Business Blog: Bored meetings

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Exclusive: Zeck, cofounded by Edward Norton, raises $7.5 million to fight the existential dread looming over your board meetings

April 29, 2024

Edward Norton wants to fix your terrible board meetings.

So, on a break from filming—he's playing folk legend Pete Seeger right now—he sat down with Fortune to discuss enterprise software.

"I've seen the absurd dynamics of organizations," said Norton in an exclusive interview. "Sending you a 90-page PDF, 24 hours before a meeting, and you grind through it bleary. Then, you show up at the meeting only to have the whole thing read back to you verbatim. It's just bananas, it's wildly inefficient."

It's a problem that Zeck, a board presentation software startup cofounded by Norton, is looking to solve. Norton and his Zeck cofounders, Robert and Jeffrey Wolfe, previously cofounded crowdfunding platform CrowdRise together, selling the company to GoFundMe in 2017. The three started Zeck in 2022, inspired by their own agonizing board meeting experiences.

Inevitably bucking your movie star expectations, Norton is in the weeds as the company's chief strategy officer. And, for the last two years, Norton and the Wolfes have been building out Zeck's product, which distills hundreds of pages of corporate jargon into interactive websites for boards. Zeck has customers, and even has an AI product, but they've held off on substantially raising capital—until now.

Zeck has raised a $7.5 million Series A, led by Salesforce Ventures and including Khosla Ventures, and Breyer Capital. Connecting with Salesforce was ultimately organic, and a byproduct of about a year of conversations, Norton said.

Rob Keith, Salesforce Ventures partner, says that it was the right time to invest in Zeck.

"The pandemic-driven shift to remote work has amplified board management challenges, creating a ripe market for Zeck’s transformative solutions to become the new standard," he told Term Sheet via email. "Zeck is poised to redefine how boards operate."

And Salesforce, known for its warm and sometimes quirky approach to enterprise software, aligns with Zeck's ethos.

“It's ridiculous that in 2024 any company is still communicating to its board through a fixed slide PDF versus a cloud software platform with robust functionality designed for this specific mission,” Norton said. "It's like using a Stone Age axe instead of steel. And in this sense the Salesforce DNA and our DNA are obviously extremely well-matched.'

There's a natural question: Why isn't this a problem that's been solved before? The answers are pretty existential. But for Norton, the existentialism of the problem is part of the appeal of solving it—and makes it feel familiar.

"In one forum talking about what makes board dynamics so negative, I described prepping for board meetings as a 'punch-yourself-in-the-face experience,' and that got a big laugh." Norton told me, referencing one of his most famous scenes in the film 'Fight Club'. "I do think that the film’s core existential crisis, that 'this is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time' really does apply to the pain point we are trying to solve. Nobody dreams that one day they'll be a great builder of a board deck. That's not anybody's aspirational narrative for their life!"

In the end, Norton is making an argument that many software founders agree vehemently with—that good software can make people better, and bad software can make people worse, affecting real-life relationships and interactions. And while it's easy to get lost in the shuffle, the fact remains that we can better optimize how we spend our time, in boardrooms and elsewhere.

Because this is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS

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- Transcripta Bio, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based drug discovery platform that uses AI to discover and predict the effects of new drugs, raised $10 million from existing investors JAZZ Venture Partners, BlueYard Capital, and others.

- Edia, a New York City-based AI platform designed to help students succeed at math, raised $9.4 million in funding. Felicis led the round and was joined by 8VC, Inspired Capital, Susa Ventures, and angel investors.

- Klineo, a Paris, France-based digital health startup designed to increase quick access to clinical trials, raised €2 million ($2.1 million) in funding from BPI and business angels.

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PRIVATE EQUITY

- Apollo (NYSE: APO) agreed to acquire U.S. Silica Holdings (NYSE: SLCA), a Katy, Texas-based industrial minerals company and a last-mile logistics provider to the oil and gas industry, for approximately $1.9 billion.

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OTHER

- Paystand acquired Teampay, a New York City-based spend management platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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PEOPLE

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