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Launch HN: Zynq (YC W20) – Book meetings instantly with your team

93 points by zerzar ↗ HN
Zerzar & David here from Zynq - we built a calendar extension for Google Calendar to help you easily book meetings with your colleagues, even if they are spread across timezones. You can check it out here: https://zynq.io/remote

Both of us worked on G Suite and quit last year because we felt enterprise calendars really needed an upgrade and they weren’t a strategic priority for Google/Microsoft. As a product manager, I spent a bunch of time organizing meetings and moving them around which was probably the least valuable thing I could have been doing. David, as an engineer, would frequently get interrupted by meetings people would schedule in the middle of his day when he was trying to get work done.

We built Zynq to make scheduling intuitive: just tell us who you want to meet & how long you want your meeting to be and we’ll find the best time that works for everyone. Our algorithm looks for open slots during work hours where everyone is free in their timezone & not out for lunch. We rank these slots via a scoring algorithm which prioritizes focus time for everyone invited & picks the top slot. We then create the meeting and automatically add a Zoom/Hangouts link so you never need to set that up manually again.

We are launching this for free given the current WFH situation to help teams move faster, but we also have a separate paid product that optimizes for meeting room utilization and that’s how we make money. We don’t plan to charge for this version, but may release paid features on top in the future geared toward larger enterprises. Our goal is to build a complete end-to-end meeting solution for smart offices including meeting room tablet software, guest check-in experience, and an analytics back-end which helps plan future office space.

Our long term vision is to automate away the many boring tasks you do at work so you can focus on the creative aspects of your job. We hope this is a step in that direction - please let us know your honest feedback and how we can improve!

94 comments

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rjsw
Which HDL do you use ?
raymondgh
Looks nice. The hardest part about scheduling meetings as a project manager in my org is when there's no timeslot available for everyone needed for a meeting. I have to check each of their schedules and weigh the importance of their attendance vs my guess of the importance/reschedulability of their conflict in order to decide who will need to reschedule/cancel/skip something. Sometimes this is simply a "do not book/focus time" block which (depressingly) works out best.

It looks like Zynq currently works based on the "available" slots on calendars, which is probably convenient for many meetings, but not really a big deal for me. Do you think any tooling/features could help address the issue I've described?

zerzar
One way we try to solve this problem is by prioritizing more urgent meetings (marked ASAP in our tool) and dynamically moving flexible ones around if possible to free up space. This is enabled by default on our paid version. Would that be useful to you? We don't currently book on top of existing meetings and have thought about a priority system but the challenge is keeping that updated as it would require everyone to rank thr importance of their meetings
mr_puzzled
The company I work for uses Outlook/teams for booking meetings and it works incredibly well. The scheduling part you talked about is almost exactly like the scheduling assistant feature in outlook and teams. Sorry if this comes across as a negative question, but what exactly does zync offer over outlook and teams which have scheduling assistant?

Can you also briefly talk about your traction? Eg- no of users, growth rate and at what stage you were in before YC and currently. Good luck.

zerzar
Our algorithm doesn't just try to find an open slot, it tries to choose a time that's most productive for everyone. This means maximizing everyone's focus time (stacking meetings as close together as possible) and in the future respecting preference as well (eg if you prefer meetings in the morning instead of the afternoon). As far as I remember, scheduling assistant still requires you to pick and time and room yourself although it gives you a view to do so more easily.

We came up with this idea halfway through YC and our paid version of the product has paying 2 customers and several others in the pipeline, including some big tech companies.

athenot
When I schedule a meeting with more than a few people, the number of open slots within business hours quickly converges to zero. So I have to manually make the decisions as to who is most important to have in that meeting (based on the topic), and who will be conflicting.

Curious how an automated algorithm can make that decision.

