The Executive Fight Club

Today’s featured startup is reimagining executive meetings to focus on decisions, not decks.

Project Overview

Board and executive meetings remain one of the most outdated aspects of corporate management. While most are now held online, the way they're prepared and run hasn’t changed in a century: endless slide decks, detailed reports, and long presentations everyone must sit through — and then quickly make decisions on.

Zeck is rethinking how board-level meetings are prepared and conducted. The startup has created a tool that simplifies this process from end to end, saving time for both report authors and participants.

All meeting materials are created and reviewed in the Zeck app in advance — and optimized for mobile viewing. Participants are expected to read through documents beforehand, raise any questions, and even vote on key agenda items in advance. This shifts the meeting itself into decision-making mode, where only unresolved or sensitive matters are discussed face-to-face.

Zeck also streamlines report creation: contributors simply upload spreadsheets and briefly describe recent changes. Zeck’s built-in AI then generates a full draft report — complete with natural-language summaries of what changed and why it matters. It also polishes the final result, correcting inconsistencies, fixing typos, and ensuring the text matches board-level standards.

Founded in 2022, Zeck already has paying customers using its platform to manage board meetings more efficiently. Notably, actor and producer Edward Norton — best known for Fight Club — is one of the co-founders and serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Zeck’s approach is rooted in the team's own frustrating experiences with board prep in a previous startup, which they successfully exited. The company recently raised $7.5 million from Salesforce Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

What’s the Gist?

Zeck isn't the only startup looking to overhaul how leadership communicates. Back in 2022, Standard Metrics launched a platform to automate investor reporting for startups, pulling financial data from connected systems and generating investor updates. That platform raised $29.5 million.

What makes Zeck different is its hyperfocus on the boardroom. While the technology could easily support meetings at all levels, Zeck has deliberately chosen to serve only the top tier: board members and executive leadership. That’s a smart strategy — it creates scarcity and justifies a premium price.

This targeted approach mirrors the path taken by Fora, another recent startup that built an AI assistant for C-suite executives. Fora’s tool helps top managers prep for meetings, extract insights from internal communications, and stay on top of reports. It secured $3.8 million in its first funding round.

But the broader trend here is the evolution of business content itself. It’s no longer just about being informative — now it has to be mobile-friendly, readable, and engaging. Piggy, a startup launched in late 2022, took this to heart. Its document editor is designed for slick, interactive reports that still work for serious business needs — from board decks to budget summaries and KPI reviews. Piggy raised $7.7 million and even used its own editor to pitch investors.

Together, these startups — Zeck, Standard Metrics, Fora, and Piggy — are redefining how business information is created, shared, and acted upon at the highest levels.

Key Takeaways

The average employee spends 15% of their workweek in meetings. For middle management, that jumps to 35%, and for senior leaders — a staggering 50%. Yet 71% of execs say most meetings are inefficient and unproductive.

And no — switching from in-person to Zoom doesn’t magically fix that.

What’s needed isn’t just better meeting notes — it’s a total rethink of how meetings are prepared and run. That’s where tools like Zeck come in:

• Prepare smarter: Easily build reports in a clean, mobile-ready format.

• Review asynchronously: Participants review and comment before the meeting.

• Decide faster: Focus only on what truly needs live discussion.

• Deliver clearly: Turn insights into decisions and communicate them instantly.

It’s not about documenting bad meetings better. It’s about making meetings themselves worth having — and sometimes, replacing them altogether.

So here’s the real question:
What kind of meetings do you run?
Could they be shorter? Asynchronous? Automated?
Where do your meeting materials come from?
And what would change if your team showed up already knowing the key points?

Company info:

Zeck

• Website: zeck.app

• Latest round: $7.5M raised on April 29, 2024

• Total funding to date: $7.5M across 1 round