The Year I Killed Meetings

A few years ago, I hit a breaking point.

I had been running a VC-backed startup for two years. We had scaled from a 3-person team in my living room to a 25-person organization with contractors worldwide. Growth was exponential—but so was my workload.

Each week, I was drowning in:

• 10+ meetings

• Hundreds of emails and Slack messages

• 100x more email activity than anyone else in the company

I had become the company’s default bottleneck. Every decision, every update, every fire—somehow, it all ended up on my plate.

So, I did the unthinkable.

I abolished all meetings in my company.

(Funnily enough, I held a final meeting to announce this decision. I called it—“Death by Meetings.”)

Why? Because I wasn’t just a CEO—I was a high-output individual contributor. I could build, design, write, and solve high-leverage problems. Every minute I spent sitting in meetings was a minute I wasn’t building.

To put it another way:

Imagine having a star quarterback—but instead of playing the game, they’re spending all their time coaching from the sidelines.

That’s how I felt. And it wasn’t just me—the executives at my company were in the same position.

Leadership vs. Management

There’s a difference between leading and managing.

• Leading = setting an example so people follow autonomously

• Managing = actively guiding someone to a specific outcome

I prefer leading. When I build great things, the team naturally follows.

So we rebuilt our company around this idea.

Diagnosing Meetings: Why Do We Have Them?

Most internal meetings fall into four categories:

1️⃣ Realignment → e.g., 1-on-1s, department syncs
2️⃣ Education → e.g., teaching someone a specific skill
3️⃣ Brainstorms → e.g., extracting ideas from a group
4️⃣ Decision-Making → e.g., coming together to make a call

Here’s the kicker: All of this can be done asynchronously.

So, that’s exactly what we did.

Replacing Meetings with Asynchronous Work

We didn’t just remove meetings—we made async communication so good that meetings became unnecessary.

• We improved the clarity and structure of every message.

• We automated Slack-to-Notion workflows via Zapier so nothing got lost.

• We iterated fast—constantly refining our async processes.

Eventually, we brought back just 3 meetings:

✅ All-Hands Meeting → company-wide updates
✅ Leadership Meeting → high-level strategy
✅ Department Meetings → weekly strategic discussions (I didn’t attend these)

My weekly meetings dropped from 8–12 hours to just 1.5–2 hours.

It changed my life.

The Takeaway

You don’t have to follow my exact formula.

But challenge the status quo. Experiment with how you lead vs. manage.

Meetings aren’t inherently bad—but if you can replace them with something better, why wouldn’t you?

🚀 Would you ever try this? Hit reply and let me know.

Until next time,

Ajay

P.S we still hung out as a team a lot - they just weren’t meetings