Bringing a silicon valley mindset to facilitation, Arjun is building a new platform for meetings, to help managers bridge the facilitation skills gap they currently face.

In this episode, you will discover:

• What meeting analytics are useful and technically possible
• What innovations are happening in the video and collaboration space
• The facilitation skills gap many newly remote managers face
• Why changing the technology used for meetings can also improve participant habits and behavior

About Arjun Sundararajan 

Arjun is the co-founder of Zync.ai, a smart videoconferencing solution hoping to revolutionize remote meetings for greater delight and collaboration. Reimagining collaboration beyond the grid of faces. Worked with several trainers / educational institutions (HBS / MBS) on leveraging technology to build effective communication in teams. Cofounded Ambit.ai – a voice tech startup understand how people communicate and how teams collaborate by leveraging voice tech. Previously, he spent many years at Microsoft.  

• Arjun on LinkedIn
• Zync

Transcript

[00:00:00.085] 
Analytics is one piece of this puzzle. It’s almost like you do this over a period of time and you collect enough data to be able to improve this very simple things like who’s doing the most of the talking, who’s not getting a chance to say anything in a meeting or it doesn’t contribute. It’s like a very simple metric, just easy to collect. But looking at it over a period of time will make things very obvious. What does it say about a leader who spends about 70 percent of the time and is meeting him or her being the only person who’s talking in the meeting?

[00:00:32.035] 
What does that say about a person who actually speaks 30 percent of the time but lets team contribute 90 percent of the time? Just the data alone tells a very different story about your leadership style, how your team comes together to collaborate.

[00:00:50.985] 
You are listening to the online remotely podcast, the show dedicated to helping lead distributor teams under difficult circumstances. I’m the host Look Sharp and I’ve participated in a run distributed teams for almost a decade. As a practitioner, I’m speaking with experts on leadership, strategic alignment and work to help you navigate the issues start facing after you get. Welcome, welcome. This is Luke again with the Line Remotely podcast. Today we are speaking with Arjun. Sundararajan invited Arjun onto the show because he is a deep tech founder who’s innovating in the online meeting space of all places.

[00:01:36.625] 
And in particular, I was curious exactly how he is applying the kind of Silicon Valley mindset of building and designing solutions for what’s going on to online meetings within companies. So in this episode, we’ll cover what meeting analytics are useful and also technically feasible. What types of innovations are happening right now in the video? In the collaboration space, we’ll talk about the facilitation skills gap many newly remote managers face, whether they’re aware of it or not, how technology can be used in that context, why changing the technology used for meetings can also improve participant habits and behavior.

[00:02:20.335] 
So without further ado, let’s get on with the show, Arjun.

[00:02:24.985] 
Welcome to the podcast. Could you say a few words about who you are and what you do?

[00:02:30.325] 
Sure. Name is Arjun, an engineer by training. Spent the last 14 years in tech, the first eight years of which was then like Microsoft, they’re working big teams, shipping location based services related products, the Bing maps and everything. And then I moved to San Francisco. And about four years back or so, I started this company called Ambered with the big vision of understanding how people communicate and how teams collaborate by using waste technology and understanding that the tone of their lives, the sentiment of what is being spent about two or three years trying to bring a product market fit to that space ended up winding down the product last year and since then took a break.

[00:03:14.755] 
And now starting my next venture called Think This is virtual collaboration platform for specialized meetings, that the big vision here is to is still on making collaboration easy. But the idea is to make meeting facilitation as much automated as possible.

[00:03:33.775] 
OK, in terms of meetings and facilitation, what do you think the current state of play is? Or about a year?

[00:03:40.525] 
And at the time of recording to the pandemic, there’s been a huge influx of people onto everything online and meeting related.

[00:03:50.395] 
What are your thoughts at the moment?

[00:03:52.585] 
Yeah, for sure. The big trend, as almost everybody would have observed, is that what will meetings are here to stay in the sense that there is quite a bit of. Teams and companies that would go back to the actual office spaces, but the movement of remote teams and remote only companies has been tremendous in the last year, and that trend is only going to increase. So an observation, which probably most people find it very obvious, is that the number of people who are going to be completely virtual, like their teams are not going to be co-located, is going to be on an increase.

