board member

“As a board member, investor representative where you have to watch the CEO and the organization make mistakes, and know that that's part of the learning process.”

“Not using sort of your board as anyone on your board as a mentor, using somebody that can take a very impartial view and an honest truth, and you can sort of deep dive into your own psychology.”

“I think the best board member is like your outside co-founder. I mean, I think he's your consigliere. Who you feel like you can call when you have so many issues that you have as a CEO that really you almost can't talk to your team about, and you know that tha…”

“I think being a really good board member can make the difference between a three X and a six X outcome, but that doesn't really move the needle on the economics of a venture capital firm.”

“A great board member is one who focuses on a 100,000 foot level because they can't possibly know the details of the business. And I think being an outsider, they can hold the mirror up to management to make sure they're being intellectually honest about their …”

“I think the best board member is somebody who can help the team be the best team that it can be. That has many aspects to it, but one of the crucial aspects to that is helping founders and the management team, but especially founders and CEOs, understand what …”

“When the people ask me what kind of board members they want, I always say the non-negotiable for me is I want a rational decision maker.”

“The only time you take preemptive action, and this is the CEO not listening, I'll come back to the board separately, you take preemptive action when it's a fatal error. What I tell my CEOs is, are you making a mistake or a fatal error? If you're making a mista…”

“As a board member, you have four jobs, and the definition of a job is if you don't do it doesn't get done. The four jobs are you hire and fire the CEO. You finance the company, because if the insiders don't finance the company, new investors won't. You agree w…”

“And it's not all the rubbishy little stuff that people talk about all the time, like introductions and contacts and all that rubbish. That's all, it's useful, but it's very second order.”

“I think this is a mistake a lot of people make as founders, which is to try to get the biggest names or something that they think is sort of like a brand of a particular board member without really doing a lot of work to make sure that you have the right chemi…”

“The most successful board members are the ones who work with the company outside of the board meeting itself on more of a day to day kind of operating model. Now you're not there every single day, but be involved in the company. And participate in what they're…”

“One of the big lessons that I've learned around what makes a good board member is having as much operation experience as you can, because investors can sort of say, well, here's what we've seen other companies do. Here are some trends and here's some data. And…”

“If someone is going to be on your board, you should probably consider how you select them in the same way that you would consider a partner. In life. Because they're going to be on your board for a really long time.”

“Having the right board members is really critical to the business. They're not going to grow the business. They're not going to make the day to day decisions that they need to. They're not going to create the strategies for us, but having a supportive board wh…”

“I think a lot of people are on too many boards. So even if you are a fantastic board member, I don't know how you can be a fantastic board member at 10 companies or 15 companies at once. I just think that requires sort of a superhuman attribute.”

“Being a board member for somebody who's been an operator, the hardest thing to do is to realize that you're not in charge anymore.”

“It is absolutely essential for senior leadership hires that the board is involved, and that I include every board member speaks with and interviews our finalist candidates, and I need buy-in from them, just like I need buy-in from our leadership team, so they …”

“Without being on the other side of the table, without shipping product, hiring employees, firing employees, I was not going to be a great board member, a great advisor to these founders.”

“When you agree to take someone out of your board and raise a bunch of money from someone, just how long-term sort of immutable the commitment is. I think if a lot of founders realized that fully, they would do more work and more diligence and spend more, more …”

“Learning from my peers, I always found was sort of way more valuable than learning from sort of board members and often coaches, quite frankly.”

“The really experienced VCs, experienced board members, come in to the board meeting knowing exactly the one issue that they really want to make sure that they get across, and that's the goal for them of the board meeting. It could be one, it could be two or th…”

“As a board member, you probably need to be 2080, talk 20% of the time, and listen 80% of the time, but you need to make sure your talk percentage is impactful.”

“I think to me, the most important thing is to really understand the core drivers of the business. And there's a lot of people that like airtime. In board meetings, and I'm sure I talk too much in board meetings at some point, but I think it's about listening, …”

“Board members have to remember that they work for the company, and you don't join a board with For the prestige or the addition to your resume, you join the board because you're ready to work. You become an extension of the organization. And if you're not read…”

“I heard stories about investors who are, of course, board members as well, who kill deals, kill fundraising deals, or M&A, just to maximize, and it's not even material, like, just, you know, because they don't like not getting everything.”

“And so the worst form of board member is someone with confidently held misinformation, right? Where they believe this is the case and this is how this works, but actually it's high confidence, but low accuracy.”

“The more you try and pull the wool over the eyes of your board members, not let them like into what's actually happening, that's actually what breeds distrust and pain and creates really difficult board conversations.”

