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Executive Eightball app shuffles an executive's meeting-notes buzzword database into 270 million CEO-style sentences
Dave Doty says he wrote down the jargon from more than 10,000 meetings and turned it into Executive Eightball, a phone app that assembles it into corporate pronouncements, free with ads or $0.99 to unlock.
Doty’s origin story is a coping mechanism. “I am an executive who has suffered through over 10,000 meetings during the course of my 30-year career,” he told The Register. “To keep my sanity, in each of them, I wrote down all of the buzz words and business clichés and have built an enormous database of them.”
The Register’s headline puts the collecting at 35 years and his quote says a 30-year career. The story doesn’t square the two numbers. Either way, it’s a lot of meetings.
The app takes that database and assembles it into sentences. The two examples The Register printed could run in a real shareholder letter: “We must dashboard the outputs to enable us to focus on operational directives and break the paradigm,” and “Drive to cross-functional synergies so we can reengineer the organization and unleash shareholder value.”
Doty’s own description: “sort of what would happen if Dilbert and George Costanza had a love child.”
The business model is about as simple as the app. The free tier “Includes ads” and a “Limited phrase dataset,” per the App Store listing, and an in-app purchase called Elite runs $0.99. The Register says it’s on Google Play too.
One detail doesn’t line up yet. Doty claims “approximately 270 million unique sentences in 15 languages,” in The Register’s words, but Apple’s listing shows English as the only language. The app first hit the App Store on July 24, and the current version is 1.0.4.
Doty is enjoying himself. In his latest email to The Register he called it “truly a paradigm shift for corporate leadership and my greatest lifetime contribution to society.”
Unleash the value.