Dan Lewis: Founders must own decisions rather than blindly following boards
Dan Lewis · 20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy · Mar 23, 2018 · at 12:41
Dan Lewis is the founder and CEO of digital freight marketplace Convoy. He shares advice on how startup founders should evaluate board recommendations and retain decision ownership.
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“Take the decision and own the outcome of the decision. Your board is giving you advice. It probably sometimes feels like because everyone on the board is often more experienced than you or has had more success to date in their career, that what they say is what you should do. And that if you don't do it and you go back and you're not successful, then they're going to hold it over your head. I think that the opposite is actually true, which is, Hey, they're probably really busy. So they might not remember what they said. They're saying it off the cuff. They're saying it based on a lot of experience. But they're not seeing everything that you're seeing, and whatever outcome happens is your responsibility. They're not going to say, well, you know, I did give you that advice, so therefore it didn't work. It's definitely on me. It's your decision. So you just need to always remember that you have to live with it, so you need to make the decision, and they're seeing this part-time, you're seeing this full-time.”
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