“I think it's incumbent on board members to really recognize when there are just little bits of conflict on the board or little bits of Differences in opinion. I won't even say conflict, and we should be proactively trying to help the CEO resolve those and get …”

“And so in the US, at least it's interesting that the likely life of a board member on a company in the tenure, I should say, which is probably about 10 years in many cases, probably exceeds the average of marriages in the US, which actually is only eight years…”

“Know your circle of competence, right? And so, if there is a point that is going to be super helpful, and you're the right person to make it, then you certainly should. But if you're relevant, or if it's something that someone else at the table knows a lot mor…”

“Anytime I have an idea that pops into my head during a boardroom, I'll write it down. And then I'll ask myself, does this need to be discussed right now? Is there a benefit of this being discussed with the other board members right now? Or is that something I …”

“Be on a board and have someone who's more senior than you that's been on boards before as an investor, and you can just absorb by watching them and learning how they do things, but that is actually more impactful than talking to people and getting advice from …”

“No, I do think they can. I know there's colleagues of mine who vehemently disagree with me on that, but I do think you can be friends. I mean, if you unpack what friendship means, it means respect. It means love for another individual. It also means honesty an…”

“Well, look, I think in order to accomplish that, you really have to be the board member that controls the board. So if you're like a board member and you're the third strongest person on the board and you have a trust relationship with the CEO, that's not goin…”

“I think the mistake board members make is they say things because they want to, like, sound smart and impress the other board members as opposed to saying things because they know what the reaction might be, and how it might affect how the company operates goi…”

“I think what I was able to learn from them is talk less. So you might have an opinion on a lot of things, or, you know, maybe even if you're younger, an opinion on most things, but you're diluting your own voice by talking so much or opining on so much.”

“Most board members advise the startups to reduce risk in a way where you can increase the probability of success of the startups, but make the consequences of that success inconsequential.”

“In fact, I would suggest that most board members, just because they went to business school and joined a venture firm, are not qualified to advise an entrepreneur. They're not qualified to challenge an entrepreneur. They're not even qualified to help them judg…”

“The reality is that founders are the ones who choose their board members more so than the other way around. It's really up to founders to decide who their board members are going to be.”

“One of the most valuable things on a personal level is you can tell so quickly when the board member cares about the company, About you as a founder, about the journey, and the difference between someone who cares and someone who doesn't is so meaningful to th…”

“When you're a board member, you're asked to approve Or advise on the basis of having about 10% of the data you're used to having as an operator.”

“I would tell you, I think the way I would articulate the goal for you is you should Seek out to build enough trust from the very beginning with a founder where you are their first call when things are good or when things are bad.”

“Board members are also meant to be shock absorbers, not amplifiers. So when the team is in the doldrums and a little bit depressed, or they've missed the product deadline, or they've had a setback, be there to rally them. And when things are going well, challe…”

“A good board member should be a shock absorber for the company, because there will be shocks, and people will be rattled, and there will be all kinds of crazy things happening, and just slowing the process a little bit down, and like guiding the leadership int…”

“It's the most often mistake of board members, which is board members go, look, I'm in this really important role, I'm sitting on the board, you know, the CEO, we make this important decision about the CEO and the engagement with the CEO in terms of what happen…”

“As a board member, you don't have to say, I think you should do X, which is kind of like, okay, like when you're saying that, when the person hasn't asked you that explicit question on the board, that's usually a problem. That's usually a mistake.”

“I think it's important to reward and to praise people when they come to you with information about mistakes.”

“And I think one of the ways that board members can be valuable is just talking people through, because it's very rarely as bad as you think it is, and also very rarely quite as good. As you think it is, of course, and being sort of a stabilizing force can be e…”

“If I look at all the board members I've seen in action, the number that are really adding value, really trusted partners of the CEO are in a small percentage. I think probably the, maybe the bulk are mostly harmless, or sometimes helpful, and they write checks…”

“Oftentimes, we bring board members in who life's only gone good for, and it's one of our problems in tech, is like, we need to bring people in that, you know, have some battle wounds, and like, maybe there was some successes that happened, but also some things…”

“To lean in with curiosity, and then to not let it repeat, though. I think it's kind of like a stuck state, back to that other part, is if you just let them, like, keep asking every meaning, and you just don't hit it on the head, you're gonna be frustrated, the…”

“These people show up You know, five times a year, or maybe a lot more often in some VC board that they just simply don't have the context. In fact, somebody gave me this advice early on. They said, don't underestimate how little your board retains.”

