
That Didn’t Need to Take an Hour - mooreds
http://www.feld.com/archives/2015/01/didnt-need-take-hour.html
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AndrewKemendo
A common thread:

 _When someone starts this way, I break in and say as politely as I can,
“What’s on your mind?”_

From the Comments:

 _Question: do you in any way prepare people before they meet with you for the
first time, with guidelines for how you like meetings to go?_

Answer: _It varies. I used to send out a "how to meet with me" note but
there's now so much on the web that it should be easy for the person to
prepare by just doing a quick search on Brad Feld Meeting"_

This is pretty haughty and I see this type of junk a lot with the VC/Angel
investors out there. They are implicitly saying, "clearly my time it too
valuable to waste it with courtesy or respect." Yes, I see that he said "as
politely as I can" however the whole idea that I need to google how to meet
with someone ahead of time is insane. These people aren't holy figures.

Maybe a better option is to not schedule time with people that you don't plan
on being courteous to.

~~~
petercooper
I dunno, I think Postel's law ( _" Be conservative in what you do, be liberal
in what you accept from others."_) is about as relevant to interpersonal
relationships as software design.

Maybe it's the Brit in me speaking, but I think it's fair to recognize and
accept when someone is higher up the totem pole than you and to handle the
etiquette properly, even if they're being brusque. A personalized "how to meet
with me" rider sounds pretty ridiculous to me, but having an idea of the
etiquette around _how to meet with an investor_ in general sounds reasonable.

~~~
prawn
"How to meet with me" could be less pretentious phrased as something like "the
meeting style I try to aim for". It's more "let's try to do it like this" and
less "here's how you have to act with me", IMO.

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edw519
_I’m always experimenting with new things. What do you do to keep meetings
manageable and sane?_

1\. No phone calls. Use email. I'll respond when I can, almost always the same
or next day.

2\. No texts. Use email. See #1.

3\. No status meetings. Email me your status report. I'll email you mine.
Column titles should include: Item#, Project#, Title, Beneficiary,
Responsible, Phase, Promise Date, Status, Disposition, Questions.

4\. No "standing meetings". If you need regular (as in weekly) meetings, just
send me an email with status, problems, questions, etc. the same time every
week. I will answer you. My answer may include a meeting request.

5\. No "all hands" meetings. Send us all an email.

6\. Schedule any meetings that really require 1 hour over lunch. I hate to eat
alone. Two birds, one stone.

7\. 15 minutes is a waste of time to stop, meet, restart.

8\. 30 minutes is usually good. (OP was right)

9\. Meet in my office. I'm too busy to travel.

10\. If our meeting is scheduled for 10:00 and you're not there by 10:01, I
lock the door. No meeting. If it's with several people, I will only meet with
those on time.

11\. Every meeting requires some form of written agenda, with appropriate
content and length, that must be emailed ahead of time. Agenda topics: Date,
Time, Length, Required Attendees, Business Problem, Topics to Cover, Expected
Result, Expected Next Steps (if possible). There is no such thing as "Optional
Attendees". There is no such thing as a meeting to determine the agenda for
the meeting.

12\. Your best bet: my regular happy hours double as "open office hours",
usually from 5 to 7: Tuesday: Bar Louie, Wednesday, B.J.s, Thursday, Tony
Romo's. These "meetings" have always been the best.

~~~
elliottpayne
I am the worlds biggest flake when it comes to email.

If you send me a chat, I'm liable to just tap you on your shoulder and talk to
you in person instead of chat back.

~~~
post_break
Are you the person who calls someone after a text message? Cause that's how
you end up with a silent ring tone.

~~~
cpwright
I don't use text messages much (typing on a phone is too low bandwidth); and
about 25% of my work-related instant messages will turn into a phone
conversation (at least 50% of those calls will add VNC to look at code). Both
parties can talk with much lower latency and higher bandwidth than they can
type.

~~~
vehementi
It's about more than "I can save the most of my time by arbitrarily
interrupting people because my talking is faster than my typing".

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rdl
I cannot imagine accepting arbitrary inbound phone calls without scheduling,
unless your whole task is being phone support.

A few years ago, I worked at company which somehow felt because my salary was
a sunk cost, it was fine to have me do phone support for customers all day (as
front line support too, since we didn't have a good triage system, although
our customers were all pretty high end), while also nominally developing.
There were fairly reliably several calls per day, ranging from 5 minute small
issues to 2-3 hour serious problems.

Needless to say that in addition to being 10% as productive as usual, I left
as soon as I could.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I don't, and it's something I try to teach people by example. I just don't
accept inbound calls unless I feel in the mood for them. When I'm busy or
tired, I just mute calls unless I really care about them (e.g. family & SO).
When someone really wants something from me, they will text / mail me, and I
will reply on my own schedule. I try to actively fight this idea that
communication means random people triggering interrupts in your life.

I especially avoid answering random calls when I'm in a face-to-face
conversation with someone; I used to date a girl that was glued to her phone
(back before smartphones, or social media, were a thing), and I know how
incredibly annoying it feels when your interlocutor keeps texting or receiving
calls during a conversation. I find it very disrespectful.

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TheBiv
It seems like he's mentioning Parkinson's law to a T!
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law))

I have noticed the same thing, but being an Entrepreneur, I don't really find
that I have his luxury.

