A few years ago, I met a South Korean startup with 5 co-founders. They were young, inexperienced, but talented, and had a decent minimum viable product ready.
They even convinced an angel investor syndicate to invest in them for $250K in a pre-seed round, which was already impressive, since most of the co-founders had very limited corporate or work experience.
After some back-and-forth, they asked me to help them with their development and business strategy because they had noticed that progress was stagnant, and their minimum viable product (MVP) hadn’t even been released to the market yet.
The reason? They held meetings every day of the week, and spent endless hours debating because there was rarely an agreement between the 5 co-founders.
And they’re not the only ones who work this way.
In most startups, the energy is unmatched. Teams move fast, ideas get tested, and decisions often need to be made quickly. But there’s one common pitfall that quietly erodes productivity: too many meetings.
It’s a problem that creeps up on even the most agile companies. What starts as a necessary alignment call can turn into a culture where every small decision requires a meeting.
What they don’t realize is that half of the team’s time is being spent in Zoom rooms or conference calls instead of building, selling, or iterating.
Why too many meetings hurt productivity
The paradox of meetings is that they often feel productive while they’re happening, but they rarely are. I fell in that same trap in my first years of entrepreneurship and, looking back, I should have realized it earlier.
What I realized is that the “work” that moves a startup forward doesn’t happen in meetings at all. It happens in the in-between: coding, designing, building product features, writing outreach emails, testing campaigns, or talking to customers.
Too many meetings fragment focus. They require context switching. If you’re deep into solving a problem, pulling yourself out for an unplanned meeting that lasts 30 minutes means losing momentum.
Research shows that it can take 20+ minutes to regain focus after an interruption. For startups where speed matters, that’s devastating.
They create unnecessary consensus loops and often turn into group therapy sessions where everyone feels the need to weigh in, which results in delaying decisions
Early-stage startups live and die by momentum. It’s what keeps a team motivated when resources are scarce, and it’s the reason a scrappy group of five can sometimes outpace a corporation of 500.
For startups, it’s about compounding progress. Every small delay adds up, and it can break the rhythm.
How startups can streamline their workflow
The solution isn’t to abolish meetings altogether. Some of them are crucial, especially for alignment, culture-building, or brainstorming. The key is to be intentional about when and why meetings happen. Here are a few strategies startups can adopt:
- Adopt an asynchronous-first mindset: Most updates don’t require real-time discussion. Tools like Slack, Notion, and ClickUp allow teams to share status updates asynchronously. This helps team members to consume information on their own schedule without breaking focus.
- Protect deep work blocks: Institute no meetings on your most productive hours, or even entire days if necessary. This practice was popularized by companies like Shopify and Gitlab, and proved that output has dramatically improved.
- Set stricter rules for meetings: Avoid unplanned meetings and ask if it can be handled in a message. Or if necessary, can it be limited to 15 minutes?
- Audit your meetings regularly: Once a quarter, review recurring meetings. Ask: “Is this still valuable?” You’ll be surprised how many can be reduced in frequency or scrapped entirely.
Real-world example: Shopify’s bold move
In early 2023, Shopify made headlines by canceling all recurring meetings with more than two people. Thousands of calendar events were wiped clean overnight.
The company’s leadership realized that their teams were drowning in calls, leaving little space for the creative and technical work that actually drives growth.
Shopify didn’t ban meetings altogether. They encouraged them when absolutely necessary, but they shifted the default expectation toward asynchronous updates and fewer, shorter live discussions.
By hitting the reset button, they sent a powerful cultural message: your calendar should serve your work, not the other way around.
Shopify’s move is a clear reminder that you don’t need to wait until you’re at scale to rethink meeting culture. The earlier you set the right habits, the more your team can focus on what matters most: building momentum and shipping real value.
Final word
Meetings aren’t evil, but when you’re building a startup, time and energy are scarce resources, and if the team holds too many meetings, it becomes a silent productivity killer.
They eat away at focus, slow down decision-making, and disrupt the momentum that makes small teams powerful.
The best founders I met and coached treat meetings like a precious commodity. They heavily lean on asynchronous communication, protecting their deep work, and focus on business building.