“Make sure that you don't want to be the smartest guy in the room. You're there to help. You need to understand that you're a support cast. You're in the passenger seat. Be very humble about that. Everything that you've got, and when something is wrong, you hav…”

“If you're the board member and the team is about to collapse because there's a catastrophe, the last thing that they want is a nervous board member that is adding fuel to the fire. What they need is someone that, that is going to be there to try to calm things…”

“So the good relationships are the ones that are highly consultative, but at the same time, you know, maintain my distance. I don't own that decision. They do. And I want them to own the decision, not me. Right? So, if they become strong owners, strong position…”

“What I've long believed is that the best thing a good board member can do is. Bring three to five questions for a meeting. Have maybe half of those be questions that the team hasn't thought about, and have one of them be truly useful. So I think being a good b…”

“As a board member, you should really only be asking questions and getting informed and”

“Board members are not mentors per se. They're your boss, which is very different, but still there's an enormous amount of things you can learn.”

“Usually the best board members, not, not necessarily investors, right, but the best board members are ones who, Really know the sector that the company is, and know people in that sector really well, such that they can easily connect said company with other pe…”

“The other truth is I think there's a utility value to board members that resembles a barbell, which is like Fenton, Gurley at the A you know, Alfred Lynn at the A, Roloff Botha at the A, amazing Pat Grady at the A, great, and then your pre-IPO people who are a…”

“I think the mean board member, the median, the average board member, you know, they, they're investors. They've seen a lot of stuff. They'll roll up their sleeves. They'll help, you know, recruit or whatever. But otherwise they're just not close enough to prod…”

“In my experience in sitting on boards, and I'm sad on many, no matter how hard you tried, you never really know what's going, my experience has been, you never really know what's going on inside of a company, so board members are entirely dependent on On the m…”

“The most important thing is pick your board members selectively. You know, the founder who comes in, you know you know, gets 10 term sheets spends an hour with each of the GPs and then picks one. I don't know how you know, You, you're actually picking your bos…”

“A board member's job is not to come up with the strategy of the company. A board member's job is to ask the right questions that might, you know, engage the CEO and the executive team in, you know, slightly different conversations.”

“In the end, people will have wished that conversation happened six to eight months ago, but ever the tenors changed. Everything's changed.”

“In a successful company, there was at least one board member, and typically one board member, that's he or she are the first call for the CEO, and they're in the room whenever the big decisions, important decisions are being made.”

“Unfortunately, I think it's relatively easy to be in the top quartile of that. If you care about it, if you're supportive in, in multiple in both up cycles and down cycles, like to your point earlier, there's just a lot of stuff that goes on when the market dr…”

“I try to say fewer things, but more impactful, generally speaking, because it's easy to fill the time with lots of advice, and if I give 30 pieces of advice to a founder, they're gonna remember five of them, and so I sort of like, what are the, I'm always runn…”

“Board members giving product advice.”

“For, well, going back to, they haven't actually done these things at depth. They haven't done them themselves. They often lack like empathy and understanding. I think they often think that things are more deterministic than I think they actually are. And so li…”

“They're better investors. Also not necessarily better board members, not necessarily better advisors, not necessarily a better bunch of things, but definitely better.”

“And they need a sounding board of board members that are actually, actually using their products and actually have a curiosity to use the rest of AI products and get more native.”

“It turns out that it's more important to, like, maximize the upside than it is to manage your losses, right? So, and the way this changes the role of a board member is, you're not that concerned, it's like, oh, like, some of your investments, like, are gonna l…”

“I think the way a board member adds, adds value is like, it's a function of two things. One is like, how exposed have you been to hypergrowth in the past? And then How much time do you put in to actually understand the context of the company so that they, that…”

“If you walk in and fire a founder or any CEO and they're surprised, you have massively failed as a board member because you didn't have the guts to tell them in advance you're worried.”

“Board members will not intervene in any way to protect the shareholders because of the bad NPS that will come from damaging that founder relationship. That, to me, is one of the most egregious escapes from fiduciary duty, and this is some of the most reputable…”

“The best founders, they don't want sycophants in the boardroom. Like, they don't want GPT-Foro in the boardroom telling them that everything that they do, they walk on water, And that they do nothing wrong. Like, they actually want other adults in the room tha…”

“I think there's generally an inverse correlation between how vocal somebody is and how helpful they actually are. So the person who just has to get the first and last word in and shows up at the board meeting and has to teach you something that you didn't alre…”

“You're not a useful board member unless A, you understand what the company does and how it compares to the direct competitors, ideally with hands-on experience of the products. And then B, you find a way without being a jerk, To keep the company honest about w…”

“One of the big picture jobs you have, and you have very few jobs, But one of them is, if the company is doing something that could have fatal error risk, that is when you at least record a no vote, and you say, I wouldn't do this, right?”