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Join UpYourStack host Noah Berk, Co-CEO of Aptitude 8, every week as he chats with industry leaders and top app developers to help you optimize your HubSpot tech stack. Tune in for expert insights, tips, and recommendations to take your HubSpot experience to the next level!
UYS Podcast: S3E2 Aydin Mirzaee, Fellow - Full
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[00:00:00] Welcome to UpYourStack, the podcast for sales, marketing, and operation leaders looking to optimize their HubSpot tech stack and drive better business outcomes. I'm your host, Noah Berk, co CEO of Aptitude 8. And today we're joined by Aydin Mirzaee, the CEO and co founder of Fellow App. Aydin has a wealth of experience in building businesses and improving organizational efficiency.
[00:00:22] And he's here to share his journey insights and expertise and how to make meetings more productive and meaningful. We'll also discuss fellows HubSpot integration, how it's addressing the challenges of the hybrid workplace and Aydin's vision for the future of workplace collaboration. Let's listen in.
[00:00:38] Aydin. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:41] Hey. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be on.
[00:00:45] Awesome. Well, Aydin, I like to just dive right into it, as we're going to explore all about yourself and your software, but you know, a burning question most people have is what is Fellow App?
[00:00:54] Yeah. So Fellow is what we call an AI meeting assistant. And what Fellow [00:01:00] does is it helps with all aspects of your meeting. So the idea behind Fellow is that it is the only tool out there that helps before, during and after every meeting. And the way it works is that most people use Fellow across the company.
[00:01:16] Over the course of time, you may start with one or two users, but the idea is that it's almost like you're hiring Fellow, this meeting assistant, that comes in, goes to all the meetings in your company, whether those are internal or external meetings. And then it does a whole bunch of great things.
[00:01:31] It does some of the basic things like take notes for you, and summarize the meetings for you, and track action items for you. But it also does really awesome other things like actually hold people accountable. Like how awesome would it be if you had this tool that or this virtual agent that basically held all the people in your company accountable for the things that they said that they would do, how cool would it be if it could update all the systems of record at your company, whether that is your CRM, whether it's a task [00:02:00] management tool that you use, whether it's your wiki and it could just go in and just like this super smart employee, just update all of those systems.
[00:02:08] And of course the other part is that it. It, has to give you insights and almost be like the super smart person that if it went to all of your meetings could answer all sorts of questions. About all the meetings that are happening in your company. So that's really the vision.
[00:02:22] So it's not, there's a lot of you and I were talking about this. There's a lot of call recorder types out there. Fellow is not that. Fellow is much more an AI meeting assistant. I would think of it as like the next gen of some of the products that you've seen out there.
[00:02:37] And that, that's really what it is.
[00:02:40] Well, I don't think there's a single listener out there who's saying that all doesn't sound awesome. How do I get this today? So I do want to dive more into it because I think, having a super employee is able to come in and take notes for you and obviously tell you what your to do's are, summarize your meetings.
[00:02:54] And obviously in the day and age of AI, this is becoming more and more popular for people to be looking for these types of tools. And they [00:03:00] expect that there's tools that exist out there that can do exactly what you're describing. So I'm excited to get deeper into it. But You didn't start by building Fellow App,
[00:03:08] you had another company. So how did this even come about? Maybe take me from your journey from, and I believe your previous company you sold was called Fluidware. How did you go from Fluidware to Fellow?
[00:03:21] Great question. So, Fluidware was this we had a few products, but the one we were probably most known for was this product called Fluid surveys. It was an online survey tool and it was Fluidware was this bootstrap company? We started it, with no money profitable from day one, because it had to be.
[00:03:38] And it grew, we grew to just under 100 people it's growing very rapidly we were, we had all those triple digit growth rates that venture backed companies would have, but we just had it as a, bootstrap company, and so, and then, we sold it to SurveyMonkey because we were really focused on the enterprise, and SurveyMonkey wanted to get into the enterprise, and [00:04:00] so This was their foray into being able to get into that space.