[00:04:33.275] 
And that opens up like a tremendous set of opportunities as well as challenges in the space. And this is not a new trend. It was a minority earlier and a growing minority, and now it’s becoming mainstream. And so which means that previously companies that were trying to target this market didn’t think that this was a big enough market are now going to be able to take this much more seriously and the solutions are going to start coming for the space. Another observation is that the current crop of videoconferencing solutions have all been built at a time when most meetings were in-person.

[00:05:10.565] 
And then there was this one person who just promoting somewhere or a few people who are remote and it’s just merging these people from an audio and a video level. But if you start to think about that, if everybody is going to be virtual and they’re all going to see each other through this medium, it opens up again, like a lot more possibilities of what you can do with this interface, like a rich interface that you have between people. And I’m excited for the opportunities and the space and playing in that space right now.

[00:05:40.595] 
As soon as someone is not in the office or in a remote location, it automatically changes the dynamic. How do you get people to feel more connected? Using technology. Yeah, I think this was a trend that was starting to become more and more obvious for people even before the pandemic, when you have multiple people in a meeting, having just one or two people remote automatically make them feel a bit disconnected from the space because you have this really high fidelity experience that’s going on between the people.

[00:06:17.825] 
And then there’s a couple of other people who are remote and sort of best practices for teams that actually want to make virtual meetings. Work was to have everybody be remote in the sense that even if you are in a meeting in the same building, you actually joined the meeting through your laptops so that you make everybody feel somewhat included and equal in that space. And I think that’s that’s more like best practices. The idea of feeling connected is something that is just beyond like a regular meeting.

[00:06:48.045] 
Right. The thing that people worry about a lot is, hey, what happens to the casual watercooler discussion or the casual bumping into each other when you are in the hallways and having the conversations? How can you solve for those issues or how do you think those things matter? And if it does matter, like what? How are things being solved? And there’s quite a few solutions being thought out in that space. And I don’t know exactly the winner here or whether how much each of these are helping.

[00:07:16.655] 
The results will be apparent in a few months or years or so. But some solutions that exist right now include explicit meetings that are meant for people to connect, like casual pairing of two people for you to have a 10 minute conversation, brokers that system and put two people together to have a conversation or more of the ups where the tandem of the world are quite a few solutions. And that that space where you almost have a virtual office, where you move about like a real world, I feel that to be a little bit artificial.

[00:07:52.115] 
But those kind of virtual offices are taking off and people feel good to actually walk around the room, hear other people’s facial audio in terms of like when you move around, you can hear what other people are talking and then just being able to jump into conversations. Those systems are starting to come up and becoming interesting as well.

[00:08:09.335] 
Hmm. So what about the issue of control and collaborations? What features have you seen where it’s possible to not make it just like a webinar system where there’s one presenter and everybody just has to listen?

[00:08:22.805] 
Yeah, all meetings are not the same and there are very distinct purposes to each type of meeting. And even in a single meeting, there could be multiple purpose. But to understand what purpose you want to achieve through like a meeting and like using the right tools or right interface to enable that would make a lot of difference. An example could be that if you are coming together for casual conversation where you are just trying to connect with somebody, the way that you actually designed the interface could be very different from the other five people coming to make a call on decision making meeting that you have to, at the end of it, decide something needs to happen.

[00:09:06.515] 
The way that you design that meeting can be very different. And when I say design everything from how each person’s video is presented to what is we are sitting in front of a computer, which we are mostly using as like listening and a video medium, but it really can be used as an interactive, collaborative space that you can throw in a whiteboard or you can throw in like more interactive activities that inside your space for you to be able to use that to drive into decisions.

[00:09:35.455] 
So if I’m making a decision making meeting like a board where we’re putting stickies make more sense, whereas if I’m doing a casual conversation like these nice pop activities, that puts like a casual game for me to connect with each other makes a lot more sense. And so the video conferencing solutions are these platforms can evolve, knowing what purpose you want to do.

