Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write meeting notes as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You run eight to twelve meetings a week — exec syncs, cross-functional standups, board prep sessions, investor calls — and you're the one person expected to have notes from all of them. You're typing in a Notion doc while simultaneously trying to track what the VP of Sales just committed to and whether it contradicts what the CFO said two weeks ago. Afterward, you spend 20-30 minutes cleaning up bullet points into something distributable, chasing people to confirm who owns what, and manually copying action items into a task list nobody checks. The meeting ended an hour ago and you're still processing it.

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Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live meeting-notes app that transcribes in real time, generates a structured summary with key decisions and action items the moment the call ends, and archives everything in a searchable history you can query months later.

Automatic action-item extraction that assigns tasks to the right people and pushes them into your Task Manager, so nothing gets lost between 'we decided' and 'who's doing it.'

A cross-meeting search layer so when someone says 'I thought we agreed on this in Q1' you can pull up the exact moment from the exact call — without digging through Notion pages or Slack threads.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Meeting Notes Task Manager

Data sources & config

Meeting Notes connects to Google Calendar (Starch syncs your calendar data on a schedule) to pull meeting metadata, attendees, and context automatically. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live to push summaries to the right channel after each meeting. Task Manager is a native Starch app. No additional configuration needed; describe the workflow and Starch wires it.

Prompts to copy

Build me a meeting notes app that transcribes my calls, generates a summary with decisions and open questions, and extracts action items with owners and due dates after every meeting.

When a meeting ends, automatically create tasks in my task manager for each action item extracted — set priority P1 for anything with a deadline in the next 48 hours, P2 for everything else.

Build me a search view across all archived meeting notes so I can find every time we discussed pricing, a specific hire, or a board concern — with the date and attendees shown.

After each exec team sync, send a formatted Slack message to the #leadership channel with the three key decisions and all action items from that meeting.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Install the Meeting Notes app from the Starch App Store — it's pre-built and ready. Connect your Google Calendar so Starch syncs your calendar on a schedule and knows your upcoming meetings, attendees, and any linked docs.

2 Join your meeting as normal. Meeting Notes transcribes in real time so you can stay in the conversation instead of typing. No separate recording bot to invite — it runs through Starch.

3 When the call ends, Starch generates a structured summary automatically: what was decided, what was tabled, and what the open questions are. This takes about 90 seconds, not 30 minutes.

4 Action items are extracted and tagged with owners pulled from the attendee list. If the VP of Engineering said 'I'll have the roadmap ready by Thursday,' that becomes a task assigned to them with a Thursday deadline.

5 Those action items sync into your Task Manager. Anything due within 48 hours comes in as P1. Everything else is P2. You can adjust priorities in a single view without opening a separate tool.

6 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog and tell Starch: 'After every exec team sync, post a summary to #leadership with the decisions and action items.' The agent queries Slack live and posts it — no manual copy-paste.

7 Meeting notes archive in a searchable history inside Starch. Build a search view by typing: 'Show me a search surface across all meeting archives where I can filter by attendee, date range, or keyword.' This is the institutional memory layer your team has never actually had.

8 Before your next board prep session, query the archive: 'Pull every action item from the last three board prep meetings that was assigned to me or the CFO and show me which ones are closed vs. open.' Starch surfaces this without you touching a spreadsheet.

9 For recurring meetings — weekly exec sync, monthly investor update prep — set up a post-meeting automation: 'Every time a meeting tagged as exec sync ends, send me a Slack DM with the summary and any action items with no owner so I can assign them before EOD.'

10 When a functional lead asks 'didn't we agree to freeze headcount in Q2?' you search the archive, find the exact call from March, and forward the decision excerpt. No more reconstructing history from memory or calendar invites.

11 At the end of each week, run: 'Show me all action items created from meetings this week, grouped by owner, with completion status from Task Manager.' This becomes your Friday accountability review — five minutes instead of a manual audit.