[00:04:03] So that, that's when we teamed up and my co founders and I were there leading up to the IPO. But the thing that we realized is very interesting. So I would consider us, we were very bootstrap, scrappy, not really knowing what we were doing from a organizational scaling perspective. We didn't have any board meetings, we didn't really have any planning sessions, we didn't have forecasts, it was just, we didn't have many layers of management.
[00:04:29] This sounds like Utopia of like startups, actually.
[00:04:32] It was very much a startup, if you imagine what in movies, what startups are supposed to be like this was that kind of company.
[00:04:40] Everybody had the ability to, take on an initiative, make things happen. And we just moved incredibly fast. It was actually a really fun time. But I will say that we were getting to the point where things were, I noticed that things were starting to break, right? We were getting to this point where if we added a few more people, if we [00:05:00] did, got a few more things going, that things would start to break.
[00:05:03] And it was very interesting getting into SurveyMonkey. At the time, maybe they were, three, three or four times our size in terms of employees and when we started working with them, what, one of the things we were all very much looking for is to learn, what it's like to scale a company.
[00:05:19] And after we joined SurveyMonkey continued to scale leading up to the IPO, I think they may have had something around 1500 or so employees. I think the numbers may be twice that today. And. Those were the things that we were looking to learn which is how do you scale teams? How do you scale people?
[00:05:35] How do you scale companies? What are the workflows the processes that you're supposed to have? What one of the things that you know you'll appreciate is that I'd never done a one on one meeting in my entire life prior and I was the CEO right and we didn't have weekly management meetings, we didn't have QBRs, we just didn't have any of this structured stuff.
[00:05:58] And so, at [00:06:00] SurveyMonkey we really learned a lot of these things, and they made sense, and, it started to make sense that, oh, if you have these structured management processes, then you can standardize, and you can really scale, and you don't have to worry about being involved in absolutely every little thing as a founder.
[00:06:15] And that's where we learned this stuff. And so coming out of SurveyMonkey, my co founders and I, and by the way, this is our third startup together. So we've done three startups together, five different products, tens of millions in revenue. So, the question we ask is how do we make it so that everybody can just
[00:06:31] do these things like all this good, all these good practices without having to go get an MBA or without having to go, read a textbook or stuff like that. How do we just get the practical stuff to happen within companies? And that's really when I would say the, this obsession of like, how do we help companies everywhere run better started it was from that notion, from that experience, from all the amazing learnings that, that we had.
[00:06:57] While working at SurveyMonkey. And so that, that's where [00:07:00] all of this started, right? It was like How can we build software that when companies use all those, great structured ways of managing the company just come into play without you having to really try it just works and your company runs better and you don't have to think too much about
[00:07:18] So, so I take it you So I take it you used to have to sit there and take all the notes during the meetings and say, this is really just, why am I, John, did you get this done? Here's your to do, or here's the recap for the meeting. You're spending all this time doing it. So did you see that as part of it?
[00:07:31] Oh, we saw all sorts of things. Again, there's a gazillion memes on, on, on all these meetings, right? So, you go in, there's no agenda. We have this statement, which is no agenda, no attenda. So, you walk into a meeting, and nobody's really sure what you need to talk about.
[00:07:49] It's not clear what the action items were. People said they would do things, but those things don't actually happen. You're talking about something, and then you have this vague memory of, didn't we talk about this three [00:08:00] weeks ago? Who, did anyone update the wiki based on the discussions that we had?
[00:08:05] Things just would fall through the cracks, right? And then, it was just a communication, there's so many like communication issues within companies too. So for example, you might be in a situation where you have an executive team meeting, you make a decision, but it turns out that nobody communicated.
[00:08:22] The decision to the other people that needed to know about it. Right. And so you have this
[00:08:26] That doesn't happen companies. Does that
[00:08:28] I'm
[00:08:29] So
[00:08:29] it's basically the, I'm sure people are listening and nodding. This is what happens everywhere. Right. And except for, I would say it happens everywhere, but there are these I would call them like.
