The funding story
Before building SESSIONS, I bootstrapped one of Romania's biggest system integrators, Trencadis. We built mission-critical systems and quickly became one of the big players in the market.
When the pandemic started, we took the initiative to set up a multi-company task force to lend critical support to the government. I invited companies like Telekom and CISCO to join, and many of them accepted. It was trying times and we all wanted to help.
As the initiator, I had to organize our first board meeting—a meeting to define our mission and setup, our top priorities, and our means of operating. This ended up becoming a great learning opportunity and the perfect context for better understanding our new reality of working remotely.
I handled the entire process and managed the board meeting from end to end without anyone's assistance. In 60 minutes online, we accomplished more than we sometimes did in 4 to 6 hours offline.
But to execute it, I worked a good few hours to prepare the agenda and the content, send proper invites, align everyone beforehand, do follow-ups and reminders, and deal with all the hassles that come with the territory. I context-switched dozens of times through several apps and put a lot of energy into moving things forward and aligning them.
The meeting went great, but the government unfortunately declined our initiative. But it wasn’t in vain, because I had a supreme epiphany while trying to set this up.
Good meetings are hard—really hard. They require thoughtful planning and thorough execution. People, tools, and content need to align harmoniously. Good meetings require a lot of work, and often, it’s not actually part of our job description.
I started doing some research and found that nobody, but nobody, was treating the problem holistically. There are countless tools to ease the process, but there is no solution to tackle meetings as a whole—not just online but offline as well. There are no systems or platforms to assist us from end to end in conducting our meetings, individually or as groups.
And that is a colossal problem.
But it’s also the reason why we're building a unified meeting system that will empower us all to host great meetings, dead easy.