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odonnellryan
This is awesome, if you work in that environment. I'd love to be able to work
in a career where I could schedule my day instead of being thrown into
indeterminable madness.

~~~
ganeumann
When I was an entrepreneur, the only thing I scheduled was meetings with
investors (and potential investors) and meetings with customers (and potential
customers.) When I went over to the investing side I had to change that:
everything is scheduled (except the entrepreneurs whose companies I've
invested in can call me on the phone any time they want.)

The difference is just volume. When my company was 40 people, whoever needed
my attention could just walk up to my desk and talk to me, or I could walk
over and talk to them. Now I get 50-60 inbound emails a week asking for a
meeting. I'm not well-known like Brad Feld, I can only imagine how many he
gets.

The question becomes quantity or quality? Do you have more, shorter meetings
or fewer, longer meetings? Neither strategy is optimal. Brad wants more,
shorter meetings (and has changed how he meets to accommodate that.) I went
for fewer, longer meeting (because I invest in people and it takes me a little
while to get a feel for a person.)

It's definitely a different world. There's no getting around that as an
investor you're dependent on sorting through inbound and so you're necessarily
somewhat reactive. As an entrepreneur, everything was proactive (because
nothing happened unless we made it happen.) It seems backwards, but to be
effective when you're reactive, you need more rigorous structure and process
than you do when you're proactive. When you're proactive, you can make madness
work.

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fivedogit
This post is really surprising to me. I've always thought of Mr. Feld as the
giving, caring mentor type -- the near-lone exception to the rule in VC land.
I've even heard him speak twice (in Nowheresville, USA) and he was very polite
when I shook his hand and introduced myself.

To hear him write in such a holier-than-thou manner... It doesn't compute.
Yes, he's important. Yes, he is busy. But I think it's proper courtesy to
assume people understand this fact when they come to meet. If they don't then
you handle it on the fly and, what's more, you've learned something about that
person's interpersonal judgement. Was this a pitch meeting that went awry?
Well maybe you've learned not to invest with them.

Regardless, having people Google how to meet with you is absurd on a level
that only someone in a yes-man bubble would think is an OK policy to have and
then _write a blog poat about it_.

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leroy_masochist
I agree with gist of the article, but the following passage is unclear and
could use elaboration:

"Phone calls: I schedule almost all phone calls, except for ones with high
priority people. This high priority ones interrupt whatever I’m doing or get
done on a drive to and from the office."

Does this mean that if he does a phone call, he's usually the one who
schedules it? And how does he determine who is a high/low priority person? Is
his assistant a control point in this regard? Does he generally refuse inbound
phone call invitations? Do people in his company know not to send him phone
meeting requests?

~~~
jessaustin
I know people much less wealthy and busy than Feld, whose secretaries screen
all their calls. Admin help isn't that expensive for someone like this.
Presumably an assistant would have a list of potential interrupters...

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jqm
Throughout my career I have met more than a few semi-professional meeting
attenders. They are usually the worst type of people to be in a meeting with.
And like a lot of people with stuff to do, I find most meetings a waste of
time and generally avoid them.

However, I make an exception for meetings with especially interesting or sexy
people. Those meetings can't go on long enough. Work (which is very important)
takes second place to being in the company of very interesting people. What is
life about anyway?

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beachstartup
for project management:

* 15-30 minute ticket calls every day at 8am. very quick run-through of who is assigned what and are there any blockers? very occasionally this call will extend to 45 minutes because of some exceptional issue but usually is significantly less than 30 mins. 8am and 8pm pacific time are a global scheduling 'anchor' slots we use for us/europe and us/asia.

* long term projects get 30 minutes per week at the same time and day, usually monday or tuesday. as deadlines approach, we add thursday or fridays so twice a week.

* at the beginning of every meeting i state the agenda, usually broken into 3 phases: timeline review, action items review and preview, and Q&A.

* 'visionary' or 'general discussion' meetings take an hour or more and are planned as such. it's not uncommon for architects and executives to block out 2 hours for such discussions (we have a remote team).

for business development:

* never schedule anything on a monday or friday unless specifically requested for a good reason. these are 'catch up' days for sales and marketing people to get busy-work done or organize their data or send emails.

* lunch meetings are fine but it's not any more likely to result in anything positive. we usually use these only when we can't fit it in elsewhere and the person is local and the team wants to eat somewhere nice.

* sales review / strategy meetings can take 2-3 hours and we usually plan these at the very end of the day on Tue or Thurs when customer calls are finished. everyone goes home afterwards and there's at least one day left in the week to actually start executing.

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dinkumthinkum
I do think people tend to just default to "an hour" for meetings and it is
really kind of crazy when many meetings are able to be resolved in a 5 minute
chat and 30 minutes is usually sufficient for many things. So, I think this
would be a good trend. However, all the stuff about googling to figure out how
to meet with him .... I mean, OK, whatever.

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jtwebman
I like the 30 minute rule, it is a good one. I would rather not have the
meeting at all so I shoot for short 5 minute calls or emails over meetings. I
ask people to email me the agenda about the meeting before I except. 95% of
the time I can just respond with emails. Though I am a programmer not a VC,
one day maybe :)

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playlist
There is something terribly manic about this post. It seems like the present
moment is never good enough for him. There must be something better to do
somewhere else.

I was like this once. It ruined my marriage.

