Improving Meeting Hygiene with Chuck Phillips

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And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host Neal Bloom and I am thrilled to be joined by Chuck Phillips, co founder of Meatwell on the show today. Hey Chuck, thanks for being on.

Hey Neil, thanks for having me.

Chuck, we've gone back and forth in the ecosystem from probably more your limber days which we're really excited to talk a little about. But today we're going to learn about Meatwell, which is your newest startup you're working on. Can you give us a quick overview of what it is?

Yeah. Meatwell is an automated calendar assistant that is meant to prevent bad meetings from destroying your Workweek and your work life Balance is a low lift solution that plugs into your existing workflows. It works with those people that put meetings on your calendar to ensure that they're properly groomed and prepared and so that you can meet with intention. Workers were surveyed by Microsoft, actually, and they said that the respondents said 71% of their meetings were deemed to be worthless, which is pretty amazing. This isn't a unique problem. In 2019, $399 billion was spent on, quote, unquote, bad meetings. And no one's really trying to solve this, so we're, we're trying to solve this in a really low lift way. And Meatwell is the calendar assistant meant to do that.

Really cool, man. Meeting hygiene. We're going to train the world to have meeting hygiene. I love it. I don't think there's one listener on this podcast who can't relate to this.

So it's memetastic.

It is, it really is. But how'd you get here? I want to know. Obviously, you must have been through quite a lot of meetings to realize that you needed this. Where are you from? Where'd you grow up?

I grew up in central California, a place called Visalia, which is in between Bakersfield and Fresno. It's that place that you drive through on the way to somewhere and sorry, mom, if you're listening, I love Visalia. But yeah, not a lot of tech. More cows than people. And so I got my start in tech from a buddy of mine, high school friend, who I went and visited. He moved after high school to Boulder, Colorado. He was a professional skater and he realized getting hurt wasn't something that he could sustain. So he became a designer and a coder. And I visited in Boulder and he showed me what he was doing and I was smitten. The way he could express his creativity in code drew me in. And so I went home and bought a bunch of O'Reilly books and taught myself. And that's how I got my start in tech.

Oh, wow. So purely self taught. Both front end, back end kind of stuff or. What were you focused on?

Yeah, backend primarily. And I was on my way to getting a CSE degree. The intention was to graduate from UCSD in computer science, but I met a guy named Doug Hecht and started building out this agency and I ended up dropping out of school and all my learning happened like the real learning happened in the workplace and on my own.

Oh, that's pretty cool. Was Doug also at UCSD or. Where did you guys meet?

Doug was at ucsd. I don't remember how I met Doug. Oh, through one of our co founders, Ruby Wong, who then introduced me to Doug. And then that's how we kind of got started.

Okay, what time frame is this that UCSD and starting the agency?

1997. So it was a little while ago and that sounds like a long time ago. And it probably sounds like I'm really old, but actually I was zero years old. I was just at a newborn and so I'm very young. I want your listeners to know how young I am.

Oh yeah, no, they're doing the math.

I was a prodigy for sure.

Yeah.

Newborn prodigy. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good, good.

So I'm guessing that's, that's obviously how you got to San Diego. UCSD. What was the scene like in 97 for starting a new agency? Were there a lot, were there a lot of agencies or was it pretty easy for anyone who needed code? They were like desperate to kind of find you.

Yeah, there was just no one really doing hardly anything in the space, like especially in San Diego. And so San Diego Zoo and San Diego Padres and NBC's local affiliate and all of these various local entities that needed help developing dynamic applications that, you know, there were no frameworks back in the day. You know, we're building everything bespoke and everybody needed help and there was just not very much talent. And so it was very easy to get contracts to get projects in the agency. We were primarily, primarily focused on backend engineering and we did some really cool stuff with a really scrappy small team. But yeah, no, there was very little going on.

So did you build most of these companies, organizations websites? Is that the initial thing that you built out for them, their first presence on the web?

Yeah. The agency Doug and I started was called Console and we were focused on backend and we would be put in touch with for instance, NBC.com and they didn't have a strong partner. And so we ended up building an entire backend infrastructure and the front end and managing it for many, many, many years. And NBC.com was like very highly trafficked website and it was just, you know, we had less than 20 employees. It was pretty cool. It's a lot of fun.

Wow, that's rad. So what was the kind of the future of Consul? Was it all back end or where did you eventually take it?