[00:09:56.585] 
A recurring theme, especially amongst facilitators. Half a year ago or so, it was just that the existing technology solutions don’t really allow for collaboration, that they’re essentially still mirroring top down type structures in a company, or at least one to many communication structures. The net result is that people don’t engage in meetings and they didn’t really before the pandemic. But it just it wasn’t as big of an issue because a lot of people were in the office and there were proxy ways of dealing with it.

[00:10:30.185] 
But all of a sudden you’ve actually got to face the problem.

[00:10:32.705] 
So that’s why I’m asking from a technology perspective. Right.

[00:10:37.145] 
And so, as you said, because everybody’s virtual and everybody’s interfacing through this medium, you can do more things like there you have this mode where one person is presenting and then there’s 15, 20 people just listening. So it’s like going for 10, 15 minutes without any conversations. What are some? Issues with the person who’s presenting doesn’t get any feedback on whether somebody is how do they feel about this, what they’re doing over here, very basic, simple things like having a way for people to for an audience who are listening to this presentation to interact and give some feedback on, OK, this is going well, even looks like pop up that says, hey, how do you feel about this?

[00:11:15.795] 
And I’m feeling good about it or like I’m understanding what’s going on or I’m lost. And for people to give that kind of reaction and for the person who’s presenting to receive that feedback in a way that is not destructive, but in a way that is helping them guide how they would go through the presentation. It’s like a very low hanging fruit. And some solutions of this have been part of even before the virtual meeting, you can make it like so much more easy, but now you can amp up that for for a bit.

[00:11:41.175] 
How can you make that even more obvious? You can. You’re sitting in front of a camera. You use Snapchat and Instagram where everybody’s face can be modified into whatever you want. But those kind of technologies are literally what it thing is. I can read your face at the level of granularity of how much you frown or like whether you understand or whether you’re yawning or all these things and be able to collect that information and present it in a way that is not very intrusive or disruptive of the meeting, but still giving you sufficient feedback for the presenter to adjust how they’re doing.

[00:12:20.595] 
And then these things become way more important than, say, a sales call or call where you’re like you’re you’re doing an all hands two hundred people. And the sentiment is that most people are just shocked at what you just said. You may want to give a pass and maybe address that a little bit better. How can you leverage this interface to get that feedback? And this is just from a presentation perspective, just one too many situation now in person.

[00:12:45.195] 
It’s eye contact. And like people’s faces, basically, in theory, you have that in this kind of zoom style. Brady Bunch look with twenty five people, OK, if it’s more than twenty five to two. But beyond that, it doesn’t scale analytics. We talked about the one to many scenarios. Are there other kinds of analytics that you think would be help for different kinds of meetings maybe?

[00:13:10.125] 
Yeah, analytics is one part of it and I definitely talk about it because my previous startup was a lot about analytics, but it’s just one of the many components there and truly collaborative meetings where almost everybody’s contribution is important. And then there is this big role of the facilitator to move people from being this disengaged and passive to like being more engaged, contributing and taking ownership. And we want to try to move people along the spectrum. And you can almost think about data that you can collect from a meeting that can be used to improve this.

[00:13:47.925] 
And again, I mentioned this to say that, like, analytics is one piece of this puzzle. It’s almost retroactive. You do this over a period of time and you collect enough data to be able to improve this very simple things like who’s doing the most of the talking? Who’s not getting a chance to say anything in a meeting or it doesn’t contribute is like a very simple metric is easy to collect. But looking at it over a period of time will make things very obvious.

[00:14:13.695] 
What does it say about a leader who spends about 70 percent of the time in is meeting him or her being the only person who’s talking in the meeting? What does that say about a person who actually speaks thirty percent of the time but lets team contribute twenty percent of the time? But just the data alone tells a very different story about your leadership style, how your team comes together and collaborate. And that’s just a single metric you can detect who interrupts?

[00:14:39.525] 
You can detect who is usually the one who is throwing the ball to other people to open up the conversation. What is the to the ball movement off these conversations? Like usually even like when this one person talks, it automatically prompts the other person to stop detecting these kind of patterns is just really simple. Once you have a stream of audio and this makes it in a previous world, we were doing this in like a real meeting, spaces where people come together.

