Board meetings are the DMV of business. But actor and entrepreneur Edward Norton is convinced that they don't have to be terrible — and that’s what he and his co-founders are working towards with startup Zeck.
"I think you could say at minimum we're stripping away a lot of that drudgery that makes everybody want to punch themselves in the face when you're anticipating and even going through board meetings," said Norton.
Zeck, founded in 2022, develops board presentation software for companies and nonprofits. It’s a cloud-based platform that’s modernizing board decks to be more effective, efficient, and, well, less terrible. Or, as the startup’s marketing puts it, #DeathToTheBoardDeck.
The basic idea: Instead of hundreds of pages of corporate drivel and meeting minutes, Zeck allows users to create interactive websites highlighting important information, while putting routine discussions, like granting employee stock options, to vote before the meeting.
Add in a mobile-friendly interface and collaborative options like digital signing, and "by the time you all get [to the meeting], you're having a conversation about the forward agenda," said Norton.
Most companies are looking to create a product you love and, sure, Zeck’s trying to do that too. But they’re doing it by drop-kicking something you hate.
The startup hasn’t raised outside capital yet, though private equity investor James Zubok — formerly of Vista Equity Partners — is a founding partner. Its other co-founders, Robert and Jeffrey Wolfe, previously started outdoor retailer Moosejaw, which they sold in 2017 for $51 million to Walmart (WMT).
Norton and the Wolfe brothers worked together co-founding early crowdfunding platform CrowdRise in 2010. And that’s when the three ran into board meetings, lots of them.
“It was the most miserable and stressful part of the business,” said Robert Wolfe. “So, we went looking for solutions and thought to ourselves, 'Can we play this script?' We'd be getting into a space that's monumentally miserable and try to — I can't quite say make it fun — improve the board meeting."
The playbook the group developed for CrowdRise, which was acquired by GoFundMe in 2017, informs their work at Zeck. One of the key lessons from CrowdRise — there’s no substitute for a good network effect.
"I think it's just impossible to run a business where you’re paying this giant cost for every customer," said Wolfe. "If there's no network effect, no repeat rate, it's just so hard."
For a crowdfunding campaign to be successful, fundraisers need to spread the word to their friends. Similarly, Zeck's founders hope their users, who often sit on multiple boards, will convince other companies to try the software if they like the experience. Which they naturally do, because they've probably never liked a board meeting before.
The bar is low, but entrenched habits are hard to break and inertia is the driving force of the universe.
So, you end up handing out hundreds of pages of PDFs that no one reads and you’re talking for hours about agenda items that could have been resolved with a simple up-down vote.
“And you sit there going, ‘This is a disaster, we’re not getting anything done,’” said Norton. “And we really thought, well, we can crush that down.”
Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @agarfinks and on LinkedIn.
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