Fixing the Slowest Part of Modern Organisations, Decisions

Kahve, the name is Turkish for coffee, but the product is about a more critical fuel: decisions. Specifically, the painfully slow, messy, and expensive way organisations make them today.

The Pain & The Product

The core problem Kahve tackles is simple. Decisions inside organisations take too long. When decisions stall, momentum leaks away quietly, time is wasted, money is misallocated, and teams lose confidence that progress is happening, and all the while meetings multiply, inboxes swell, and outcomes remain frustratingly unclear.

Kahve is built to replace that chaos with a fast, structured, asynchronous decision-making workflow. Instead of long meetings and endless email chains, decisions are framed clearly, time-bound properly, and opened up to the right contributors, regardless of time zone or seniority. The result is better-informed decisions, made faster, with a full audit trail of how and why they were taken.

The Pivots

The idea itself did not arrive fully formed to the Startup Academy programme, let’s make that clear from the get-go.

If there was one word to describe my time on the Academy, it would be ‘pivot’. I entered with an entirely different concept called HarbourBear, focused on fast parametric insurance payouts. But as the Academy encouraged me to dig deeper into the problem, it became clear that slow payouts were not the real pain point; high insurance costs were. Since HarbourBear did not meaningfully solve that issue, it was parked.

The next pivot tackled something closer to my personal interests: unproductive online discourse - a super sexy topic, I’m sure we’d all agree. Survey data I ran showed over 80% of respondents found online debates hostile and unhelpful, so a thumbs up for the pain point. Unfortunately, the same respondents also admitted they would keep using existing platforms anyway, and competing with Meta, it turns out, is ambitious even on a good day. Ultimately, two thumbs down.

That forced a more useful question made by my mentors and peers at the Digital Greenhouse: where else does unproductive debate cause real damage? The answer in that frame then became obvious: inside organisations themselves. Decision-making, when poorly structured, is essentially institutionalised argument without accountability. That realisation led directly to Kahve, and something I am incredibly grateful to everyone on the course for aiding me to get to.

After nearly a decade working in finance, I have seen how unclear inputs, undefined outcomes, and elongated communication loops stall progress, often without anyone being explicitly at fault. Research supports this too. A recent London School of Economics study found that over a third of business meetings are considered unproductive, costing US firms hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

The root causes are consistent: fragmented communication channels, no decision-specific structure, and no single source of truth explaining why a decision was taken. Conversations repeat, decisions drift, and institutional memory evaporates.

The Proposal & Next Steps

Kahve proposes a purpose-built alternative. A single clear question. A fixed deadline. Structured inputs. Evidence over volume. Automated summaries. Auditable outcomes. Decisions made deliberately, not accidentally.

Today, Kahve remains firmly in the building and validation phase. The focus is on coding, conversations, early users, and tight feedback loops to develop the product around real organisational pain points.

So, if slow decisions are quietly holding your organisation back, then Kahve may be worth a conversation, and one in which I am more than happy to have over a nice, hot cup of kahve.