[00:15:06.375] 
But when you think about meeting, the way to detect this has become so much more easier because you have all channels separated, audio, everybody’s like screaming from their own devices. And so gathering analytics like this becomes super useful. And now you roll it up across a single meeting and you roll it up across different meeting, different organizations, different managers. And you’re like imagining what is your style of collaboration? How does your team come together as also you go a little bit more deep back and think about the words being spoken.

[00:15:37.305] 
And can I analyze the sentiment of the words, who’s using inclusive language, who’s using more words that are negative and bringing people like cutting off people like I don’t think you can do all of this sentiment analysis on your conversation and. Then you’re basically like super powering your analytics at that point of time, and NLP is being used for so many different things right now and it’s become so mature in the last three, four years since I started this company.

[00:16:03.075] 
And there’s just so much you can do. It’s still a lot unknown in the world of conversational data because most of this is being done on texts and materials and law books. And like all these things, that’s what people have been analyzing using natural language processing. The conversation is a gold mine like you can think about, like how you can analyze the world of Alexa in Google. Homes are starting to explore this, although far more smaller commandingly conversations, but real conversations which have a deeper meaning.

[00:16:35.355] 
There’s plenty of room over there.

[00:16:38.135] 
So what about identifying patterns? You have a lot of data now, so how can you look for patterns?

[00:16:47.135] 
And in that data data collection and analytics is like one piece of it. What helps is and this is a problem that we have faced in the past as having context is everything. Just saying that, like you spoke 40 percent of the time in a meeting is one thing. But being able to say that, hey, this was a leadership meeting or like a collaborative meeting and you’re the leader, the less you speak, it actually allows. And this is that are research around this, right.

[00:17:15.155] 
As a leader that lets you speak and let the team speak a little bit more. It actually encourages everybody to become owners and contributors, putting that context piece of it and understanding the team dynamics and looking at patterns over that. That’s how you can work those data into insights. Insights are still just insights. They’re not going to help you change behavior. And that’s the harder problem of like how do you take these insights? And then they change people’s behavior so you get the best outcome for you.

[00:17:43.745] 
But that insight, part of it itself is for a lot of people, just clicks open. Oh, my God, we doing this. And that helps a lot in making them more open to that behavior change part of it. So, yeah, I took a patterns is more about this, the raw data, taking into account the context of the meeting and what you want to achieve and what is the purpose of the meeting.

[00:18:04.055] 
And then in terms of patterns visually, can you get things from the video stream?

[00:18:10.205] 
Because the audio is I guess it’s pretty clear them and try to analyze the content of the text.

[00:18:16.295] 
What about on the video side?

[00:18:18.345] 
Yeah, and I’ve been speaking to a couple of companies in the space who are starting to think about this. And I’m very interested about this area as well as how can you use facial recognition, as I said, facial recognition and detecting emotions in your face, the gestures to be able to add that to your data stream. You can get the idea of how each person is reacting to the situation, using their faces and adding that to the data stream.

[00:18:46.865] 
Yeah, there’s quite a few that’s happening over here. There are some technical challenges around it and also some big concerns around privacy.

[00:18:55.535] 
Some of the technical challenges, I would say is one in just interpretation of this data. Right. What is good? How can I actually frown face? And you might actually think that I am disapproving of what you’re saying, but I really am not. And those situations will arise. And unless you have enough data get enough maturity about this, it’s hard to take subjective interpretations off these facial data. And that’s going to happen. And it’s also a very technically a resource intensive work.

[00:19:21.395] 
How are you going to be able to run this in each person’s computer or your browser if you have to? And that’s the implementation challenges associated with that as well.

[00:19:30.995] 
So what are your thoughts on improving collaboration for people in meetings?

[00:19:36.125] 
Right. Collaboration is a big piece. There’s just so much that happens in the space. And I think I mentioned about starting to think about specialized tools that actually cater to what you want to do in these different types of meetings, tools that automatically enable you to do those things. It’s better to do that then stay in this world of like just audio and video and even the collaboration, because this is so much of what facilitator’s does that can be taken into this.