We met a guy named Dan Cobby and a woman named Daiga Atvara and they ran an agency called Digitaria and Digitaria was at the time front end focused, design focused. And so we, we kind of saw an opportunity to get together and leverage our, our individual strengths and create a stronger offering. And so after we merged and kept the name Digitario, we, we grew like crazy and we did some really cool stuff, like Internet history stuff in some cases, like Kony 2012, we were involved in that which was fun and exciting and controversial.

Was that Chris Carver a part of that?

Yeah, yeah. Chris Carver was my client at the time.

Okay.

Invisible Children.

Is that how you met Chris?

Yeah, exactly. Right.

So Chris of lend now, but Invisible Children and Coney, I remember before.

Exactly. So they, they created at the time the most viral video in Internet history. And we YouTube live. YouTube hired us to build out their first live streaming platform and host their first live streaming event. And it was this kind of like entertainment variety show thingy, really interesting that was meant to promote YouTube celebrities. And we broke an Internet record for concurrency with our agency running it out of San Diego. It was really a lot of fun.

Wow.

So we worked on some really cool stuff. Telematics system for Nissan. We flew to Japan and we worked on the Nissan Leafs telematics system and we streamed professional surfing from the beach at Bell's beach in Australia and Fiji. Rolex and NFL. Lots of really interesting cool projects and clients. It's always diverse.

Must have learned a lot going through it as well though, because it sounds like this was also your first job potentially too, right out of school, at least first like tech job. So you also learned how to manage people, how to hire people, like on the fly, while you're also kind of learning how to scale up code.

Exactly.

So all hands on learning.

Absolutely. And it was just into the deep end from day one. It was a very small team and we grew from a really scrappy small team building out NBC.com to at the end when I left Digitaria, which eventually was acquired by WPP, huge marketing advertising conglomerate. I was responsible for 250 engineers, slash QA, various engineering positions in Mexico, Canada and the United States. So I learned a lot in those 18 years.

And so Digitaria gets acquired by WPP, you know, big team already in San Diego, but got to imagine there's a little bit of an itch to start something new. Maybe because I know what happened next. How did you go from an agency where you're building so many different things for different industries to then limber? Were you focused on the health and wellness space? What was the kind of founding story there?

Yeah, I always felt constrained by the agency. You're always dealing with constraints, not enough time not enough money, very marketing focused. And while we felt like we had really strong engineering practices and disciplines, we always felt like we weren't allowed to take it where it needed to be. It was just enough to pass muster. Things like non functional things like security, maintenance, scalability, these kind of non functional things weren't coming out of the marketing departments as requirements. They were coming from me and my team because they weren't valued by our as much. I should say to be fair, there were, there were some clients that did, but for the most part they weren't valued as much. There was kind of a cost of doing business for us and it cut into our margins, but we felt like it was important. But even having spent that time, I had an itch. I wanted to evolve something and make it better every single day, forever. And Doug had left the agency a year before me and he was doing a lot of investment stuff. He's a big name in San Diego. He had this idea, I'm not sure how it came about, but to sell drop in classes for wellness and fitness studios, to develop a dynamic pricing algorithm and sell these unsold classes at variable prices. And he took me to lunch and told me about it. I was like, I'm in, let's go put in my notice. And we built Limber and it was really awesome. It was maybe the funnest year of my career.

It also was like the quickest startup story I feel like as well. Yeah, within a year. Right. So it seemed like on the surface.

Yeah, it was quick. So we built this application powered by this algorithm and the algorithm was awesome. And even it's early state price things based on instructor popularity, class popularity, time of day, time of week, weather. It was really cool and our customers liked it. And we were making all of hundreds of dollars a month and we were approached by mindbody and they made us a very generous offer and we took it. And so before our even first year's taxes were due, we had, you know, contract in place to sell the company of Mindbody and. And after that I worked for mindbody for I think three years before I started, left and started Meatwell.

Okay. I still have my shirt and I got my blender bottle of Limber Limber Swag. So there was enough time to get that out into the market. So that's good.

Important priorities.

Yes, absolutely.

Yes. And thank you for continuing to wear them.

Of course. Of course you feel like an OG wearing it now because you know the company, what I remember the team over, you guys were over in Solano Beach Del Mar area, right?

Solana beach, yeah.

Did the team. No, the team. When you got acquired by mindbody, they started to grow an actual mindbody presence, a whole office in San Diego. Is that true?

Yep. Part of the reason why they love the idea of Limber was it was consumer focused and they didn't have a strong consumer focus previous to the acquisition. And so they said, hey, stick around and build our consumer team. And so Doug had that office and our team at limber was 10 people. And we grew from 10 people to when I left it was well over 100.

Oh wow. 100, 150 mindbody people in San Diego. That's awesome.