zerzar
One way we try to solve this problem in our paid product is by prioritizing more urgent meetings (marked ASAP in our tool) and dynamically moving flexible ones (marked "This Week / Next Week / etc.") around if possible to free up space. If the meeting is scheduled manually via Outlook/GCal, we assume it is high priority and don't move it. We experimented with more complicated priority systems but ultimately that required too much work from the user
nogabebop23
Aside from everyone marking their own meetings as IMPORTANT! you could also delete all meeting requests that are "flexible" or deemed not critical - why are they being held in the forst place?
zerzar
We think of priority based on time sensitivity - not importance. For example, if I have a 1:1 with my direct report, it is very important but not time sensitive. This allows us to move that 1:1 if needed to accommodate a more urgent meeting
nogabebop23
We work in resource scheduling and this is a continual tension between "algo optimized" and "manually tweaked". We have lots of very smart people working on both the technology and the workflows, but none of them have ever been able to explain to me how you resolve this in a consistent, universal way. I see the same problem here.
zerzar
Optimizing scheduling in a system that is already at or over capacity (i.e. double bookings) is a very challenging problem and we don't claim to solve that problem. It would require manual user input which doesn't work very well. Instead, we focus on solving rearranging meetings based on urgency and also to optimize for individual focus time
user5994461
If you're expected to gather many people (more than 10), or really need to work with few specific people on a specific project. One trick is to schedule a weekly or biweekly meeting for that.

If you really need it one specific week, send an update with topics that must be covered. If you really don't need it one week, cancel it in advance.

Assuming that you work with regular people or on regular projects. You or other participants will always have something to share, but maybe only 15 minutes out of the hour, it's fine.

Edit: this makes me realize. It's obviously not a software algorithm for scheduling, because this ain't a technological problem. So to make it a technological problem, the issue might be to identify groups of people who interact and prepare them regular timeslots together. Now that's a plan for a SV startup that will disrupt how meetings happen.

user5994461
How about something like "required" and "optional" participants? Also a feature of outlook meetings :D
zerzar
Good idea, this is also a feature on Google Calendar. IME it is not used much unfortunately, and the challenge is balancing the work a user needs to do up-front vs. the benefits. Definitely thinking about creative ways to get this information though!
user5994461
I can tell you I'm working in a F50 bank and it's heavily used all the time.

If someone ain't marked required, then that person probably ain't coming up to the meeting, and they won't tell you that they couldn't make it because they assume they're not needed.

Similar thing as in To and Cc for emails. No need to reply to emails where one ain't in the To line.

Ah. Social conventions in large organizations. An infinitely complex topic. But you're probably not trying to cater to Fortune 500 so nevermind.

zerzar
Thats a good point! Every company (F500 or not) has different cultural/social norms about how they treat attendees (and even cc on emails!)
ska
Stacking meetings is helpful until it is harmful. How do you balance that, out of curiosity?
zerzar
we define focus time as 3+ hours of uninterrupted time chunks. If you already have less than 3 hours of free time during the day, we prefer to give you a break than to further stack meetings together.
ska
I cans see how that helps with protecting some focus time but not with meetings themselves

For example there are lots of situations where 4 1 hour meetings in a row is just a bad idea even though it could be done to protect a 3 hour block. Problem being knowing which situations those are depends on both the type of meeting and your role in it.

I guess the problem is splitting your day into "focus time" and "meeting time" will work well for some roles, but is overly simplified for others. Not obvious how to solve that, most of the simple approaches would involve significant user input.

zerzar
Ah I see, do you mean in case you need to do some prep/post-meeting work for a meeting and if its sandwiched, there is no time to do it? I can see that being a problem as well, we are adding functionality to cycle through suggested times to avoid that situation if the default time we suggest causes issues like so
ska
It's both pre/post work, and focus.

Some meetings need more mental focus than others, so stacking them can in fact can cause the same sort of problem you are trying to avoid with other work (i.e. "focus time").

cycling through sounds like a decent approach.

nogabebop23
How do you handle the fact that not everyone needs big blocks of uninterupted time (example: IT vs Developers) or that all employee-hours are not equal?
zerzar
For our paid product, we allow the company to set priority based on roles (mostly for executives) and also to tune the algorithm to work differently (prioritizing meeting space utilization vs. individual focus time)
nilkn
I haven't used teams, but from my experience Outlook's scheduling assistant just shows you a few open time slots. The biggest problem is when there aren't any acceptable open slots within a reasonable window into the future (e.g., this week), and the only way to make the meeting happen is to move stuff around. This then becomes pretty problematic if you have to start asking other folks if they can move conflicts around.

(I don't know to what extent Zynq resolves these issues.)

ska
There isn't a general solution to this, which is why the typical scheduling tools just punt back to user.

I suspect the real difficulty for a company trying to offer something more powerful is balancing effort/input the user has to take against dynamism and principle of least astonishment.

I don't think it would be hard to write a scheduling algorithm in this space that basically works but everyone hates, for example.

user5994461
The scheduling assistant shows you the timeline hour per hour, with a line for each employee and any meeting they have anywhere. You can even view what any meeting is, if their meetings are not set to private.