[00:20:06.335] 
The big thing about that is currently running a good collaborative meeting is almost completely at the mercy of the person who’s facilitating that meeting. How do they run the risk of meetings? And it all comes down to how good the facilitator is in those meetings and what kind of preparation that they’ve made for that meeting. And there is a lot that a facilitator does in a meeting, right?

[00:20:28.745] 
Yeah. You can also have someone just facilitator, not the the the discussion leader, and have it be more delegated in theory.

[00:20:34.985] 
Going back to what you were saying, it sounds like it’s more of a facilitation skills issue in companies than a technology issue, in a way. And that’s the part that is interesting, right, and that, I feel is the opportunity that’s clicked right now in that because. One way, as you said, is make people better facilitators. It’s obvious to kill them, give them training, give them coaching on how to be good at facilitating a meeting.

[00:21:04.715] 
But that kind of behavior change or ability to influence other people is actually a really hard thing as well for some people to learn and pick up. But it also takes time. And I think that we should continue doing that, upskilling people to be good facilitators of meeting. But implementing change happens from changing the environment where the behaviors are happening. If you look at the productivity or habits phase, there’s a ton of books that’s been written recently as well, which is all working about how do you change your behavior, tiny habits or atomic habits.

[00:21:36.005] 
And one of the big things that comes about in that phase is for you to be able to change your behavior. Changing the environment is one of the biggest ways in which you can have an impact. And when I say environment, it can be anything from the culture of the company to the tools that you use, the same scrum meetings that people were doing for people to come together and have a conversation about what their status is. They got changed into what is called a stand up meeting, mostly because when you say it’s a stand up meeting and people are standing, it automatically forces them to be quick about what they’re saying and be precise about the exact thing that it’s a it’s a classic example of what can be done to change the environment that would actually affect the way that people behave in a meeting.

[00:22:19.295] 
Whereas now you have this golden opportunity to have technology and you can use this to augment reality in ways that you just could not even have thought of before in a real world. Very simple example. If I’m doing my stand up meeting, just having to circle around my head, that just slowly fades away. When I’ve spoken. More than 90 seconds are like a circle around my head that just gives me like a timer, very easy to implement in a virtual world.

[00:22:46.595] 
But it’s not just people to stay on. Time makes very evident what needs to happen. Several such design examples could be used to change behavior a lot from very simple things that like showing indicators of how much each person spoke in a meeting or a brainstorming session showing how much each person spoke as the size of the person. And it just grows. And you automatically know that, hey, why aren’t these people contributing and how can you bring those people again?

[00:23:12.665] 
Not everything is socially appropriate, but you can imagine using these design guidelines and the technology to change behaviors of people in ways that was not possible before, doesn’t want to be triggering people’s Napoleon complex.

[00:23:29.915] 
So, yeah, about making meetings more intentional.

[00:23:35.315] 
That’s something that is difficult. And it’s also different now being online. What are your thoughts on how to do that?

[00:23:42.515] 
Since the start of the pandemic, meetings have become the way in which people are able to show that they are productive or they are in the meeting. So most people just join a meeting so that they feel like they’ve done something for the day. Just attending a meeting gives them that thought that they are. But for the most part, they are just engaged in that meeting. And a lot of which has come to this point about casual conversations have all become meetings when you don’t even have an idea of why you are setting up this meeting.

[00:24:09.035] 
But you just set up a meeting and then once people come in over there, you start figuring out what you want to talk. For the most part, you have material for five minutes. If it’s solved, you’ve already booked a 30 minute meeting. And so you are just like rambling on about things that you weren’t even planning on doing. The purpose of the meeting is unclear. There is obviously several organizations where the culture is for people to if you don’t have an agenda, I won’t attend the meeting.

[00:24:33.395] 
And that’s actually a very strong step that people take towards the direction to say that if you have to have a meeting, you have to make it really intentional. And you tell me exactly what are the agenda items in that meeting and how we can go about it. And this part of it is where I feel like that could be a lot more made easy for a person who is facilitating the meeting to think about what is the intention of this meeting.