In San Diego, yeah. They're still working remote, but mostly in San Diego. Great people, terrific people. Whenever you get people focused on solving problems, especially wellness problems, they tend to attract really quality people.

Something interesting about Mindbody San Diego, fact wise is that it's one of TechOS Angels most successful investments, actually. Think TechOS Angels, the local group invested in the early 2000s, I think. Mindbody, are they a San Luis Obispo based company?

Yes.

Gotta be one of the biggest tech companies, one of the few in San Luis Obispo. Back to your central coast roots. Kind of a little bit closer to the coast. But yeah, it's kind of cool to come a little bit full circle because Doug, I think may have joined tech goes angels for a hot second somewhere around there is when he funded my company Portfolium and then for him to go build a company that then gets acquired by another portfolio company. I don't know, just kind of cool for the small world aspect of San Diego tech and investments. So life at mindbody, you said you were there for three years. Take us through a little bit about. They're not really a startup at that point. Were they already public when they acquired you or not yet?

Yes, they were already public.

Okay.

And when we first joined, the mandate was stay small, stay scrappy, stay fast, let us become like you and not you like us. But in practice, just kind of the. There's like this gravitational pull toward the big slow moving company. Right. And so it kind of evolved and I don't mean to beat up on Mind Body. It is, it's a, like I said, terrific people there. I had a very positive experience. I love the purpose driven work. Toward the end of my stay there, as the office became more slow moving, more corporate, I would have these moments of I'd come home like grumpy and I'd have these existential crisis, what am I doing? I have all these things on my list being checked off, like great compensation. I work with great people. I'm working on a product that has a purpose. But I'm, I'm unhappy. And what I realized I was missing was I wasn't able to master my craft. I wasn't learning new things because I was constantly in these meetings. Just my day was just chopped up and just distracted. All my work was distracted by these meetings. And it wasn't unique. To me in a leadership position is pretty much standard fare. And again, not to beat up on my modi, this is, this is par for the course in every medium to large sized company in the world. So I realized somebody needs to be solving this. It was shortly after we had this consultant, this high paid consultant come in, hired by the CEO because they realized they had this problem. So this guy comes in, he's like, you're doing this all wrong. You need to do these things. You need to change these behaviors. And then he left. And we changed those behaviors for a week or so and then we reverted to bad behaviors and it just didn't improve. And so I thought, why isn't anybody solving this? So I did some research and I realized there were attempts. But in my estimation, some of those attempts, they actually closed shop because they weren't able to affect change. But I realized there's a way to do this and there's a way to do this in a way that doesn't add to the workload of already busy people, but it can happen with tech. And so I had the idea to create Meatwell and I put in my notice and contacted a couple folks I knew whose talents complemented my own and we built it and it's awesome.

Yeah. So take us through what first build is like, because the way you say it, you put in your notice before you put pen to paper. In a sense, you had the idea, I'm guessing you didn't have to do too much customer development in a sense because you knew how much of a problem it was around you. But what did you actually do before building, like before you knew to take the leap on it?

Yeah, a couple of things that I did was I researched why other companies weren't successful in the space. There's a lot of attempts at solving this problem and again, it's, at least in the United States, a $399 billion a year problem, according to the research I've done. It's crazy how, you know, companies who are very focused on optimization just accept this problem as a cost of Doing business they've created for knowledge workers. We have so much autonomy that the upper management says, you know, deliver your okrs and then you figure out how you want to work. But we have these norms in these bad behaviors that we have accepted and they're making us miserable. What I did know from all of my research was that these things are making people unhappy. And that was even before the pandemic hit. I have had users and friends and family members say, hurry up. After the pandemic hit, things were exacerbated and they got even worse. And so, yeah, a lot of user feedback, a lot of research. One of the insights was we are not being very intentional with other people's times when we create meetings for whatever reason. But one of the reasons is that we're all very busy, too busy to do proper preparation and grooming. I'm too busy to prepare pre work, I'm too busy to do these kind of basic things. And so the outcome is a poorly run meeting. Our insight was focus on the preparation of the meeting first. Make sure that a meeting is properly groomed and prepared, and if so, the likelihood of holding a good meeting is better. And so rather than requiring a lot of input from our users, we're focusing on the accountability of the organizer. A meeting is a contract. The organizer is saying, I need these things from you in this meeting or even before the meeting. I need this pre work. And so I'm going to schedule this meeting and I promise to do my part to prepare a good meeting if you promise to attend and contribute and make that meeting good. But the preparation part is lacking and therefore the execution part lacks. And so Meatwell's focus is low lift. Put the emphasis on preparation, but have the organizer organize the organizer prepare and groom and do the due diligence. Because according to Microsoft, As I said, 71% of meetings that are held in the US are bad meetings. And so if we can reduce the number of meetings by 10%, we're happy. But our aim is 71%.

