In this episode of the Startup CEO Show, host Mark MacLeod interviews Aidan Mirzaie, CEO of Fellow, about the pervasive "meeting problem" in organizations. Mirzaie explains that meetings become problematic when processes and recurring meetings persist long after their original purpose has faded, leading to unnecessary time waste. He highlights key hygiene practices—mandatory agendas, selective attendance, clear action items, and continuity from previous meetings—but notes that enforcing these habits at scale is difficult due to behavioral inertia. The conversation turns to Shopify’s strategy of periodically purging all recurring meetings across the company, a forced‑function approach that temporarily removes meetings, allowing teams to reassess which ones truly add value before reinstating them. Mirzaie praises this tactic as smart because it breaks entrenched habits and makes removal easier than addition. Fellow has built product features that support this behavior change, such as automatically cancelling meetings lacking an agenda and providing tools for companies to execute a company‑wide meeting purge. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to try these practices in their own organizations.
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We all hate meetings, yet we keep having them. We say time is our most precious resource, and yet anyone could book time on our calendar. Aidan Mirzaie is CEO of Fellow. He is setting out to solve the meeting problem, and he has his work cut out for him. In this video, he shares how Shopify periodically blows up meetings. This is fascinating and worth watching. Give it a shot in your company and let me know how it goes. I'm sure people universally feel that meetings suck. What is the meeting problem?
Yeah, so the meeting problem is multi-pronged, but I think the root of the meeting problem is that it's, people start to meet for a given reason. I think like the biggest aspect of the meeting problem is that a meeting is just a process, right? So when you think about a QBR or you think about a one-on-one meeting or you think about a staff All these things have a purpose. But what happens with companies that stay around for longer and longer periods of time is that there's all these processes that get created. And over the course of time, whether or not you need them in the same way changes, but people don't necessarily take those processes away. They don't morph their meetings, they don't remove them, and they don't rethink them. So I think this is a large part of the meeting problem. And there's a lot of just hygiene things. So if we start to talk about things that you need to do to run a great meeting, we can definitely do that. But the problem is things like obviously always have an agenda. Only people who are going to speak should show up to the meeting. There should be clear action items. You should know what you talked about last time. All these different things we can talk about, but it's really hard to do. So everybody knows these things. I don't think I'm going to say a single thing that would surprise people. But the hard part is to actually get everybody to do that and to do that en masse within your company because it's behavior change. And so that's what Fellow does. It makes a behavior change possible and simple so that everybody does it. In any company, there's going to be some people who run great meetings, but most of the people who don't. Fellow makes it easy for everybody to run great meetings. And so that's the way that we think about it.
I love it. As an aside, what did you think about Shopify blowing up recurring meetings in everyone's schedule?
Yeah, I think it's actually very, very smart. So little known fact that Shopify is a customer, has been a customer for 4 or 5 years now, and they have been doing this for a long time. So it's just that as they've become more and more I guess known by everybody. So now whenever they do something like this, everybody finds out. But yeah, no, all this to say is this is a practice that they've been doing for a very long time. And I think it's very smart because it's very hard to— it's very easy to add things and it's very hard to remove things. And I challenge any person to be able to say like, oh yeah, we're just going to remove this meeting. Someone in your team is going to say something like, Yeah, but we do get the side benefit from having this meeting, or at least we get to see everybody. We don't get to see everybody. And so, by having this meeting, we get to see everybody. Or, you know how hard it is? If you do anything for enough of a period of time, it becomes a habit. And we all know how hard it is to get rid of bad habits. Now, I'm not saying all meetings are bad habits, but some of them are. By making it okay and saying across an organization, we're going to have this period of time where all of our recurring meetings are going to get removed, then it becomes okay and it almost becomes a forced function. And then, after that 2-week period, you can decide which ones you want to add back. And I think that's a very smart thing. We do it at Fellow. As a matter of fact, it's so good that we actually have built this as a feature within Fellow so you can do this. You know, across your company. And we built all sorts of functions. Like if you, if there isn't an agenda to the meeting, it automatically cancels. So we're all about these, yeah, we're all about these little things that again, make the behavior change interesting or easy across the company.
Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you'd like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacleod.me or follow me on LinkedIn at The Mark MacLeod or Twitter @MarkMacLeod_. And if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time. Bye.