[00:08:42] The super managers that exist in our organizations everywhere that kind of hold things together and really what, our thought behind fellow is again, build this super scalable, almost like AI chief of staff that you can hire for your company. It's going to come in, do all these things for you, and unlike a [00:09:00] human, it actually scales.
[00:09:01] It can be in, ten different meetings, happening at the exact same time. And so this is really the vision behind Fellow. It's
[00:09:08] I
[00:09:09] and help with all those things.
[00:09:11] it. I love that you just use that. I don't know if you just came all over the spot, but AI chief of staff because I imagine so many organizations need that. So many leaders need a chief of staff because, and I guess this kind of leads me to my next question is what do you see as the challenges of meetings today?
[00:09:27] Especially in this hybrid work environment,
[00:09:31] Yeah, so Hybrid's changed a lot, right? And so I think the first thing that Hybrid changed is that when we all used to be in an office, One of the things that was true was there was an actual physical limit on the number of meetings that you could have. There's only so many meeting rooms in the company, right?
[00:09:50] And so, if all the meetings rooms were booked, you couldn't really have that meeting. And so, there was an actual physical limit. And so, when we went [00:10:00] hybrid and remote, that limit was gone, right? You could have as many meetings as you wanted. It was easier than ever to create a meeting on other people's calendars.
[00:10:09] All of a sudden, everybody was empowered with the super powerful, ability to usurp time from each other without even You know, thinking about it. And so, that was the first thing that changed. The other thing that changed is that it really changed the way that people come into meetings, right?
[00:10:26] Especially if we're talking about hybrid meetings, as an example, where some people are virtual, and then you have a bunch of people clambering into one conference room, and it's just not an equal footing, right? So, it's if you're on the virtual side, it's really hard for you to elbow your way into the conversation, right?
[00:10:45] It's really hard for you to basically understand any side conversations that, that might be happening. On the flip side, if you're in the room that has its own distinct set of challenges too. So, for example, one of the things that, we do at Fellow and we [00:11:00] encourage is, This only being part of meetings that you're going to have a significant portion, call it like 5 percent or more of the meeting, to comment on, or to actually speak.
[00:11:11] You're not going to speak 5%, 5 percent of the meeting, you shouldn't be in that meeting. And, in a virtual setting, that's easier, right? You could come in You could have the private conversation, you could go in a physical meeting, it's really awkward to stand up in the middle and leave and it doesn't happen as often.
[00:11:26] So there actually are disadvantages if you're doing the physical stuff too. And, but, I think the biggest benefit, to be honest, from the virtual and hybrid stuff is you can actually have a meeting assistant present, right? That can add value in ways that wasn't possible before. It's almost getting to the point that you wouldn't really want to have a meeting in person unless you also had
[00:11:52] going to say, have Google or zoom or something going on with your meeting software to be able to, or your your AI meeting [00:12:00] assistant people to take notes. Cause you're right, like who's taking
[00:12:02] Yeah, and
[00:12:03] I
[00:12:03] and it depends, right, if you and I are getting to know each other and want to grab a coffee and, rapport, if we're doing a project meeting, it's actually better as in a virtual setting, like you actually get more out of it. It is a suboptimal experience not to do it that way.
[00:12:19] So how do you suppose companies can make meetings more productive these days? If we continue along this line of thought,
[00:12:25] Yeah, so, there's a lot of yeah, so, so, so there's a lot that can be done in terms of making meetings everywhere productive and, A lot of this may, maybe you'll start to think about in terms of internal meetings, but, applies equally to external meetings with customers.
[00:12:41] So, on the the first thing is that every meeting should actually have a shared collaborative agenda. If there is no shared collaborative agenda, then not everybody's on the same page of what needs to be discussed. If you have great things like a shared collaborative agenda, [00:13:00] and if they are shared with everyone, say, 24 hours in advance, then all sorts of magical things can happen, right?
