A Mission to Solving Scheduling

In 2010, I had an idea for a startup– a scheduling app that could compare the availability of multiple people's calendars to automatically book a meeting time.

I thought it was completely insane that I was scheduling meetings manually by sending emails back and forth with people who I knew full well had digital calendars that lived on the internet.

If my calendar is connected to the internet and your calendar is connected to the internet, why can't they just talk to each other?

I even had a name for the product I wanted to build: Skej.

That spring, Steve Jobs went on stage and announced iPad. The boutique iOS agency that I was working at in NYC started to get a ton of calls from magazine and news publishers about creating apps for this new device.

One thing led to another, and we came up with another idea for an app development platform aimed at media companies. I debated heavily between the two ideas, but we decided to go with the app platform, and that became MAZ. I spent the next decade building and running that company before eventually selling to PSG Equity.

Throughout that period, the scheduling idea would reemerge from time to time. I would create new mockups, talk to my co-founders about some sort of spinoff product. I still had the problem and still wanted to solve it.

Along the way, it became clear a lot of other people were trying to solve it too.

Calendly was founded in 2013. That at least solved for one side of the equation by publishing your availability for others to book. Today, that business is worth more than $3 billion and is used by millions.

In 2014, two email scheduling AI companies were founded. x.ai, a.ka. Amy, and Clara Labs. They were from Y Combinator, they were both well funded. The race was on to have a robot EA that could handle all your scheduling for you.

Neither of them ultimately achieved broad success, but I was a vivacious user and truly loved those products.

Those were all founded ten years ago. You would've figured by now this problem would have finally been solved. And yet, I am still scheduling meetings via email. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

After MAZ, I co-founded a business called Bounce House. Bounce House was a scheduling tool for local service businesses like personal trainers, yoga instructors. These people were underserved by the existing solutions, so we were able to carve out a tool optimized for them. It had deep scheduling capabilities and also integrated payments. We sold that business to another private equity firm.

Bounce House was awesome, but it still wasn’t built for someone like me. I was still yearning for the scheduling tool of my dreams, but I had accepted that it was just not in the cards. After all, so many other people had already attempted it. Surely there was no room left.

I started teaching more and working on a fintech/web3 company called Allos that automatically moved money between bank accounts and crypto wallets. Soon after, FTX imploded, followed by Silicon Valley Bank, etc., and it became clear that it was the wrong time for that particular business.

But while all of that was happening, GPT-4 was released, and as I began to mess around with it, I actually spent a lot of time talking to ChatGPT about the scheduling tool that I really wanted to make. Me and GPT ultimately hatched a plan for how I could build a tool like the one promised by those AI companies from a decade ago, but now leveraging the amazing power of LLMs.

And so I went and dusted off my old Dropbox files and found Skej.

Skej is a new company, but more so, it is a mission. A mission to finally solve scheduling once and for all.

We are working toward that aim from multiple angles. First, we made a simple tool called Matchly, where you can paste in 2 Calendly links and it will automatically book an overlapping time, which is not dissimilar from that first concept I had had so long ago.

And now we are building our flagship product, an AI powered scheduling assistant that you can Cc on your emails, just like you would a human executive assistant.

But Skej does so much more than just check your availability. Skej understands the context of who you want to meet, why you want to meet, and what matters to you most at any given time.

It's not ready for primetime yet, but even the very early versions that we’re using internally are incredibly exciting to use.

Beyond that, the hope is that you wouldn't even need an AI to go back and forth with your contacts, because if everybody is using Skej, or at least using a calendar app that is compatible, then there really should be no reason for any back and forth at all.

You might ask, why does this guy care about scheduling so much? There are so many problems to solve in the world, so many things to spend one's time on, why mess around with measly calendars?

But here's the thing– meetings drive humanity. Meetings are everything. Human beings collaborating, communicating and sharing ideas– this is how societies are built. This is how companies are built. This is how activism is organized. This is how governments function. This is how personal relationships are nurtured.

Human existence is largely about meeting up with other humans. And so to me, there's actually no more foundational problem to solve than this. Imagine if all the time you spend coordinating meetings was spent actually meeting? How much more productive, how much more fulfilled could we all become?

If any of this sounds interesting, you can sign up for Skej Beta at our website.

We’re building a list of people who are interested in what we're doing and who will get first access to early versions of Skej.

This is a problem that I personally have been thinking about and iterating on for well over a decade, a dream that is now becoming a reality, enabled by new tech that I couldn’t have imagined back then.

We're on a mission to solve scheduling. Join us.

Paul Canetti Co-Founder and CEO, Skej