Fred Wilson loves meetings. Paul Graham hates meetings. They’re roughly in the same business (identifying promising companies, and helping them realize their promise), and I’ve never met someone who reads one or the other and not both.
So what’s the deal?
Meetings are misunderstood. They’re not just the default response when people aren’t sure what to do next—they’re also proof that, for all attendees, it’s better to deal with the interruption, inconvenience, and inefficiency, than to do the next best thing.
In other words, meetings are a great tool for anyone who wants to defer to other people’s judgment about what they should be doing next. If you can afford to spend all of your time in meetings with potential clients and joint venture partners, it’s because every one of those constituents think they’ll get more value out of the meeting than they put into it.
It’s easy to see why someone would want to spend half an hour with Fred Wilson. It’s not as easy to see why he’d spend half an hour with anyone else.
My guess is that the average meeting at that level is a waste of time, and that given enough time to research each prospective meeter, he’d turn most of them down. (He cites a 70% ‘success’ rate, but that seems to be the number of meetings that are worth something, not worth enough.) But those meetings bring in investment prospects and unique information, two of the three things a VC needs (the third is cash, and there’s no way Union Square Ventures has any trouble raising that on the terms they want).
For the rest of us, meetings are a simple measure of whether or not we’re doing something sensible, according to people who know us. If your email to Fred Wilson, your target acquirer, or your favorite possible client results in a meeting, it’s evidence that they expect the meeting to be worth something.
If you have better things to do, you don’t have to spend time in meetings. But if you’re not sure, use the inherent inefficiency of a meeting to your advantage: if it’s worth someone’s time to physically sit down with you in a conference room, figure out how to make your computer cooperate with their overhead projector, and inconvenience everyone involved, it’s probably because you’re worth talking to—so you must be doing something right.
Leave a Reply