Wow, big goal. Is it just as much meetings internally within a company as externally, say business development, sales kind of stuff, or even just networking? Or is there a kind of a focus on where this is best used?

Yeah, our emphasis is on more like makers, where the work is getting done, so we're a little less concerned. Like the same best practices apply to sales and, you know, leadership, whatever, but the people really losing their minds are those that have work to get done there. They have autonomy, at least on paper, to figure out how they want to get that work done. Their superiors are focused on outcomes. So you get this work done by this time and blah, blah, blah, their day is swallowed up at the time after they make those commitments, their day swallowed, followed up with these meetings, these distractions. And so they end up working these weird second shifts which cut into their life. And that affects their wellness and their relationships and their mental health. And so there's not just a hit to the bottom line, there's an actual human cost. And we're seeing that it hits those makers, those creative people, those people that build product and have deadlines and have deliverables hits them the hardest.

Got it. Okay, so give us the status of kind of where Meatwell is at now.

Yeah, we just recently launched and we're just now focused on marketing Meatwell and thanks for inviting me here. This is part of that effort, getting the word out.

Happy to help.

And so we actually have been building it since late March of last year. So I quit my job and then shutdown happened and then so we had lots of time to focus on, on the build. And we had three companies, one local and if you're listening, thank you guys very much, you're a tremendous help. And small, medium and large. And then we had in total about 100 users. And so we would survey those users. We had regular correspondence with our users. We got a lot of good feedback. We knocked out some assumptions that were incorrect early on. The prep, the meeting prep phase of our roadmap is done and ready to go to market and that's where we are.

That's great. And so you've got a bit of a team all working remotely. Do you need to grow a bigger team or you kind of have the application built for the go to market for the time being.

For the time being? No, it's certainly on the roadmap for the future to grow the team. But those non functional requirements I alluded to at the agency, there's a huge focus. We've spent a lot of time, a lot of time on security and performance and scalability and so and testing it. So we're very confident that this will scale and we'll be able to make adjustments to this MVP release which is the prepare phase on the roadmap is improving the meeting that is being run and then also feedback loops, post meeting like follow up. Those are kind of the three phases and phases two and three are in the roadmap and I could see a, a time where we would need additional resources for the second and third phases.

Okay, got it. So Kind of a call to all listeners now who work in spaces where they're creating things, whether it's code, web pages, or even any other kind of tool or kind of builder. It sounds like this is an open call, maybe an early exclusive. Look for listeners to try out Meatwell in the MVP phases. Meatwell app that people can go to.

And you can send your feedback directly to me at Chuck.

Okay. Just in pure feedback, you're not asking for a meeting with anyone.

Please, no meetings. I've had enough.

Yeah, no, this is great. I think hopefully, maybe it takes hold first in San Diego. And San Diego is the most efficient city for good meeting hygiene. So let's do that.

How cool would that be? Let's do that.

Yeah, I'm down for that. All right. Call the arms. To everyone. Meeting hygiene step is important. So much so that we're going to make it a 2021 priority through Meatwell this year. Chuck, you've been in San Diego a while, since your UCSD days. You've had a taco or two.

I have.

We got to know, do you have a favorite? Can you pick one? Because if not, I'll give you a few. I'll give you. And there's no wrong answer as well.

Oh, Neil, I have had a lot of tacos in the time I've lived here. I think right now my favorite is TJ Tacos in Escondido. I'm way into the Suadero taco. And so they make a great Suadero taco. But Taco Nasso, if I'm cheating and crossing the border, Taco naso. And TJ is the best taco in the world I think I've ever had. So I'm sorry. San Diego, we're number two.

It's okay. It's a different column in our taco database. It's okay.

Okay, good. I can still count that. Okay.

You can have the American TJ Tacos. Be the. Be the US One.

Awesome.

And Taco NASA, be the Mexican one.

Perfect.

No, that's a great one. I love TJ Tacos, too. We are adding it to the taco database as we speak, getting it mapped out. But, Chuck, thanks so much for spending some time with us telling your story because I don't think a lot of people know, actually a lot of the deep story of digitaria and limber. And now Meatwell, three great companies built here locally. So thanks so much for your imprint you've had here in town. And now hopefully for good meeting hygiene.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Thanks Chuck.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music and this podcast is edited and mixed by Patrick Norton at citizenrecording.com you can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom and on LinkedIn.

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