board

“If you are arguing with your board in the middle of the board meeting, you need a mental, you know, some little light needs to go off saying you're doing something wrong.”

“The way to keep a happy board is to never surprise them. Always get in front of them. When you go to the board meeting, there shouldn't be any information that's presented where they're going to look at and go, what the hell is this?”

“I think that boards are very dangerous because all of a sudden you've empowered these people with title and decision-making authority. Now you're, you have argument from authority, right? Like you're, because the board says it must be the right thing to do. Ev…”

“Just on the boards that I'm on, a good half of the VCs that I share these boards with, I don't respect. I don't think they're transparent.”

“And I think more boards should probably have more nerdy Choices like more CFOs, more CIOs, CTOs, CMOs. I think there should be just more boring operational people on, on some of these boards than the, you know, quite as many celebrities and investors, but ulti…”

“This is an unpopular opinion, but I think most boards are just not very successful, and you look at some of the things that you read in the press about very famous companies sometimes, and some of these companies have some of the most famous venture capitalist…”

“Sometimes you need to have your own team sign off on the person before the board does, and then in other roles, you want to get the board's buy-in before you then run that person by your own leadership team.”

“I think they should have a board from day one, and I know that's not a popular opinion, especially with founders”

“If something actually comes to like a split vote in the board, or the board has to go through a formal process to make a decision that kind of everybody didn't already kind of agree on, that's probably a pretty bad sign.”

“Our, you know, provides data points that can be really helpful, but it's your job to synthesize those data points with everything else and with your vision and make decisions.”

“If you don't listen to the board, you might get fired. If you do listen to the board, you will get fired. And I think that's true.”

“First off, I don't think seed stage companies should have boards, I really think that they can get misdirected when all they really should be focusing on is talent aggregation and product market fit.”

“You never really want any one person on the board to be able to block or hold up the board on a decision, and frankly, it's way better to have the CEO driving the board than the other way around.”

“I wouldn't have a board until I was required to have one, because I had to raise enough outside comfortable that they would not give it to me until it came with a board seat.”

“Keep the board informed with up-to-date data, and then your discussion should focus on strategic questions, or maybe it's an operational problem. But you don't want to spend a board going through like, okay, here's the quarterly results. Let's go through 35 pa…”

“The biggest mistake that boards and CEOs can make is waiting too long sometimes to make changes.”

“I think actually it's not necessarily the role of a board to spend ages debating strategy. Often the strategy of a company can be outlined in two or three sentences. The real magic is in the iteration, the execution against that strategy. And so you use a boar…”

“Very few boards are, I think, really well run.”

“Spend more time listening than talking and just trying to really understand the dynamics of the board, some of the challenges and opportunities of the company, and be more surgical in terms of ways you intervene.”

“If you don't see the world the same way, you don't see the future of the company the same way, there's no real way to build trust between the board and the founders, and that's a conversation that has to happen before any other, in my opinion.”

“So both rounds, we didn't bring any investors on the board.”

“And I think at some point along the way, maybe it's series A, series B, the board usually flips over to be controlled by investors.”

“For a certain level of acquisition, that could be approved by our CEO and CFO, and then if that acquisition begins to get into the billions, that's something that we'll want to involve our board directly on.”

“So I tell CEOs, curate your investors, but curate your board.”

“I find that where companies start failing is when boards get overactive and start micromanaging or vice versa, and that's when you see deterioration, but it's really pretty simple, at least in our approach.”

“The board's role, I think, is, besides hiring and firing the CEO, is validating strategic direction for the company And providing some insights to the CEO that they might be missing.”

“Venture capital should really be only on a maximum of, call it, 10 to 12 boards as a way of kind of working on them for these kind of commercial boards.”

“As CEO, you always have the most context, more context than your board has.”

“There was a committee of the board that was trying to find somebody else, and they weren't able to find anyone better than Jack.”

“And a board represents a governance structure. And so there are many people who, like myself, are highly anti-authoritarian. If we see authority, we immediately don't trust it. And so that's one of the challenges, that you create a structure that has the super…”

“Boards at that stage are not Useful and helpful. They get lots of advisors. Like it's not like people sometimes have this misperception of like how valuable a board can be and like how much influence they can have.”

“Your board is really busy and it's not a dog and pony show and you should tee up like, what are your top questions for them? And then have the debate around that.”

“And Neil Bouchery told me, you know, the hardest bit about the CEO job is you've got to build both below you and above you, right? You've got to build a leadership team, but you've also got to build a board, you know, to help ensure your success.”

“If you're a founder CEO, your job is to propose a path and then Rely on the board to help you course correct. So one side of the error is not coming in with a plan. Got a problem. If you're going to propose it to the board, you know, you're going to get a plan…”

“I've sat on many boards. I've only sat on one that has actually provided any value at all out of about 15.”

“And I think as you go and see a bunch of bridge rounds, down rounds, and all this other stuff that's going to happen in the next couple years, like, The reality is founders are going to have to listen a lot more to their board and because of the board doesn't …”

“We were just so busy running the business, Harry, that we didn't spend a lot of time with our board, other than maybe a few people here and there. We could have been More proactive in building relationships, building trust. That would have then created currenc…”

“I do think boards as a company gets bigger and bigger and closer to going public are really important for governance and accountability. But when the company is so early on, it's very, very hard for a board member to get up to speed. You know, they're showing …”

“There was one point where the entire executive team, unbeknownst to me, went to the board and basically said, if Sean doesn't come back in the CEO role, we're all quitting.”

“The CFO suddenly has an interest in absolutely everything. You know, there used to be a time where, you know, well, you're in your envelope of spend. I'm not really going to question it or, well, you know, you've presented a logical case for why we would need …”

“Also, founders who are building companies, at some point it might be good for them to be on one board of another person building a business. You know, I think it's good for both.”

“And at your board, you get one person. You don't get a brand.”

“We gained so much more respect when we went against the board and said, we're not going to do this. We're not going to do that. We'll focus on this. This is my opinion. This is where I stand.”

“Compensation is how boards reveal their real priorities. Nothing else matters as much.”

“Hold is your best time to trade on, to legally trade on inside information, though. If you're on the board or close to it, it's your best time to trade on that illegal by not trading. Yeah, you can hold legally with inside information. It's a privileged positi…”

“I don't really want a more active board. They're not super active in the business. They're not like telling us what to do. They don't help that much, but they don't ever hurt. And like, I would much rather have that than like a really helpful board. I don't th…”