I think it's quite good to find a time, with the least conflicts. However given any meeting with more than 3 people in a large organization, it's simply not possible to gather everybody at once, without planning 3 weeks in advance.

one screenshot: https://technology.ku.edu/outlook2013/scheduling-assistant

MisterTea
> please let us know your honest feedback and how we can improve!

Don't name your business after a well established product? Because as soon as I saw Zynq I thought Xilinx FPGA SoC. And many people searching for Zynq will find the same.

https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc.html

sheepybloke
+1! As someone who works with Zynq devices, I was thinking the exact same thing. Also, your name is the same as the product of a really large company, so it's probably easier just to change it now and not have any conflict with them later on.
smt88
Been in software for 20 years. Never heard of Xilinx or their Zynq product. I expect most of Zynq's intended customers will be the same.
gramakri
Xilinx are the FPGA pioneers.
ska
This will tend to skew with how high up the stack you've spent your career.

Zynq will probably be familiar to anyone who has been dealing with SOC and FPGAs at all recently.

crtlaltdel
im well acquainted with fpga development so recognized the name from that context.

regardless of that, they will have to up their seo game if they wanna outrank...

saagarjha
I knew about it, but I happen to have a close family member who owns Zinq-emblazoned clothing so that might skew things a bit ;)
nikofeyn
that's a separate problem and unrelated.

zynq is a trademarked product name for another technology company that makes both software and hardware, and a major one at that. your never hearing of it, which while surprising, doesn't change that fact.

from a search result perspective alone, it is a terrible idea. unsurprisingly, searching for "zynq" will bring up results for xilinx zynq. the name is terrible from both legal and business development standpoints.

smt88
> the name is terrible from both legal and business development standpoints

I guess someone should tell UberConference and Box about that. They seem to have mistakenly thrived despite using extremely well-SEO'd software brand names.

q3k
You might want to consider a new name - Zynq is Xilinx's flagship family of FPGA/ARM SoCs. With Xilinx being a pretty large corporation I'd be surprised if they don't immediately try to defend their trademark.
zerzar
thanks for the heads up, noted!
user5994461
I want to add, having worked in electronics engineering before. This will be highlighted by any people (future customers) who has worked in a hardware software company.

You should really consider renaming the product. Even if you don't want do, your product is going to loose the Google game, it will never popup when people will Google "Zynq", "Zynq planning", "Zynq trial", "Zynq API", etc... and if it does, Xilinx will sue you as soon as they notice.

I've worked for a startup before, whose name was systematically getting auto corrected by Google (it was too close to another word and was interpreted as a typo) and it made it really hard for people to find it even when they were specifically looking for it. In retrospective, they should have changed name. Don't do the same mistake we did.

Obviously that's not the feedback you were anticipating, so sorry about that. ^^

zerzar
thank you for the feedback! we are certainly not married to the name, but simply prioritizing the product/features ahead of it currently
nikofeyn
i am curious. do people not google their product name ahead of time before the final name to get a sense of how searchable it will be?
joshmn
IANAL but the idea of trademarks is to avoid consumer confusion. I don't think there's much consumer confusion between the name of a SoC and a startup offering to manage your calendar. They're in completely different industries.

Now if you were Dell coming out with a Zynq line, that would be a different story.

CamperBob2
I don't know. Given what FPGAs are commonly used for -- i.e., I/O -- using a .io domain for this seems potentially confusing/contentious.

Lawyers are as hungry these days as anyone else. They need to pick a new name, or at least a new domain name. It's a terrible name for SEO, if for no other reason.

jack12
Seems like there's a bit of room for confusion in the stuff surrounding the two. Would you guess "PYNQ - Python Productivity for ZYNQ" is a set of python bindings for this Zynq's API or for the FPGA? Especially seems like it could be related to this startup with its site being at pynq.io, at least until you see the photos of the pink PCBs :)
user5994461
They're both tech companies selling software solutions. It's quite similar.

If I were Xilinx and reading this thread. I'd be preparing the lawyers already. Just my two cents.

