Why Boom Builds for Async Work

I’ve spent more than twenty years building companies in ad tech, and I can count on one hand the number of meetings that truly needed to happen live. Most meetings happen simply because we never had a better default.

Over time, the calendar invite became our default way to collaborate. Everyone’s day gets broken into 30-minute blocks, often built around other people’s priorities instead of their own work.

I built Boom because I believe there’s a better way to work. I also run multiple products with a small, distributed team, so I experience the cost of that old default every day.

The real cost of a meeting isn't the meeting

When people calculate the cost of meetings, they usually multiply the number of people by their hourly rate. But that leaves out a much bigger cost: fragmentation.

A 30-minute status call at 3 p.m. doesn’t really cost an engineer 30 minutes. If they know they have a meeting coming up, they may spend the two hours before it avoiding deeper work because they know they’ll have to stop. That’s the maker’s schedule problem Paul Graham wrote about years ago, and it hasn’t gone away. If anything, it has gotten worse as remote work has made meetings even easier to schedule.

The teams I talk to aren’t necessarily burned out because they’re working too much. They’re burned out from switching between tasks too often.

Meeting overload is a burnout problem disguised as a scheduling problem. And no amount of “no-meeting Wednesdays” really fixes it if the underlying assumption stays the same: that teams need to be working at the same time to stay aligned.

The thesis: most meetings are information transfer, and information transfer doesn't need a calendar

Here’s the filter I use, and the one Boom is built around.

A meeting should be live only when it genuinely needs real-time discussion. That could be a difficult decision where people disagree, a sensitive conversation, or a brainstorm where ideas need to bounce back and forth.

Everything else is usually information transfer: status updates, demos, walkthroughs, design reviews, sprint recaps, and onboarding explanations.

That kind of information is often better shared asynchronously. With async video, people can watch at 2x, skip to the parts they need, search the transcript, or come back to the video later. They get the information when they’re ready, rather than when the organizer happens to find a gap in everyone’s calendar.

That one distinction eliminates, in my experience, 60 to 70 percent of a typical engineering team’s recurring meetings.

What this looks like in practice

Engineering teams: The daily standup is one of the most expensive recurring rituals in software. On my own teams, we replaced standups with Boom recordings. Each person records a 90-second screen recording showing the actual PR or failing test instead of trying to explain it from memory.

Boom automatically removes pauses and dead air, so even a rough first take becomes a clear, focused update. The searchable transcript also means nobody has to rewatch the whole video to find one detail. Reviewers can reply with questions tied to the exact moment in the video.

A standup takes each person about three minutes, but the record stays there. When a new engineer joins, the last two weeks of standups become a useful onboarding resource instead of a conversation that disappeared after the call.

Remote and distributed teams: A team spread across five time zones might have only a couple of hours of overlap each day. Using that limited time for status meetings means spending your most valuable shared time on one of the lowest-value activities.

We flipped that around. Overlap hours are reserved for conversations that actually need to happen live, while everything else moves to Boom.

With voice dubbing in 50+ languages, one recording can reach the whole team in the language each person is most comfortable working in. View tracking also lets me see whether an update was watched without having to ask, “Did you see my message?” That small question can easily turn into another meeting.

Replacing the status meeting specifically: The process is simple: the meeting owner records the update they would have presented, shares the link in the same channel where the meeting invite used to be, and gives everyone a 24-hour window to respond.

The AI summary sits alongside the video, so anyone who only needs the key points can get the context in seconds. Questions can come back as comments or reply videos.

If a genuine disagreement comes up, then you schedule a short meeting with only the two or three people who actually need to be involved.

The meeting becomes the exception rather than the default.

Teams that try this rarely want to go back. Within the first week, they get hours back on their calendars, while still keeping the information and context they needed from the original meetings.

How we built around asynchronous communication

Building for an async-first workflow, rather than treating video messaging as just another feature, changed what we chose to prioritize.

Recording speed over production value. If recording an update takes longer than typing one, people will just type. And typed updates lose the screen, tone, and nuance that make video useful. That’s why your video uploads as you record, so the shareable link is ready the moment you stop. There’s no waiting for a render. The whole async video thesis falls apart if recording itself creates friction.

The viewer’s time is the product. Automatic removal of pauses and dead air, captions, and a searchable transcript aren’t nice-to-have features. They’re what make async video better than another live meeting. A 10-minute recording that can be watched in four minutes, whenever it’s convenient for the viewer, captures the entire value proposition. Removing silence isn’t just a cosmetic feature; it’s what makes an update easy to watch all the way through.

Persistence as a first-class feature. A meeting disappears when it ends. A Boom recording keeps working. It can become documentation, onboarding material, or a searchable record of a decision. We think of recordings as part of a team’s institutional memory, not disposable messages that get forgotten after they’re watched.

Where I'll admit the limits

Async communication doesn’t replace everything, and pretending it does can create its own problems. Conflict is harder to resolve over messages or recordings. Real brainstorming can be better when people are in the same room. And an async-first approach only works if people use it well. A rambling 20-minute recording is still just a bad meeting with extra steps.

The goal isn’t to eliminate meetings. It’s to make sure the meetings we do have are actually worth putting on the calendar, while giving people more uninterrupted time to focus on the work itself.

That’s the company we’re building. Not just a screen recorder, but a product built around a simple idea: teams should be more intentional about where they spend their attention.

About the author

Daniel Matalon is the founder of Boom (boomshare.ai). He has spent 20+ years building technology companies, including a successful exit from Odeeo, an in-game audio advertising platform. He builds and runs distributed teams from Cascais, Portugal, and uses Boom daily to run multiple products async-first.

Related reading

• The Complete Guide to Async Video Communication
• How to Create Async Videos
• Top Async Video Features for Freelancers
• Boom vs Tella: The AI Auto-Editing and Summary Comparison
• 7 Best Recording Software Tools for Students and Creators