[00:13:05] So, A. You can see what the discussion is about. So you may say that this particular meeting, I don't need to be there. I can read the fellow summary afterwards, right? Because fellow's going to be there, it's going to summarize things, I can just step out, right? And then just get the gist, because it looks like, based on this agenda, I'm not an active participant, so therefore I don't.
[00:13:28] don't actually need to be there. The other thing is that, again, just this notion of if you're not going to speak for more than 5 of the meeting you shouldn't be there. Meetings shouldn't have more than 8 people. If there are more than 8 people in a meeting, that just suggests a structural problem.
[00:13:44] There's this great study that, the more the number of attendees that you have past the number of 8, the ability to make a decision decreases. And I, I think when you hit 15 or 16 participants the ability to make a decision approaches zero. [00:14:00] So it is again, inversely correlated with the number of,
[00:14:03] it's less of a meeting at that point, more of a presentation. If you have 15 or 16 people there versus an actual meeting,
[00:14:10] Exactly. And, when I think about hybrid and remote work, one of the biggest advantages of of this type of working is that you can chunk and use your hours in the most productive way, right? So if in the morning, say between 10 and noon, you are the most productive you that might not be the time that you're going to want to participate in in a meeting where you're not going to do much of the talking anyway, right?
[00:14:35] So maybe that's a Fellow was in the meeting, you read the summary or you maybe watch a portion of the meeting you're going to do that at 4 p. m. or 5 p. m. When you're like super tired and you've already had your productive hours, you're not going to put your most productive hours to consume that kind of content.
[00:14:51] So, it takes this idea where a meeting has to be synchronous when everybody's in person and it makes it possible for you to have meetings in this [00:15:00] asynchronous format. The other thing is that it also allows you to continue conversations after the fact. So sometimes a meeting will happen, but you might want to tag in people that were not there and you could do that.
[00:15:12] Maybe you're collaboratively commenting on the content of the meeting that was produced afterwards. Maybe you have followup questions. And so, the conversation can also continue. So there's a lot that the second that you make a meeting hybrid or remote, there's a lot that can happen.
[00:15:28] In a much better way. But all of these things at the end of the day, help with this idea of having a productive a productive meeting. The final thing that I'll say about this is that other than certain meetings that are, call it, routine that you really should have all the time, call it like, one on one meeting or a business review, Most meetings should not should always have an end date.
[00:15:52] So if you have a recurring meeting, and you don't have an end date for that recurring meeting, it is [00:16:00] actually irresponsible. And the reason is that humans are habitual creatures. And when something is a habit and you are having it, week on week, even though the original purpose of the meeting was something else, you will still continue that because other purposes have built in, but they had nothing to do with the original purpose.
[00:16:20] One way to, get around this is this idea of just, having that end date in place. You can also do other things like, cancel meetings or recurring meetings once a year. One of our customers, Shopify, does this, for example. And so there are other ways and approaches to it. But, yeah, those are some good tips to get people started.
[00:16:42] you just gave like 10 great tips that we just need to organize into 10 things you should know about meetings. And I think you also dispelled the myth. About this hybrid work environment where, you know, versus in person, I remember very, it wasn't not too long ago that we were in person to your point.
[00:16:57] There was only 5 conference rooms we could choose [00:17:00] from. And then 1 was busy. You couldn't take it. And, everyone else, you're either meeting at their desk, you're meeting someplace else. You're meeting in that tiny little phone booth, which is not the best place to have a meeting, a little tight in those but it's fascinating.
[00:17:13] Well, one thing I do want to switch, obviously this is UpYourStack. We talk about HubSpot, we talk about how apps integrate with HubSpot or, and in this particular case how does Fellow app work with HubSpot? How does that integration work? How do companies leverage it?
[00:17:27] Yeah, good question. So we actually use HubSpot internally. Fun fact, HubSpot is also a customer of Fellow's. So we love HubSpot. And so the way that we work with HubSpot is is in a few ways. So usually when people are using HubSpot, it's for external conversations, right? So it's people on your sales team, it's people on your customer success team.
