Hi, I’m Wim, the founder of Briefcrate. The idea grew from a problem I repeatedly encountered in academia, international organisations, and, more recently, the startup world: meetings require a surprising amount of work to make them genuinely useful.
Trying to fix the meeting problem
During my PhD and subsequent academic career, I spent a lot of time trying to improve the way I ran meetings with principal investigators, professors, students, and external stakeholders. I was also involved in an international organisation, where I managed its web infrastructure and helped organise executive team meetings.
Over the years, I built numerous systems, templates, and workflows. Some helped, but none made me feel that I had really solved the “meeting problem”.
I know the academic and startup worlds best, and I began to notice some important similarities between them. In both environments, we regularly meet with people who have very little time. They may not have time to read the agenda beforehand, fully process everything during the meeting, or carefully follow up afterwards.
Nevertheless, when a meeting is prepared and managed well, it can be extremely valuable. The challenge is to make that value possible without placing even more demands on everyone’s time.
A useful meeting should not depend on everyone having an hour to prepare and another hour to reconstruct what happened afterwards.
Meetings do not fit into one document
Another problem is the variety of material that students, researchers, and entrepreneurs need to discuss. A single meeting might involve a spreadsheet, several graphs, a Jupyter notebook containing code and plots, a business plan, a legal document, a PDF, and a few webpages.
Often, you only need to show a small part of each resource and make notes while discussing it. In practice, that means opening files, finding the relevant section, sharing the correct window, switching back to your notes, and then searching for the next item.
I noticed firsthand how much this interrupts the flow of a meeting. It affects your thinking, slows the conversation, and creates constant context switching. Avoiding the problem requires considerable preparation: finding every document, adding links, deciding on an order, and then navigating through everything during the meeting.
The material already exists. What is missing is a calm way to move through it, discuss it, and capture the outcome.
The report loses the context
There is also a mismatch between meeting preparation and the final meeting report. The preparation may contain links, figures, questions, and background information. The report is usually reduced to a short list of decisions and action points.
A report should, of course, be clear, lean, and concise. But when too much context disappears, people later have to dig through old documents to understand why a decision was made or what evidence was discussed.
The preparation and the report are therefore not really separate objects. They are the beginning and end of the same process, with the actual conversation connecting them.
What I’m building
That is how the vision for Briefcrate emerged. Briefcrate aims to sit between the places where your documents live and the places where your meeting outcomes need to go.
It is not intended to replace spreadsheets, notebooks, slide decks, document editors, or knowledge bases. Instead, it provides a container around them: one meeting flow in which you can organise the relevant material, present it, add notes, and retain the context behind the resulting decisions.
The output might be a concise meeting report, several reports for different audiences, or structured decisions and actions stored in a tool such as Notion. The important part is that the useful context can travel from preparation, through the meeting, into the final record.
Today, August 9, 2026, Briefcrate is prototype software. It already performs some of these tasks well, while other parts are still taking shape. My goal is to develop it together with a community of students, researchers, and entrepreneurs who recognise these problems.
I do not want to add features simply because meeting software is expected to have them. I want to learn which parts genuinely make meetings calmer, more focused, and more useful.
Why the name Briefcrate?
While looking for a name for my dream meeting software, I had words such as briefing, briefcase, and beer crate floating around in my head.
I am Belgian, based near Antwerp, and, as stereotypical as it may sound, I enjoy beer. Somewhere among those words, Briefcrate was born. I liked the image of putting all your documents into one crate and turning them into a clear briefing.
I do not remember whether alcohol was involved when I chose the name. Some people around me believe it probably was. I will leave that question unresolved.
If these problems sound familiar, I would love to hear how you prepare for meetings today, what tends to interrupt them, and what information gets lost afterwards.