Board Member

“Joining as a board member, you're coming in, in the middle of a movie. Your job is to quickly figure out who's the protagonist, who's the martyr, what's the plot.”

“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?”

“I think if you're on a board because you are either getting status or you're getting income and that's your primary reason for doing it, not for representing shareholders, then that's where we come in to try to disintermediate that and take away some of the st…”

“And that's why, I mean, my advice you know, when you pick board members, and by this a very, I'm turning something that's generic into a very narrow things, I think a good place to go is find people who've already gone through a crisis. Because to me, people w…”

“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…”

“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…”

“I'm here as a board member as an insurance layer. Okay. If the company falls apart, I will step in and be part of replacing the CEO. And that's basically the entire job, which is replacing the CEO well.”

“Most of the time, board members have, don't have the domain expertise, or the industry expertise, or the expertise. They think they might, you know, that's a problem.”

“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…”

“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…”

“He's going to think about the problems that we have for minutes to tens of minutes, and we're going to be thinking about it for hundreds of hours. So it's like, what is he going to uncover that we haven't, and if he does, it's like, so the, his biggest value i…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“Board members giving product advice.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Any board member can reach out to any person in the company anytime they want and ask them anything they want. And there's no supervision or people have to accompany them or none of that.”

“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.”

“I have one of my MBA is recalculate everything. And I'm like, this is a symptom of a very serious problem, right? We don't trust the management team to present the correct numbers. We don't correct them to do the trust them to do the right formulas.”

“There were times when I was in venture capital where we'd be making investment decisions, but I'd be conflicted as the board member representing the fund on certain decisions because, you know, I, you know, let's say we put in a million dollars and the next ro…”

“The most important thing is when you do join a board is that you're not there to manage day to day, and that transition and that shift is so, so important. If you want to be an operator, then, ah, it'll be challenging for you to be on a board and be independen…”

“And this notion of having a sell by date, it may not be polite, but often board members have it, and if they have it, I'd advise you to understand what they are. And to try and reframe the issue that it shouldn't be that John or Mary is with the company or not…”

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

“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.”

“All of these people who have zero judgment are going to fuck so many companies up. It is the beginning of the beginning.”

“Most often, the shift from the executive job to the CEO job is, you now own the job. Right. Doesn't matter what your board member says. Board member is right, wrong, indifferent, doesn't matter. You own the job. Right.”

“The reality is a C it's super hard because you can't be completely honest with your employees because, you know, at the end of the day, the buck stops with you. And so, Your board members, you should absolutely see them as a sounding board that you can be tota…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“One of the, I think, the personal objectives I always have that I also recommend to the board members is to say, well, make sure that you bring at least one really important question that the company may not be thinking about, and bring one new thing from the …”

“Anyone with an idea is trying to help, and your job is to listen, to understand the idea, and then by and large not do it, right? Because if you have a good plan and a good strategy, you need to go execute that.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“I guess the other observation about a good board, in my opinion, a good board member is that they understand their role in the process, and it's one of oversight. It's not one of execution and management. You know, their job is to make sure the organization is…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“The other way that happens from where the board loses the CEO's trust is usually if the CEO doesn't feel like the board member is acting in the best interest of the company. If an investor ends up investing in a competitive company, if they recruit someone to …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”