[00:17:51] And so, so the way that it works is you go to your meeting the way you always do, and Fellow is going to attend [00:18:00] that meeting. It's this AI meeting assistant, so it'll look like an extra tile on your screen. And, after the meeting, we do a bunch of things. So one, we will automatically take all the notes, the action items, the summaries
[00:18:14] and the call log, and we're going to put that directly into HubSpot automatically without you having to do anything. But that's not the best part. We also automatically update all of the fields that you want to be updated in HubSpot. Because everybody hates updating fields manually.
[00:18:30] Everyone does.
[00:18:31] So, but then you ask, well, what about that super complex field that is super obscure and you have to really think about it to figure out how to answer that.
[00:18:40] So, for example, what if you had a field that was something like, companies growth prospects in three years. That was a question, right? A normal person, a salesperson, might have to sit and think, Well, this is, put a bunch of things together, and then type something into that field.
[00:18:56] With Fellow, you can actually create these AI prompts. [00:19:00] And once you create a prompt for any particular field, once the meeting is done, the entire meeting is run on that prompt, and based on that, we automatically update those fields as well. So all those complex fields that never get updated or super hard to update, now you have this, again, this super employee.
[00:19:20] That is going to go update all those things for you. And of course the other stuff which is super valuable is again, once you have all these external meetings in place, Fellow does a bunch of other stuff that, that is relevant too. It makes it really easy to share this information. So for example, if you want all your sales conversations to be accessible by everybody in your company, but say all your CSM conversations are only going to be accessible by a subset of the company, you can do those things.
[00:19:48] You can ask it questions, so if you wanted to say, of all the sales calls I had last week, what were the top three objections that I had? These are questions that you can ask. Again, super smart employee, goes to all of your [00:20:00] meetings, and you can ask it anything, and it's just gonna automatically do all those things that you never liked doing anyway, but it's just gonna do them automatically, without
[00:20:08] I'm pretty sure as listeners and some of you are in sales right now are saying to yourself, well, this sounds fantastic. I hate doing all the updates. I hate taking my notes. I hate doing all these things. And the word hate is probably pretty commonly used that they don't like doing it. They like focusing on their job.
[00:20:21] And, I'm just thinking from the perspective of a consultant, also, the consultant having all this information organized. And I love this cool thing of pre prompts that runs through after all of your meetings Hey. Here's a prompt, pull out this information.
[00:20:34] Yeah, no, you reminded me of something else that is incredibly valuable. So the other thing we do is we do this thing called a pre meeting brief. This is super powerful. So we'll pull the information from HubSpot and so that you can have that visible during the meeting. But more than that, we will consume the conversations that you've had previously.
[00:20:55] Say it's a client and certain, recurring cadence. Maybe it's not a recurring meeting, but call it, [00:21:00] you meet them once a quarter, you have different, thresholds. Fellow will actually send you an email and say, Hey, here's what you talked about last time. But, and this is the part that I love the most, it will say that this is what we recommend you follow up on this time.
[00:21:15] And this stuff is really good. So, it will be something like, the last time you talked to Noah he described this project, but It didn't seem to have that much detail. Maybe you want to ask him to describe that in a bit more detail this time. So, again, it's not like the, hey, the super obvious stuff, but it'll actually give you those sorts of insights as well.
[00:21:36] It really feels like you get superpowers.
[00:21:38] You do get superpowers. It's pretty awesome. Especially so it goes above and beyond just simply telling you to your point summarizing the meeting you just had, but also prepping you for the next meeting coming up and then also making sure it's asking. It's fantastic.
[00:21:52] I love the idea that you can actually pre prompt. So you can actually have a pull the information you want. All of this is pretty fantastic because I know a lot of people are probably [00:22:00] familiar with the whole call recording world and the players in that space. And, but this is truly, I love the position of an AI meeting assistant.
