Snowflake, a $76 billion cloud data platform, said earlier this year that it tracked the number of phone calls and in-person meetings it had on a company-wide scale to become more efficient. Now the company’s CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, is clarifying exactly how he makes meetings as painless as possible. 

Ramaswamy runs meetings with rigor. He told Business Insider on Sunday that “meetings are like bureaucracies” and “all of us hate bureaucracies except our own.”

Microsoft research shows that U.S. companies waste more than $37 billion in salary hours each year on unnecessary meetings. Here are Ramaswamy’s tips for effective meetings. 

Rule 1: Publish an agenda

Ramaswamy’s first requirement for a meeting is non-negotiable: no agenda, no meeting. He asks meeting hosts to publish agendas and supporting documents in advance so meeting participants can arrive prepared. 

“I will not go to meetings whose agendas and materials are not published in advance,” he told BI. 

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An early riser, Ramaswamy uses the hours of 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. to read meeting materials and prep for the day’s conversations. He also expects written notes after every meeting, turning each session into a documented process. 

Rule 2: Have a clear purpose

Ramaswamy’s second rule for meetings is that each gathering must have a specific purpose and a clear point of view on a particular topic. He considers meetings to be tools, not rituals, and he refuses to hold them simply to “check a box” or keep people informed. 

He also emphasized the importance of having the right people in the room, not the most people, and pushed back against meetings that exist for visibility. 

“Meetings should not become something for prestige or for being in the loop,” he told BI.

Rule 3: Spark conversation, not read-outs

Ramaswamy additionally treats meetings as a place for open conversation, not for reciting information that participants could have read asynchronously. “Facts can be read offline,” he told BI, stating that meetings should be reserved for interpreting and debating those facts. 

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He also avoids having one or two voices dominate the conversation by opening the floor to more discussion, and he tries to ensure that there are diverse perspectives at his meetings. 

Rule 4: End quickly

Ramaswamy admits he feels “itchy in meetings” and wants to move fast. His last rule is to keep things as brief as possible and end the meeting the moment it achieves its objective.

If a meeting reaches what he calls “glorious success” in that the participants arrive at a decision and the outcome is clear, he tells everyone to leave immediately.

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