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FPGAhacker
My first thought was Xilinx. I'll live.
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aylons
It took me a while to realize that this has nothing to do with FPGAs (or APAC, as they are trying to rebrand). Also, given that Zynq is not a common word, Xilinx really could hurt you bad if they want to.
myself248
Same; HN titles are already notorious for overloading existing words, and this just exacerbates it. HN is exactly the place I'd expect to find interesting FPGA news.
kkotak
Good deal! I think this will require people to block off times on their calendar when they don't want to do a meeting. Not all available slots in my calendar are up for grab.
zerzar
We let you set what times in the week you want to have meetings - no need to block off your calendar!
kkotak
Thanks @zerzar. Unfortunately this changes for me, and I'd think for others, from week to week.
zerzar
Ah I see, is the use case for things like doctors appointments vs more repeated tasks like picking up kids from school?
kkotak
Both, I guess. For repeated tasks, there are times when I need to take over something unexpected. Are you accounting for all calendars in the view or just the logged in account?
zerzar
We currently look only at the logged in account, but we have been toying with the idea of looking at both your personal & work calendar -- especially during the current WFH times.

Out of curiosity, how do you currently handle the case of your calendar being open, but not being free? Do your colleagues book the meeting anyway and then you let them know that they should reschedule because you're busy?

kkotak
At the moment I'm not using any auto calendaring app, but sharing my availability through external interactions. Happy to help further if you'd like. kkotak at gmail dot com.
kevindong
Re: the comments on the name 'Zynq' being used for something else already: I had never heard of the SoC company before. I'd expect most of your target customers to have never heard of them before either.

Isn't what you're describing already built into Google Calendar via the 'Find a Time' tab?

zerzar
Find a Time tries to find the most recent upcoming free slots and suggests them. We try to be smarter - by automatically picking the most productive time for everyone. This means picking a time where everyone's uninterrupted focus time is maximized and their preferences are respected (eg if you're more productive in meetings in the mornings vs afternoons)
pronouncedjerry
how is this different than https://www.getclockwise.com/
zerzar
Clockwise allows you to move existing meetings to maximize focus time for yourself (and possibly team if everyone is using it)

We're a scheduling tool that helps you create meetings and optimize for focus time for everyone invited as well as each users' preferences.

cathyreisenwitz
Clockwise is an intelligent calendar assistant that will automatically move meetings to open up the most Focus Time for everyone. It also has a scheduler which will find the best time for a meeting automatically while respecting users' preferences.

The only difference I can see from the description is the meeting priority inference, which you get with a paid plan. Clockwise is currently free.

zerzar
Sorry for the confusion - our paid product does more than just meeting priority inference, it allows you optimize meeting room utilization and is targeted to companies to help them better utilize office space.

We launched this free version with a subset of features since some things (like room utilization) don't make sense for an individual. We're looking to port over more features as we get adoption & based on demand. Our priority inference also works a little differently than clockwise -- there's no step of marking meetings as flexible, that happens automatically at scheduling time based on your urgency

M13wang
Scheduling is a tough problem. In my experience with Clockwise, my focus time has increased. Best of all, I don't have to constantly spend time to get the benefits.
alex-wallish
If this proves to be a feature that people actually want, what would stop google/microsoft from building it directly into their calendar? How do you plan to make this product defensible?
zerzar
Our main business is improving utilization of physical meeting spaces (via the same scheduling product) - we are building out an E2E solution including meeting room tablet SW, guest check-in experiences & real estate planning analytics. The idea is that this will more than just a scheduling tool on top of calendar but rather a full suite of products to help real estate planning & utilization. This will also allow us to gather a lot more data about office space than currently exists in G Suite / Exchange giving us a moat as well
jayp
Zerzar - this looks awesome! Right now we're a small team in the same timezone, but can definitely see value as we expand our team!
[dead] thisistheend123
Sorry to say this, but considering that you guys have worked at Google, Microsoft, I wonder why you had to go after such a product.

With your intelligence/talent/means, you could have chosen a more challenging path.

Has the bar come down so low? No wonder we don't see more Musks around.

koolba
Isn’t this a trivial feature for Google to add to all Apps accounts? I can’t imagine the logic for picking a meeting time being that complex and “next available” is likely the right answer for most people any way.

Shared calendars could easily be done by them as well for the entire GSuite ecosystem with one off “approve picking a spot” on a per meeting basis.

zerzar
Google/MS can certainly add this feature (for enterprise accounts) but it would not be trivial. IME "next available" means urgent, and that was not true for 80% of my meetings at work. There were many times I booked a meeting one or two days/weeks ahead, so that I could spend X hours today/tomorrow getting something important done without interruptions or waiting for some progress to be made.