[00:22:06] I love the position of the AI chief of staff. Because if you think to yourself, what does everyone want? That's what they want. And imagine everyone in your organization have an AI chief of staff. And it sounds like that's exactly what you guys have built. So, one big thing I know people have concerns about is privacy.
[00:22:21] The, they have privacy, they have security concerns, and especially around note taking, that needs to take place. How do you guys address this in the marketplace with your solution?
[00:22:33] Yeah, this is something that I think about a lot and more and more as these tools become more widely adopted, they just become a lot more relevant. I think the, over the last, call it, 2023, 2024, these were all really cool, shiny objects, right? And so everybody wanted to trial them. And if you remember in 2022, we went through this software recession.
[00:22:59] Maybe it [00:23:00] extended it a little into 2023, where companies everywhere were like, we overspent, we have too many tools, we're just consolidating. That's the name of the game. CFOs, basically, acted as CF nos, and they went in and they cut a whole bunch of things. And then the AI wave started, and so all of a sudden companies were starting to buy things again.
[00:23:19] And It was such a period of cutting that then when they started to buy things again, they created these experimental budgets. And experimental budgets were exactly that, experimental. So you had more leeway to go do things, and the whole movement started again. Everybody could sign up for different things, and as they started to sign up for different things, all of a sudden you got to a point where you're in this meeting, And it's an internal meeting.
[00:23:45] But in that internal meeting, there's three different bots. And one of them belongs to an employee that's no longer there anymore. And you can't figure out how to get it to not come to your meetings.
[00:23:56] We've all experienced that before.
[00:23:58] yeah. And then, [00:24:00] once the, the meeting, or you have a situation where you have a meeting and you forget that there's this person on the invite.
[00:24:07] And you talk about sensitive things that you didn't want them to hear and then this bot then emails everybody, including that person that you talked about. Or, the bot's there, you forget that it's there, you're having a conver a meeting, a conversation before the official beginning of the meeting.
[00:24:24] When the other people come, you stop talking about that other topic, but it turns out that everybody now gets access. There is a whole bunch of stuff. We've solved these things with email and Slack. A lot of places, for example, for Slack, they automatically delete conversations after two months.
[00:24:40] And there's a reason why they do things like this. Partially it's because you don't know about the ticking time bombs, right? Is in the record, what do you actually want on the record? And so on and so forth. So, these are all just major problems. And if you think about the evolution of this space and, note [00:25:00] takers and call recorders and things like that, some of the early companies in this space were all, primarily built for sales audiences, right?
[00:25:07] the gongs the choruses. And when you're thinking about sales conversations, privacy and security matters, but it doesn't matter in the same way, right? If you're recording a sales conversation that an AE is doing a demo for a customer, worst case scenario, someone else has access to that.
[00:25:24] It's not the end of the world, right? But, if all of a sudden, this call recorder is going to be in your executive team meeting where you're talking about strategy, maybe your public company, you're talking about an acquisition, maybe, it's going to your one on one meeting or your HR meeting.
[00:25:40] And, maybe you are the leader of the company and thinking, Well, for me, it doesn't matter because I'm really good and, I make sure that I, only have it in the places I need it. But the problem is, once everybody in your company has access, how are you going to control all the people in your company and what's in the record?
[00:25:57] It is literally a ticking time bomb waiting [00:26:00] to happen, right? Across the company. You don't know where the data is going, how it's going, where it's getting shared with. And here's a fun fact for you. One of the things that is true about the vast majority of companies, arguably all companies, is that there's more data in the conversations that people have than any other source within that company.
[00:26:19] So all of a sudden you have all, the biggest data source in your company. Effectively unprotected and it's if you brought someone off the street And you said, Hey, you, I don't know you that well, but you seem like a nice person. Why don't you come to our company? And you can literally walk into any room you want and listen in on anything you want and go nuts, right?
[00:26:41] So this is like the, we call it the wild west of bots and AI adoption. So this is something that we really care about, because again, if you think about our mission is to be this AI. Meeting assistant for the whole company, for all the conversations. And this stuff matters a lot more for internal meetings.
