I once walked out of a three-hour board meeting and couldn't remember a single decision we made. Not one. We had debated, we had argued, we had filled a whiteboard with scribbles that looked like a toddler’s art project. But the actual, concrete takeaways? They vanished into thin air the moment I stepped out of the room. That was my life for the better part of three years while scaling my first two companies, MovieLaLa and RemoteTeam. It was a special kind of hell reserved for founders.
Everyone tells you to hustle, to grind, to be in every meeting. What they don’t tell you is that most of that time is a complete and utter waste. It’s a black hole of productivity. You spend hours talking, then you spend more hours trying to remember what you talked about. It’s insane. And the solutions they sell you? They're even worse.
Stop listening to the gurus. The secret to insane productivity isn't another complex system; it's about letting AI do the heavy lifting in a way nobody talks about. Everyone thinks you need expensive, complicated software for AI automation. They're wrong. I built a multi-million dollar company using a few simple, powerful AI tools, and I'm revealing my entire stack and workflow in this deep-dive.
The Meeting Notes Graveyard
For three years, I was the king of wasted effort. At MovieLaLa, we were trying to build the IMDB for the next generation. We were a small, scrappy team, and every minute counted. We had endless meetings: product roadmaps, user feedback sessions, investor pitches. I tried everything to keep track of it all.
- The Dedicated Note-Taker: We assigned one person in every meeting to just take notes. The result? They were so busy typing they couldn't actually participate in the conversation. And their notes were a biased, incomplete mess. A week later, nobody could make sense of them.
- The Shared Google Doc: This was chaos. Everyone would be in the doc at the same time, writing over each other, deleting important points, and adding random thoughts. It was a digital Tower of Babel.
- The Fancy Note-Taking App: I must have tried a dozen of them. Evernote, Notion, you name it. I spent more time organizing my notes than actually acting on them. It was procrastination disguised as productivity.
By the time we sold MovieLaLa to Gfycat, I had a graveyard of meeting notes. Thousands of pages of useless text. When I started RemoteTeam, I swore I would do things differently. And for a while, I did. We were a remote-first company, so we recorded everything. But that just created a new problem: a mountain of video files that nobody had time to watch.
We were drowning in information but starved for wisdom. We had all the data, but we couldn't find the signals in the noise. It was during the acquisition of RemoteTeam by Gusto that I had my breaking point. We were in endless due diligence meetings. Lawyers, accountants, executives, all talking at once. I was spending my nights re-watching recordings, trying to pull out a single sentence about a specific liability clause. It was soul-crushing. I knew there had to be a better way.
My AI-Powered Rebellion
I didn't need another app. I needed a system. A system that would be invisible, that would work for me in the background, and that would give me the one thing I craved: clarity.
My journey into AI wasn't about chasing the latest shiny object. It was born out of pure desperation. I started tinkering. I’m an angel investor in over 200 companies, including some names you might recognize like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Scale AI. I had a front-row seat to the AI revolution, but I wasn't using it to solve my own biggest problem.
I started with a simple script. A little piece of code that would take a meeting recording, run it through a transcription API, and email me the text. The first time it worked, it felt like magic. I had a searchable, text-based record of a one-hour meeting, ten minutes after it ended. No more re-watching videos at 2x speed.
But that was just the beginning. Transcription was great, but it was still just a wall of text. The real breakthrough came when I started layering on more AI.
Here’s my entire, ridiculously simple stack. This is the system I use to this day. It costs me less than a fancy dinner in San Francisco each month, and it saves me at least 10 hours a week.
1. The Automated Scheduler
Problem: The endless email chain of '"What time works for you?"' is a special kind of torture. It can take a dozen emails to schedule one 30-minute call.
Solution: An AI scheduling assistant. I use one that plugs directly into my calendar. I give it simple instructions in plain English, like: "Find a 30-minute slot for me and Sahin next week, avoiding Monday." It handles the rest. It checks my availability, emails the other person with options, and sends the calendar invite once a time is confirmed. It has saved me from the brink of insanity more times than I can count.
2. The AI Meeting Recorder & Transcriber
Problem: Taking notes is a distraction. Recording meetings creates a video backlog you'll never watch.
Solution: An AI-powered meeting bot. This is the heart of my system. It automatically joins my Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls. It records, transcribes, and, most importantly, understands the conversation.
This isn't just a dumb transcription. The AI I use can identify different speakers, understand context, and even pick up on sentiment. The transcript is just the raw material. The real magic is what comes next.
3. The AI Summarizer & Action Item Extractor
Problem: A 10,000-word transcript of a one-hour meeting is almost as useless as no notes at all. You need the highlights, the decisions, the actions.
Solution: This is where I use the power of large language models, the same kind of tech behind ChatGPT. I have a script that takes the raw transcript and runs it through a series of prompts. Here’s what it generates, automatically, within minutes of the meeting ending:
- A 5-bullet point summary: The absolute key takeaways. If I read nothing else, I read this.
- A list of all action items: The AI is surprisingly good at this. It looks for phrases like "I will follow up on..." or "We need to decide..." and assigns the task to the person who said it.
- A list of key decisions made: No more ambiguity. The AI pulls out the exact moments a decision was reached.
- A "curiosity" section: This is my secret weapon. I prompted the AI to find moments of disagreement, confusion, or interesting questions that were left unanswered. This is often where the most valuable insights are hiding.
The Result: A Multi-Million Dollar Workflow
When we were building RemoteTeam, this system was our superpower. We were a small team competing with giants. We couldn't afford to waste time. While our competitors were stuck in meetings about meetings, we were executing.
I remember one specific instance. We were negotiating a major partnership. The deal was complex, with a dozen moving parts. After a two-hour call with their team, my AI system delivered the summary and action items to my inbox before their team had even left the conference room. I had a clear list of what we agreed to, what they needed to provide, and where the sticking points were. I was able to send a follow-up email that was so clear and concise that it completely streamlined the rest of the negotiation. We closed that deal a week later. It was worth seven figures to our bottom line.
This isn't about being lazy. It's about being smart. It's about augmenting your own intelligence with the power of AI. It's about focusing your energy on the things that actually matter: making decisions, building relationships, and creating value. Not on the soul-crushing administrative drudgery that burns out so many founders.
Stop Wasting Your Life in Meetings
I’m not selling you anything. I’m giving you a playbook that has been battle-tested in the trenches of Silicon Valley. You don’t need a team of data scientists. You don’t need a six-figure software budget. You need a few simple tools and the will to break free from the old, broken way of working.
I’ve made 200 angel investments. I’ve seen inside hundreds of companies. And I can tell you that the ones who succeed are the ones who are ruthless about their time. They understand that their attention is their most valuable asset, and they guard it fiercely.
Your time is a non-renewable resource. Stop letting it be consumed by the black hole of meetings. Start using AI to reclaim it. Start building your own invisible system, your own productivity superpower. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve when you’re not buried in meeting notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How has this view evolved over time?
My thinking on most topics has changed significantly over the years. Early in my career, I held many conventional views that experience proved wrong. I try to update my beliefs when the evidence changes.
What experience informs this perspective?
This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 200+ startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.
What's the most common pushback you get on this?
People often push back by citing exceptions or edge cases. And they're usually right that exceptions exist. But building a strategy around exceptions rather than patterns is a losing game for most founders.
How can I apply this thinking to my own situation?
Start by identifying the core principle behind the opinion, not the specific example. Then ask yourself: does this principle apply to my context? If yes, test it in a small, low-risk way before going all in.