The paid version of our product adds another dimension to optimization by improving room availability/utilization. Our goal is to build an E2E product suite including room tablet SW, guest check-in experience & real estate utilization analytics, which would be more of a challenge for Google/MS to trivially add to their suite. By doing this, we are also able to gather more high-fidelity data about office spaces that doesn't currently sit in G Suite or Exchange.

indigomm
Looks like a great tool and would certainly help if it can intelligently suggest changes across calendars to facilitate meetings.

One question I have is all the permissions it requires. Amongst others, it's asking me for:

* View and manage the provisioning of calendar resources on your domain

* See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access using Google Calendar

I've no idea why it would need the first permission there? I'm assuming the second relates to seeing co-workers calendars, and perhaps it also needs to be able to move meetings. However "permanently delete all the calendars" seems a bit over the top.

zerzar
Thanks @indigomm! The first permission is needed for us to book meeting rooms (not relevant in the current WFH environment, but historically what we have been doing)

The second permission is just read & write on your calendars (since we are booking meetings on your behalf). When we request "write" access, it automatically gives us delete access and there is no way for us to turn that off unfortunately.

ChuckMcM
So have you talked to Xilinx yet about sharing the trademark "Zynq" ?
ska
"just tell us who you want to meet & how long you want your meeting to be and we’ll find the best time that works for everyone."

FWIW, I used to have a very competent EA and would tell them basically exactly this and they would work everything out. But the amount of effort and intelligence (and phone calls) that went into that behind the scenes was, er, significant.

zerzar
Absolutely, especially if it required others to move meetings around to accommodate. We've spoken to a few EAs at big tech companies that spend 3+ hours on some days doing just this and they were incredibly excited to try out the product
ska
I bet. The tricky part here is the metadata. A good EA will know importance level of various meetings, flexibility, etc. in a way that is not typically encoded in calendars.
PopeDotNinja
This could be cool for recruiting, too, if it handles sequential meetings.
zerzar
Would love to learn more about the use-case for recruiting! Are you thinking in terms of scheduling when the candidates come in / hop on the phone based on interviewer availability?
PopeDotNinja
I'm just thinking for a series consecutive interviews. Like 3 people interview candidate over 3 hours, or whatever.
zerzar
ah got it - yeah most large companies have proprietary systems to help with that since its not a simple problem at scale.

do you work in recruiting? If so, I'd love to understand the problem space more deeply in that domain!

sivakon
How is this different from x.ai?
zerzar
x.ai focuses on scheduling meetings with people outside your company (so there is still a manual step of choosing a time) and doesn't work great for 5+ people.

We're focused on internal company meetings, and so we can automatically choose a time without any party having to pick between several available times even for a 5-10 person meeting.

ammbo
Hi guys, Ammon from x.ai here!

Killer app you built, looks like it has a lot of smarts. Love the native calendar extension UX. Really slick!

We just updated out user experience for 5+ users if 2 or more are not connected to x.ai and it is proving successful. However, if everyone is connected to x.ai, whether they are internal to your company or external, we find a time for everyone instantly.

For internal meetings, coworkers do not need to be connected to you on x.ai. If you can see their calendar, we can see their free/busy info and we book it instantly as well.

Cheers!

zerzar
ammon - thanks for chiming in! I have not used x.ai in a while and it looks like you guys have added some really awesome features since then. looking forward to trying it out again!
ammbo
Absolutely! Installing yours, too, it has some very clever features!
statictype
Looks cool. How many enterprise users are using the Google Calendar web app for booking meetings? Is it significant enough?
zerzar
Office has most of the market share but there are still millions of employees using G suite to book meetings so it is a significant initial target for us. We will expand to outlook in the future
zackbloom
The real dream for me would be something solving the satisfiability problem of conference rooms (obviously not an issue this moment anymore). If it was possible for every meeting to have a priority the computer could figure out which meetings should be when to allow as many of us to have rooms as is possible. The current system is horribly inefficient, with the first person to book getting whatever room they happen to choose.
floatingatoll
Will this handle the scenario of “I need to schedule a new meeting with a higher priority to me than others I’ve requested, triggering a wave of automatic rescheduling?”
zerzar
Could you explain what you mean by higher priority to me vs others? Currently each meeting has an urgency defined by the organizer (ASAP, this week, etc) and automatic rescheduling will happen based on that. We don't currently support priorities per meeting attendee
nickgervasi
"All our team members are certified organic and non-GMO" Love it. Congrats on the launch!
throwscroogld
Think this is something that fails Paul Bucheit's infamous "why won't Google just copy you?" test.