[00:26:59] So there's a bunch of [00:27:00] things that we do on, in this regard. One is we give you extreme control. So for example, if you as a CEO are thinking or the, head of security are thinking that I don't want any conversation where one of my lawyers is present to be recorded. Basic concept.
[00:27:17] one right there, by the way.
[00:27:19] Yeah, so, so this is, so that automatically. Okay, great. That can be a rule in your company. I want every meeting with more than three people to automatically be recorded. I don't want for our one on one meetings, I don't actually want a video recording of the whole thing. I just want it to take notes and tell me what the action items are.
[00:27:39] For my board meeting I just wanted to have low fidelity notes, talk about the general topics discussed. I don't want any record of anything I want it gone. For my executive staff meeting, I want the records, but I want it to be auto deleted after three months.
[00:27:55] Interesting. I'm following where your thread is going here. So, in other words, what you're doing to [00:28:00] organizations is giving them the ability to control the amount of information is collecting the amount of notes is taken. And who is this taking notes for? Because I know from personal experience my note takers will come on.
[00:28:10] There is no. Delineation, it's everything or nothing.
[00:28:14] Yeah, exactly. So it gives you this level of control, and almost think of it as the different modalities, right? Again, if you had the super smart chief of staff that came to all your meetings they would know. When you're talking about, certain things, they would know not to put that in the record, right?
[00:28:28] And so, that, that's really the way that Fellow behaves. We have the ability for you to go on the record or off the record. Say you said some things that were on the record and you changed your mind after the fact. We have amazing redaction features that allow you to go in and knock those things out so that they're no longer part of the record.
[00:28:46] It's really about giving you full control. And when you have full control, then you can have full utilization. Because again, the biggest data source in every company is the content of the conversations within that company. And so, with [00:29:00] where AI is going, the usefulness of this data is, more useful than ever before.
[00:29:05] And, so the first step in order to get there is, we have, you have to have a system that is super secure, gives you the controls and the privacy so that people know exactly what's happening.
[00:29:17] so, Aydin, on this thread that we're pulling here at this moment, where do you suppose the future of meetings and collaborations headed?
[00:29:25] Yeah, so, think that a lot of this is things that, that we have talked about. But it's this question of, If you had this super smart employee that would sit in on every meeting, hold everybody accountable, track things. If someone else was mentioned during the meeting, or maybe they should know part of the meeting, or should understand the communication.
[00:29:46] Maybe it just makes it super easy to say, Hey, this person just mentioned, send this clip to them. Maybe it's, I taught you something during this call and we can make it easy for you to update your your wiki with that information, right? So that you don't have to do [00:30:00] that after the fact.
[00:30:01] Maybe it's You know after a meeting you talk to a customer, and you talk about a whole bunch of features that customer would want to see in your product, maybe it automatically can create that, product requirements doc so that you could just ship that to your engineers right away, and it's just written in that format.
[00:30:18] So, I think this is where meetings are heading. But in addition to that, again, if you had the super smart person that attended all of your meetings, you would also want it to give you feedback on the meetings that you are having or give you insights or talk about, what may have been missed in the conversation or things that are relevant from previous conversations that you might want to think about again.
[00:30:41] And so that, that's really the way that we're thinking about it. If you think of yourself as a meeting host. If you're feeling great and you're on the ball, you'll probably do a really great job. But, you're not really, you might not feel that way all the time. And so, this is the world of agents.
[00:30:58] They're these super [00:31:00] smart, workflows that don't get tired and always execute and always make all these things happen. So, so that, that's really what I see. I feel like every company everywhere is not, they're going to have a AI meeting assistant or an agent that attends all their meetings.
[00:31:15] But in addition to that, I think there will be other agents as well, right? So we'll work in these hybrid environments where There will be human employees, there will be agents and there will be teams where it's all agents, or partially agents, and partially humans, and we'll all kind of work together.
