Man Who Survived 10,000 Meetings Builds App That Says Nothing 270 Million Ways, Is Now Legally Qualified to Be a CEO

Somewhere in America, a man sat through 10,000 meetings and did not scream. He took notes. That is either the bravest act in corporate history or the longest hostage situation ever documented in a calendar app.

"I am an executive who has suffered through over 10,000 meetings during the course of my 30 year career," Dave Doty told The Register. "To keep my sanity, in each of them, I wrote down all of the buzz words and business clichés and have built an enormous database of them." Most people who keep a secret diary of their coworkers' sentences end up with a restraining order. Doty ended up with a product.

The product is Executive Eightball, an iPhone and Android app that remixes 35 years of collected jargon into roughly 270 million unique sentences in 15 languages. Note the math: a 30-year career, 35 years of collecting. Five of those years were apparently spent in the meeting before the meeting.

Doty describes it as "sort of what would happen if Dilbert and George Costanza had a love child." HR would like to remind everyone that this is not an appropriate topic for the all-hands, and that the child has already asked to take it offline.

Sample output: "We must dashboard the outputs to enable us to focus on operational directives and break the paradigm." Another: "Drive to cross-functional synergies so we can reengineer the organization and unleash shareholder value." Read either one aloud in a conference room and three people will nod, one will ask for the deck, and someone in finance will quietly approve a budget. Nobody will know what happened. The paradigm will remain unbroken, mostly out of exhaustion.

The app store listing promises users can "Speak fluent corporate nonsense instantly," which is a bold boast in a market where most managers already do it for free, unprompted, before 9 a.m. Suggested uses include office humor, LinkedIn jokes, presentation icebreakers and "Fake CEO energy." The difference between fake CEO energy and real CEO energy is a private jet and a severance package shaped like a private jet.

The pricing is the most honest thing in the economy. The free tier comes with ads and a limited supply of waffle. For $0.99 you unlock the whole engine. Consultants sell the same sentences by the hour and throw in a laminated four-box quadrant as an apology.

Fifteen languages means the nonsense now travels. A manager in Tokyo can circle back with a manager in Berlin, and neither will ever have to land anywhere. Globalization promised shared understanding. It delivered shared misunderstanding, with better fonts.

There is a dark efficiency here. If a phone can generate meeting-ready sentences with one tap, the phone can attend the meeting. Then two phones can attend it. Then the phones can agree to align on next steps. At last the meeting reaches its natural form: no humans, full productivity, and a follow-up scheduled for Thursday.

Doty said he wrote it all down to keep his sanity. It worked so well that he has now shipped his insanity to the rest of us, in convenient app form, for less than a dollar. That is not a business model. That is a revenge plot with a subscription tier.

Ten thousand meetings. Two hundred seventy million sentences. Not one action item. Somewhere, a calendar invite is already waiting: "Quick sync re: Eightball learnings." Accept, decline or tentative. The paradigm, as ever, will survive the meeting. You might not.