[00:24:56.465] 
And this goes into this other part about there are big buckets of. Reasons that you go for a meeting about what is the intention of the meeting, it usually falls under like these six or seven buckets, right. Like I’m going there to drive clarity or alignment with people. And that’s one big bucket, right? And then are like, I’m setting up this meeting mostly as a knowledge sharing session. Someone has to share some knowledge of the people.

[00:25:19.265] 
It’s a presentation. It’s like a seminar or whatever it is. And then there’s a third big bucket of I need to do some problem solving. I’m stuck and we need to do some problem solving, decision making meetings, that is meetings about connection, where people come together to the team building or one on ones where the motivation is personal connections and then influence style meetings, which are like a different bucket about if you’re doing interviews or sales. And we are trying to influence people.

[00:25:48.935] 
And meetings generally fall under these buckets and clearly setting your agenda items to say that this is the goal that we want out of this, whether we are making a decision and everything and then using the right tools for those is a great first step towards running more intentional and more purposeful meetings that have the best impact. Use technology to say that like, OK, this is a decision making meeting and how can this meeting, this ship itself so that it helps us make this decision really fast and so you can put them all together.

[00:26:22.175] 
So let’s talk about let’s start with the product. What exactly is the product? Turn to zinc is considering everything that I’ve been speaking about right now, zinc provides what are already existing videoconferencing spaces provide is the ability to have a video conversation or generally having multiple people. The meeting and talking about the thing that makes zinc different is rewarding the good behavior and removing the disrupting behaviors. We have this notion of what is an activity, which is when you have intentionally this is what I want to do.

[00:26:58.055] 
You throw in an activity that actually transforms your space into exactly what you want to do. If you are doing a status update or a daily stand up, you just do that. It takes people and automatically puts them in the circle. The person who is giving the status update is put front and center. The video takes up like almost a good size of the screen and everybody else shrinks and becomes this sort of smaller bubbles in the circle. And they have a timer around them that tells them that this is about like 90 seconds or two minutes time, that you have to time are not necessarily to tell them that you don’t think you will be cut off for this.

[00:27:38.465] 
But if you don’t make it exactly spread out this bouncy out of the meeting now. But the idea is to nudge them to stay within the context of what you have to do and the prompt of what they’re talking to. Like just put front and center on the screen telling them that they have to think about this and then small logistics of who’s going to go next and it automatically lines up with who’s up next and what’s the order in which people are updating.

[00:28:04.745] 
So when you actually enter this mode and you do a status update activity, it takes you like a very predictable amount of time and you actually get through everybody’s. We also have our A.I. kicking off in the back and they’re like all of this data about each person giving this type of data is automatically capture. And transcripts of that is categorized by who spoke what. And it is sent to you at the end of the meeting for you to look back or for somebody who’s missed the meeting to catch up on what really happened.

[00:28:32.825] 
And so that automatically happens in that space. And then the more delightful things. Right. Like already just being able to see yourself in bubbles and moving around in that circle is a very experience that actually adds delight to your meeting. But you could react to other people in the form of, if you like, what somebody has done or if somebody is achieved something, you give them feedback by clicking this button, which automatically sends collapses emojis on your screen and lets other people know that, like, you really appreciate what they’ve done.

[00:29:02.705] 
And as a person giving a status update, that’s really one of the big things why they actually do these things. Like we come to the status updates to talk about what it is and they feel excited about something it shows and what they’re saying. And it allows people to react to that in meaningful ways, things that are lost in an asynchronous status update if you have to. And so this is an example of how you’ve designed activity around status update.

[00:29:26.465] 
But once this is done, you go back to what is like a regular meeting. And depending on what you want to do next, depending on what you want to do, this meeting can transform itself into that mode. Another example is we do brainstorming, which is something that is just about coming out of there. If you say that you are going to do brainstorming, it automatically puts people into the sides and making the center board something that you can actually share, something most of these existing solutions like mural or mural provides like a blank canvas for you to do this.