[00:31:32] But I think what will happen is that organizations everywhere are going to get hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times more productive. And I think you're already seeing that, right? If you look at a lot of tech companies today. They're not necessarily increasing their headcount by as much but they are increasing the amount of revenue per person.
[00:31:50] And so, a lot of that is coming from just having access to the, this type of technology. And and, every week there are updates and, I'm sure you've talked about this with other [00:32:00] guests as well. This is the new future that we're all living in.
[00:32:03] And to your point, I think I made a joke several times on other calls, is, are we really avatars? Are we even showing up to our own meetings or letting Our avatar is going to handle it because it knows us so well. It knows what to ask. I'm not saying that's where we are ahead in the future.
[00:32:16] It's more of a very sci fi imagination. You and I are just sitting on our couch eating popcorn while our other self is doing all the work. But maybe it's not as far sci fi as we think.
[00:32:26] Yeah, there are elements of this in the real world, right? So, when you actually have a Chief of Staff, the idea behind that is that it can extend you. You can, that person can go to meetings on your behalf. It can loosely, synthesize conversations and things that you need to know.
[00:32:45] And so, people do this in the real world, but we just do it through other humans. And so it's not that far of a stretch for us to get there as well with tech.
[00:32:55] Aydin, you've had such a successful career. It's impressive. You've had that successful exit, you [00:33:00] had this successful company, you've done other products. What's one piece of advice you would give leaders to improve their own productivity, maybe their team's productivity.
[00:33:09] Yeah. So I think the thing that, I have found has the biggest impact is just having a moment of. Reflection but almost like a program moment of reflection so that it actually happens on a weekly or quarterly cadence. So what I found is at a company level, for example the nice thing about having things like business reviews, what, monthly business reviews, quarterly business reviews and the like is there are these
[00:33:39] moments in time where you can look back on what you thought the plan was and the results that you thought that the plan would achieve. And it's a moment of reflection, but it's only as useful as if you do that reflection and based on that, make iterations. Now One of the things that I, I've realized is that the same thing [00:34:00] applies to you personally.
[00:34:01] And so, the, taking all these same elements and then just applying them to your own productivity and to your own lifestyle can also have the same impacts. If we just did all the things that we do for our businesses and we just did them internally, whether it's like a Sunday night reflection of the week whether it's like a monthly reflection of the goals that you set in January.
[00:34:21] And, being able to tweak them and think about how they've went it's that those moments of reflection that really make the difference.
[00:34:29] Thank you, Aydin. This is fantastic. Wow. If you did not understand and wonder where the future of AI meetings were going, you absolutely understand it now. I think thinking of it as like an AI chief of staff. I do not hear that term very frequently. I think of AI agents, but AI chief of staff summarizes what you do, because that's what an internal person does inside an organization.
[00:34:51] So whether you're a consulting firm, whether you are a sales organization, Whatever the case may be, having this tool, especially in this remote environment [00:35:00] is a blessing and an advantage versus being fully in person. And I think especially in the hybrid environment. So Aydin again, thank you so much.
[00:35:08] Thank you for sharing your insights on meeting productivity evolution of hybrid work really how fellow is helping businesses collaborate more effectively. And listeners, if you'd like to learn more about fellow app or connect with Aydin, visit fellow. Dot app or check out your podcast, Aydin.
[00:35:25] That's super managers. And just for the audience purposes, what is super managers in a sentence or two?
[00:35:32] Yeah, so super managers is basically this tactical podcast where we talk with some of the best managers in the world. Lots of lots of well known people leading large organizations or people that are in the literature, a lot of academics on the topic as well.
[00:35:51] But really it's about, could we create this show where. And bite sized chunks, you can really uplevel your management skills and learn tactical things that you [00:36:00] can apply to your week. And so we have episodes with marketing leaders, sales leaders, CEOs of publicly traded companies, CEOs of startups and everything in between.
[00:36:10] That's awesome. Wow. Check it out. Aydin again thank you so much. And listeners stay tuned for more episodes of UpYourStack. Thanks.
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