I’ve been in the business world for over 30 years. I’ve designed websites since the dot-com era, built digital products across industries, and collected a weird mix of skills along the way — design, psychology, systems thinking, and an unreasonable amount of opinions about how things should work.
But the one constant across three decades? Meetings. So many meetings.
Meetings where I didn’t need to be there. Meetings that ran long. Meetings that could have been a three-sentence email. I sat through them, tuned out, and moved on — just like everyone else.
I lost my dad. I lost my best friend. And somewhere in that grief, I started thinking differently about time. About how we spend it. About how much of it we waste on things that don’t matter.
Around the same time, I was listening to a podcast — they mentioned inefficient meetings and the psychology that prevents productive change — and a thought popped into my head:
I laughed. And then I stopped laughing.
Because it’s not funny. It’s actually brilliant.
Not because they don’t care — but because there’s no safe way to speak up. You can’t tell your boss their meeting was a waste of time. You can’t raise your hand in a team sync and say “why are we here?” You just sit, nod, and hope it ends soon.
This isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s not bad managers or lazy employees. It’s a systemic problem baked into how organizations operate. Meetings multiply. Calendars fill up. Nobody questions whether any of it is working — because nobody has the data, and nobody has a voice.
I wanted to change that.
Could Have Been an Email is built on a simple premise: the people who sit through meetings should have a voice in whether those meetings are worth their time.
Anonymous feedback. Shared equally with everyone. No politics. No fear. Just data.
We’re not here to shame meeting organizers. We’re here to give them something they’ve never had: honest feedback from the people in the room. The good organizers will use it to get better. The meetings that shouldn’t exist will quietly disappear.
That’s how culture changes — not from the top down, but from the bottom up.
I’ve watched hours disappear into conference rooms and video calls that accomplished nothing. And for most of that time, I accepted it as just how work is.
Losing people I loved changed my perspective. Life is too short to spend it in meetings that don’t matter.
So I built the thing I wished existed. Not because I think I can single-handedly fix corporate culture — but because I believe that when enough people start asking “could this have been an email?” — the answer will start to change.
We’re a small team with decades of experience designing digital products and a shared belief that meetings should earn their place on the calendar.
We’re not backed by venture capital. We’re not trying to become the next unicorn. We’re building something useful, sustainable, and honest — because that’s the kind of company we’d want to trust with our feedback.
If you’ve ever sat through a meeting wondering why you were there, this is for you.
If you’ve ever wanted to tell someone their meeting could have been an email — but couldn’t — this is for you.
We’re just getting started. And we’d love for you to be part of it.
Ready to join us and make a difference?