[00:29:58.385] 
But you can do a lot more work like you are to facilitate the. Set a timer for 10 minutes where everybody are like five minutes, that everybody comes up with ideas, they type in as many ideas as possible, just goes into cards, and then like you come together in the second phase where you start collaborating on these ideas and adding to what somebody else has already said. And all this is automatically facilitated. There is not there’s not like somebody who has to share this screen and do all describing for you.

[00:30:25.065] 
But you have an interactive environment where you’re all doing these things and it automatically does it for you. And it also allows you to do things like, hey, I want two thumbs up on this or what on someone else’s ideas. It allows you to brainstorm in ways that you would bring the best ideas out. So those are a couple of examples. But if you zoom out, zinc as a product is basically like a canvas in which you can actually create intentional, purposeful activities that enable you to do what you’re meeting your intention of committing.

[00:30:57.405] 
Is the entire meeting or a series of meetings that you’ve had is all preserved in a way that we currently don’t have. Where you have a meeting, that meeting is just gone. And at the most what you get is a recording of what that meeting was, which is just not possible in any meaningful way. But each meeting automatically because it’s intentional, because you’re intentionally throwing activities, it automatically summarizes at the meeting and keeps structured data for you to go back and be able to look at exactly what you want to get out of that meeting while it’s also eventually searchable.

[00:31:33.495] 
Eventually analytics can be done.

[00:31:35.055] 
On top of that, I think if you have some kind of structure for capturing action items and two dates and who’s assigned and that kind of stuff, too, we have a way to capture agenda items and everything.

[00:31:45.225] 
What we are currently working on is a way to capture action items. And again, there’s several ways that you can do this and really figuring out what exactly has been working with some people who will be working with is it a collaborative activity where everybody comes in and the action items, or is it one person just listing down the action items list a few different ways that you can do. And as you said, like that’s a very important part of expanding the activity during an activity which is 15 minutes before the end of the meeting, where everybody just like describes what they think their action items are.

[00:32:14.355] 
And then the facilitator could possibly fill the gaps over there. And so at the end of that meeting, you actually clearly know what it is. And that being sent out, it’s super valuable. And it seems like 20 minutes of the presenters, the facilitators, time after the meetings or so.

[00:32:30.045] 
Moving on to the company. What kind of customers are you working with now? Who are you targeting, that kind of thing?

[00:32:39.345] 
Yeah, for sure. Our current target is companies which have anywhere from 10 to one hundred people. That’s the size of the companies that we are targeting specifically. That is people who facilitate regular meetings. This could be like a product manager or a manager of a team. They are our primary target person and we are currently working with smaller startups where founders install this as a part of their slack. We actually plug into directly where if they want to have a meeting, they can just type slicing in their channel.

[00:33:15.075] 
And there is a space for the channel where all the meetings are captured over there and it brings together people and they have them a very specific type of meeting. And then that summary just gets back to and that’s also how it’s being used currently in in early stage startups. Cool, great.

[00:33:31.315] 
So what’s the best way for people to find out more about you or about think?

[00:33:38.625] 
Yeah, Zindagi is where we are. So is the Zenker. Is that why? And see, that eye is where we are. If you are anyone who is in an early stage startup looking to have better ways of collaborating with your team, you should definitely check it out. I’m available on LinkedIn. My name is Arjun’s and the region and hopefully there’s a link for my profile somewhere. This will be in the zone. Sure, yeah. Feel free to reach out.

[00:34:10.095] 
Reach me at Lake Argin at Zindagi as well. And I’m happy to share composition in this space. Right. And. That really was a great conversation with Argin, my favorite part of it, other than geeking out on the tech, was the importance of the percent of the conversation that each person participates in. I find that useful, even without technology is something to pay attention to as a relatively objective way to track what’s going on and also thinking in terms of who within the group is really enabling others to talk.

[00:34:51.045] 
I know Argents trying to solve it on a much deeper technical level, but I think even without the benefit of this technology, it’s certainly useful as a mindset, from a facilitation standpoint to see how everything’s going. Glad you could join us this week. And next week we’re going to go back into hiring, hiring with someone who is truly a world class expert, in my opinion. See you then. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Aligner will Be podcast, if you enjoy the show, please leave a review on iTunes, Google podcast or wherever you get your podcast.