12 Fork the base Meeting Notes app to add fields specific to your operating cadence: board meeting notes get an 'investor commitments' section; hiring committee calls get a 'decision and rationale' block. Describe the change and Starch rebuilds the template.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q2 Board Prep — April 2026 Exec Series

Sample numbers from a real run

Exec syncs processed (4 weeks)	16
Action items extracted automatically	47
Action items with no owner (flagged for CoS)	6
Minutes saved per meeting on notes cleanup	25
Meetings searched during board deck build	11

In the four weeks leading up to the April board meeting, you ran 16 exec syncs touching revenue trajectory, headcount plan, and Q3 strategy. Previously, those produced 16 separate Notion pages in varying formats, action items scattered across Slack DMs, and a board deck that required you to chase five people for their version of what was agreed. This cycle, Meeting Notes ran on every call. When you sat down to build the board deck, you searched the archive for 'headcount freeze' and found the exact moment in the March 18th leadership sync when the CFO and CHRO aligned on a hiring pause for IC roles — with the CFO's name attached and the decision dated. You searched 'Q3 priorities' and pulled up three separate calls where engineering, sales, and product had each named their top initiative, letting you spot the misalignment between sales ('land three enterprise accounts') and engineering ('platform stability sprint') before the board saw it. Of the 47 action items extracted across those 16 meetings, 6 came in with no clear owner — Starch flagged them in a Slack DM to you automatically so you could assign them before they disappeared. The board deck took two days instead of four, and you walked into the prep call having actually read the record.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Action item close rate week-over-week (what % of items extracted from meetings are actually completed)

Time from meeting end to distributed summary (target: under 5 minutes, not 30)

Unowned action items flagged per week (a leading indicator of coordination gaps across the exec team)

Archive search hits during board prep and investor update cycles (proxy for institutional memory actually being used)

Cross-functional decision latency (how long between 'we discussed this' and 'we have a written record of what we decided')

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai

Good standalone transcription, but action items live in a separate silo — you still manually copy them into Notion or a task tracker, and there's no connection to your calendar, Slack, or the rest of your operating stack.

Notion meeting notes template

Flexible doc format, but someone still has to write the notes, extract the action items, and remember to update the page — it doesn't do any of that automatically.

Your EA or a dedicated ops coordinator

Highest-quality output for complex meetings, but expensive, doesn't scale to 12 meetings a week, and the searchable archive still requires someone to structure and maintain it.

Google Docs + Google Meet transcripts

Built-in and free, but raw transcripts are hard to skim, action items aren't extracted, and there's no search layer across meetings — you're still doing the synthesis work yourself.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — meeting notes, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually join my meetings, or do I have to record them separately?

Meeting Notes works with your existing meeting recordings and transcripts — it doesn't need to join as a bot participant. Connect Google Calendar so Starch syncs your calendar on a schedule, and it knows which meetings to process. Check current transcription source requirements in your Starch setup; the most common path is feeding in a recording or transcript file and letting Starch handle structuring and extraction from there.

Will my meeting notes end up in Notion automatically?

Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule and can push structured notes back to Notion pages. You can describe the exact format you want: 'After each exec sync, create a new Notion page in the Leadership Meeting Notes database with the summary, decisions, and action item table.' Starch builds that automation; you approve and run it.

What happens to action items if someone wasn't in the meeting?

Action items are extracted with the owner's name as spoken or referenced in the transcript. If someone is assigned but wasn't on the call, you can set up an automation to Slack DM them automatically with their item and due date. For items with no clear owner, Starch flags those in a separate view so you can assign them before they drop.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? These are executive and board-level conversations.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If that's a hard requirement for your security review, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap. For most growth-stage companies at 100-200 people, it's a reasonable tradeoff given what the product saves, but it's your call to make — not something to paper over.

Can I search across meetings from six months ago, or is this only recent history?

Everything Starch processes is archived in a searchable history. There's no arbitrary lookback window on the meeting archive itself — you can query notes from a year ago the same way you'd query last week's. The limit to be aware of is on connected data sources like Gmail (message sync is capped at 30 per page to avoid errors on long threads), but that's separate from the meeting archive.

We use Zoom for most calls and Google Meet for external ones. Does that matter?

Zoom is reachable from Starch's integration catalog — the agent can query it live. Google Meet recordings go through Google Drive, which is also reachable from the integration catalog. You can build a workflow that pulls recordings from either source and routes them through Meeting Notes. Describe the setup and Starch handles the routing logic.

Our exec team uses Slack heavily. Can action items get posted there instead of just living in Starch?

Yes. Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog and describe the behavior you want: 'After each exec sync, post a message to #leadership with the decisions list and tag each action item owner directly.' The agent queries Slack live when the automation runs. You can set different Slack destinations for different meeting types — board prep summaries to one channel, weekly syncs to another.