Board Meeting Prep Hasn't Changed in a Century. This Fixes That.

01 /The Concept

Board and executive leadership meetings are a structural part of running any company. They require multi-page reports and dense presentations that participants are expected to absorb and then immediately act on.

The underlying procedure hasn't changed much in a hundred years. Meetings have moved online – but the content, the process, and the time lost preparing for and sitting through them remain exactly the same.

Zeck is tackling the mechanics of how board and executive meetings are prepared and run.

All materials are prepared in advance inside the Zeck app, where every participant can review them before the meeting. The interface is explicitly designed for comfortable reading on a phone screen.

The goal: everyone arrives having already read everything, with questions already formed. The meeting itself becomes a real discussion of what actually needs to be discussed in person – not a read-along of the deck.

Participants can even cast preliminary votes on agenda items inside the app before the meeting, then confirm or revise their position once the room comes together.

Preparing the materials is also substantially easier. Authors paste in data tables and note the key changes since the last period. The platform's AI expands those inputs into a full draft report – analyzing the numbers, calling out what changed, and flagging what readers should pay attention to. The AI flags these points and incorporates them into the draft.

Authors can edit the draft directly inside the app, with the AI fixing typos, factual inconsistencies, and formatting along the way. An "Optimize content" button lets authors run the draft through another pass – clean up, refine, review, repeat.

Founded in 2022, Zeck already has real customers using it for live board and leadership meetings.

One notable detail: actor and producer Edward Norton – known widely for his role in Fight Club – is a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer. Norton and his partners previously built and sold a crowdfunding platform, and Zeck grew out of what they describe as their "harrowing experience" running board meetings at that earlier startup.

Zeck just raised its first $7.5M, backed by Salesforce Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

02 /Why It Matters

Standard Metrics, [covered here](/review/prozrachnost-na-avtopilote) in early 2022, addressed a related problem: making startup reporting to investors simpler, more transparent, and current. It can pull data automatically from connected financial systems and generate reports and conclusions on its own. That startup raised $29.5M.

Zeck's core technology could in principle be applied to any kind of meeting. But the company has chosen to focus specifically on the highest-stakes tier – board and C-suite meetings. That might look like an artificial constraint.

It is artificial. But it also justifies a higher price point. This isn't for everyone – it's for the people at the top.

Fora, [covered here](/review/pust-i-menshe-no-zato-dorozhe) last February, took the same altitude. They built an AI assistant specifically for C-suite executives – CEOs, COOs, CTOs, and their peers. Meeting prep is one of its functions, alongside surfacing problems and insights from internal correspondence and incoming reports. Fora raised $3.8M in its first round.

The more broadly interesting trend visible in Zeck, though, is the transformation of content format. Documents need to become more contemporary – optimized for phone screens, simpler to engage with, and structured for decision-making rather than passive reading.

Piggy, [covered previously](/review/nezametnoe-izmenenie-na-mnogie-milliardy) in late 2022, is building an editor for exactly this type of document and raised $7.7M in its first round. The overlap with Zeck is real – Piggy's template library already includes board presentation templates, departmental budget reports, employee KPI dashboards, and market research reports. The founders even sent their investor pitch in Piggy's own format – and it worked.

03 /Opportunities

On average, employees spend 15% of their working time in meetings. That figure climbs with seniority: middle management loses 35% of their time to meetings; senior leadership, 50%.

And 71% of executives above the front-line level say their meetings are generally unproductive – whether those meetings happen in person or online.

The broad direction of travel: platforms and tools that make meetings shorter, more focused, and more productive. That includes:

- Tools that make it easier to prepare materials in a clean, mobile-optimized format

- Tools that let participants review materials asynchronously ahead of time, forming views and handling questions that don't require live discussion

- Tools that streamline how conclusions and decisions get captured and distributed to the people who need to act on them

And no – the wave of AI meeting-transcription tools doesn't address any of this. A transcript of an inefficient meeting is a useless document. Everyone still wasted time getting to and sitting through it. The problem isn't the lack of a record; it's the meeting itself.

Zeck and Standard Metrics are moving in a more useful direction. Layer on more engaging presentation aesthetics à la Piggy, and you have a genuinely compelling product.

The more productive frame for building in this space: start with a specific meeting type where preparation data already exists somewhere – departmental reviews, board meetings, sprint retros – and map the exact workflow it would take to eliminate the manual assembly step. The preparation problem is almost always the bottleneck; the in-room discussion improves automatically once people actually read the materials. That's the entry point worth attacking first.