> Gregg Brett: I did. You know, I came from an IBM background. I was an executive at IBM, and I was exposed to the world of Lotus Domino server, Lotus Workplace and somehow they were trying to move towards that unified communications collaboration world. At the same time, my brother and cofounder was working at Macromedia as an executive, and he was involved in the web collaboration world. Well, both of us realized that there was a missing piece, a huge missing gap in all of these collaboration tools and that is how do you manage meeting information? It's great that live meeting, WebEx and GoToMeeting can allow me to have a collaborative meeting online. But what happens when you turn off the switch on those applications, where does the meeting information go? How do you track the life cycle of action items? None of those applications address that problem, and it's a huge paying point. If you can't track and manage effectively meeting information and action items, why have the meeting in the first place?

>> Vince Thompson: You're a lawyer, you're a biz dev guy, you worked at IBM, now, you're an entrepreneur, you're running a company, what was the transition like?

>> Gregg Brett: It's an intense transition. Starting your own company, raising funds is an intense activity, but the nice thing about it is we're passionate about what we're doing, we see that it's a paying point, we see that people need this solution, and we don't see the big boys actually playing in this niche, in this space. So, I would say as intense as starting a company is, it's twice as exciting knowing that you're filling a gap, you're doing it effectively, and we're making progress. You know the fact that now we have over 600 companies using our product is really exciting to us.

>> Vince Thompson: Gregg Brett, CEO of MeetingSense. Thanks so much for joining us today. And as always, if you have questions, comments, or ideas for guests, please email us. You can do so, info at dogandpony.com. I'm Vince Thompson. Thanks for watching.