Meetingbird’s Super-Calendar Takes The Pain Out Of Coordinating Meetings

Founded by twins Paul (Princeton ’17) and Henry Dornier (Harvard ’18), Meetingbird is the first calendar designed with group scheduling in mind

The average U.S. employee spends 5 hours/week scheduling meetings, while executive assistants and office managers spend even more. Further, unproductive meetings cost U.S. companies an estimated $37 billion every year.

Historically, calendars have been built for the individual– not for the team. As a result, as teams grow past about 40 employees, calendars become so busy that manual scheduling becomes highly inefficient and distracts from mission-critical work.

Recognizing the opportunity for software to reinvent the calendar, brothers Henry and Paul designed Meetingbird with the team in mind. Meetingbird makes scheduling team meetings fast and easy by analyzing participant’s availability, meeting rooms, and other constraints to instantly find the perfect meeting time and location. When team member’s calendars are completely booked, Meetingbird understands which meetings can more easily be rescheduled than others, and presents those insights to the scheduler. Today Meetingbird is available both as a standalone calendar web app and as a Chrome extension that brings your calendar into your Gmail inbox.

Paul and Henry first realized the inefficiencies with large-team scheduling during their internships at Sift Science and Morgan Stanley, respectively. Meetingbird started as a small side project at school, but the hundreds of conversations they had with employees at companies at mid- to large-sized companies revealed the true universal frustration with team-calendaring and gave them the conviction to pursue Meetingbird full time.

As young founders, Paul and Henry’s early mentors have been critical to Meetingbird. The startup is currently part of Y Combinator’s S17 batch where partners Jared Friedman, Gustaf Alströmer, and Kevin Hale have been close mentors. On campus, Harvard’s startup R&D class was helpful in connecting Henry with a community of peer founders at the college while Princeton’s High Tech Entrepreneurship, taught by Professor Chris Kuenne, class taught Paul the fundamentals of running a startup.

We’re excited to have Meetingbird in the Rough Draft family. To try out Meetingbird, download their chrome extension or web app here. Stay tuned for updates!