Enterprises Spend $80M a Year on Meetings – and Nobody Notices

01 /The Concept

Meetings are eating corporate budgets alive – and most companies don't even notice. Project Manda is built to fix that, turning meeting culture into something measurable and improvable.

The problem is stark: employees spend an average of more than 500 hours – about 26% of working time – in meetings. For a company with 2,000 employees, that translates to roughly $80 million per year spent on sitting in rooms talking.

Eliminating meetings entirely is obviously not the answer. But helping companies spend less time in them, while making those meetings more productive – that's the opening Project Manda is filling.

The platform works on several fronts. On one end, it monitors meeting size – research consistently shows that effective meetings rarely exceed eight participants, so Project Manda flags oversized invite lists and suggests which attendees could be removed and why.

On the other, it watches recurring meetings – the weekly syncs that exist more out of habit than necessity – and can recommend reducing frequency, cutting duration, or trimming the participant list.

The platform also enforces upfront agenda-setting: organizers are required to send agendas to all participants in advance, ideally including not just the topic but proposed actions. The goal is to skip the "let me bring everyone up to speed" portion and jump straight to decisions.

Even the small stuff gets attention: default meeting lengths get trimmed from 30 to 25 minutes and from 60 to 55 minutes. Those five minutes add up. The platform also sends organizers and participants regular tips for keeping their meetings tight.

All of this applies to internal meetings and external client or prospect calls alike – though one assumes it holds off on sending meeting etiquette tips to outside guests.

To generate its recommendations, the platform has analyzed more than 14 million meetings. The results: a 12% reduction in per-employee meeting time, saving Project Manda's clients a combined 72,000+ hours of working time.

Netflix, Salesforce, and Zendesk are already on board.

Pricing starts at $8 per employee per month for the standard plan. Individual use is free, and large enterprises can negotiate custom terms directly.

Project Manda is an Australian startup that has just raised its first $2 million to fund an aggressive push into the US market.

02 /Why It Matters

Ineffective meetings consistently top the list of productivity killers in corporate environments – outranking even unclear goals. Too many meetings comes in third, ahead of low employee motivation. The productivity drag from meetings is disproportionate to their apparent cost.

The reason: employees spend roughly 57% of their working time on communication rather than actual work – including meetings, email, and messaging. And communication is expensive by nature: it consumes time from at least two people simultaneously, with meetings multiplying that across every attendee. Even a modest reduction in meeting load ripples through the organization.

Meeting time exploded during the pandemic and was supposed to snap back. It didn't.

From 2020 to 2023, the time employees spent in meetings grew by 250% – that's 3.5x. Meanwhile, time in chat grew by a comparatively modest 32%.

The cost problem intensifies as seniority rises. That's why Zeck ([related review](/review/bojcovskij-klub-direktorov)) raised $7.5 million in its seed round for a product that makes board meetings more effective. Its approach: require all materials to be prepared and distributed in advance – with embedded pre-votes that can be ratified or revised during the meeting – so participants can review everything on their phones in idle moments and walk in ready to decide.

Worth noting: Zeck was co-founded by actor Edward Norton, known for Fight Club.

03 /Opportunities

Selling to large companies is always attractive – big contracts, strong retention, and enough inertia that switching requires a deliberate effort once the platform is embedded in standard processes.

But what do you sell to large companies? It's like buying gifts for wealthy friends – they already have everything.

Project Manda offers an interesting answer: sell them savings they didn't know they were burning. Large companies mean large meetings – many of them, with many participants, and large accumulated costs.

Even a 10–15% reduction in meeting time produces meaningful absolute numbers. Project Manda's largest customer to date has reportedly recovered the equivalent of $600,000 annually in employee time.

The broader opportunity: platforms that improve organizational productivity by reducing and sharpening internal communications – not just meetings, but the whole communication stack.

This recalls a well-known story about Jeff Bezos, who once walked into a senior Amazon meeting on the topic of improving internal communications. After the discussion had gone on too long, he stood up and said something like: "You're all saying the right things. But you're wrong about the fundamental issue. Communication is a sign that the organization is dysfunctional. Separate discussions are only needed when natural collaboration breaks down. We need to rethink how our teams are structured – so people communicate less, not more."

The lesson for platforms in this space: the best communication improvement tools don't just optimize meetings – they're embedded in workflows, reducing the need for communication in the first place rather than just making existing communication marginally more efficient.