Board Of Directors

“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.”

“I am never going to be smarter. Then the sum of all the directors, that's never going to happen mathematically.”

“At Trinity, we have internal discretion. We started with working with our board on every decision. The goal there was to make sure they understood what we did and what we're doing to have real support. Over time, the first thing that Was passed on to not need …”

“You know, so the bad, bad governance I've seen is when, from a number of things. One, they let their loyalty or relationship to a CEO who's not up to the job overshadow their duty to shareholders. That's probably the main thing”

“When you go out and you raise billions of dollars, like, one, or some people raise billions of dollars, but millions of dollars, one, like, that company isn't yours anymore. Like, you have to deal with, like, you know this, having a board of directors, that's …”

“The investors are the board of directors, or elect the board of directors, and thus will always vote To lower fees when they can lower fees, because it's in their own interest.”

“The other thing I always recommend to CEOs is a board role is like a marriage. Once you get into it, it's very hard to get out of. So never, ever, ever invite anyone to join your board before spending at least a year with them.”

“You know, the one pager forces focus. If you do like a bunch of slides, like a 40 page slide deck, like that you'd give to a board deck, I find that you can hide more there, but the one page Just demands the truth.”

“Taking an investor on the board, right? It's kind of a one-way door. It's, you can't really fire board members. Or if you can, like, it can be very difficult and painful. Take an investor on your cap table who doesn't really have any rights. They can be annoyi…”

“When it came down to it and you probed these questions of what they were looking for is basically they had, they disliked the business that they ended up building. And to me, like, that's a kind of a crazy situation to get yourself into. Cause it's your fault.…”

“A board of directors that had perverse incentives, a management team that had perverse incentives.”

“I think an outgoing CEO should just leave, should not sit on the board, because then you're sort of curbing what the new CEO can do, because they're now always looking over their shoulder to see if they can take a direction that's different than the CEO sittin…”

“The power of the board is bigger than you think. If the board wants to fire you one day, probably they can.”

“As when you start scaling because that organization is much larger and if you, I set a goal saying, okay, I need to have a ten million dollar quarter. I feel it's very ambitious. Practically it has to be, let's say, for example, six, and we end up at six. I am…”

“When you, whenever you talk to the board or your investors, you're not asking for approval, you're asking for alignment.”

“For me, the executive committee and the team leaders I'm working with are way more important than the board, and I shouldn't say that.”

“When we presented to our board of directors on AI in September, the way we structured is I had seven external speakers come in, right? To give different perspectives from an investor perspective. The CEO of one of the leading LLMs. We partnered with Databricks…”

“The board is for governance. They're to make sure that there's no fraud, and like, it's a real company, and primarily to hire and fire the CEO.”

“Boards basically are there for two things. They're there to hire and fire the guy or gal running the company. They're there also to decide if and when to sell the company. That's about it. And maybe make sure the chairman of the audit committee is smart enough…”

“But I would say that a good investor may create tone of value by proper work in the board, and good board brings tone of value, and the biggest value from the board is that you're just accountable, and you have moments of truth, like board meetings, when you n…”

“Do I think that doing that in the structure of like gather a bunch of investors on your board is the way to do it? No, I think that's really stupid.”

“The one thing I think interesting that was removed but makes sense is some of the identification of board members with the climate risk background. Like, talking about and identifying if there's someone on your board who has this expertise.”

“A six member nonprofit board of directors is the Half dozen group that will decide when OpenAI has quote unquote attained AGI.”

“If we were on the board of a company that kept missing quarter after quarter, and the CEO said, no, look at all the good things I'm doing, we would probably still fire that CEO. Just because You're like, how do things get worse, right? You just take the chance…”

“I've seen that, you know, the board of directors is saying this person stinks and they don't. It's more that the founders aren't listening to customers. They're not building the right product.”

“If you think that there's two, 2000 hours in a year, give or take, you know, that's assuming a 37 and a half hour work week, but you, as management, you're working two, 2000 to 3000 hours a year. A board, On average, is probably putting in 200 to 300 hours of,…”

“He said, I've made more money being on board, on the boards of companies and the equity that they've given me than actual, actually building companies.”

“The budget number is what we would essentially present on to the board. This is the board number. This is the number that come hell or high water, we are not going to miss. And there is some conservatism baked into this number, ok? This is the number that give…”

“The job of the new CEO to some extent is to be the CEO and do something different from the old CEO. Like that's definitional and the, you know, a little bit about that. Yeah, exactly. There could be hesitancy at a board meeting, et cetera, because the Old pers…”

“Not taking money, so I'm not beholden to anybody. We don't have a board of directors.”

“So, so, or when early stage investors Get to this point where there's just a lot of paper gains. We, there should be sort of term limits on board seats, like term limit out. If I get to, you know, a 10 X return and can get you some liquidity, then you can move…”

“If you walk into a board meeting and there's a crisis and you're not presented in a way that's where there's a crisis and, you know, we're doing a briefing for what the crisis is and kind of what our preliminary responses and thoughts are. What our analysis of…”

“I do think it's helpful if you have involvement from the people who have made the investment, who chair the board, who sit on the board, to also be in the business. By the way, it makes the board meetings way more productive when people are like, I know exactl…”

“If your executives and your board are telling you that the person who's communicating those things to them are usually not chief product officer level, right? Like if you are, if your executives don't know what you're doing, that's a big problem. So that's usu…”

“Your voice about what's actually happening in the company and how you can actually execute against that advice is really important. So oftentimes I find myself saying like, that's a, that's really good advice. The product team is in no place to be able to exec…”

“I think your board gives you some of your best advice and some of your worst advice. And about, without knowing it, and about equal measure, and you gotta, it's your job to realize you have to decide, right? And the bad advice isn't wrong, but it's wrong for y…”

“With that being said, there's one disadvantage, I believe, what all bootstrappers have. We're kind of like a lonely wolves, you know, we don't have any experienced board of directors, sometimes we don't have many people we could talk with, and this is like com…”

“And I haven't heard in the mailing board, one discussion about the markets, one discussion about investors and the share price. It's all Product and strategy. Product and strategy. Product and strategy.”

“If the consensus view ends up being that the CEO has lost the confidence of the board, then I think the board has a responsibility to make a tough decision. The CEO serves at the pleasure of, for the shareholders, and the board is actually supposed to be the o…”

“There was no advantage for this CEO to set the target at forty million dollars in the first place. What you should have done with hindsight, is reached out to the board before the meeting, said, what does a successful twenty-twenty-two look like to you all? Th…”

“Yeah, but the reality is a board needs to be led. Okay. I mean, I always tell people the worst thing you can possibly do is go into a board meeting and go, What do you guys think? You've just created a vacuum. Okay.”

“Even entrepreneurs starting company number four or five, six, You know, this is why they should have, like, a board of directors, and they should have people on their board who are actually, like, very smart and strong-willed who will argue with them, right, a…”

“In fact, Titan has thesis to taught or to in fact, not join any board as director also. We generally join as observer and we remain very silent.”

“In general, I would prefer not to because it's very time consuming and I don't want to be restricted. I don't want our investors to be restricted and it's not so much the sale because I think if we get the risk reward correct and the asymmetry of it, it's real…”

“It's generally good to control the board as long as you can. So, you know, if you have, control it with either founders or friendlies.”

“It is worth in those times, like kind of remembering, this is still your company. You are still in charge. That just because someone came in and gave you some money and is your boss in the sense that the CEO reports to the board, they're not your boss in the s…”

“That's so, so wrong, because things rarely come to a vote. It's always about what's that conversation around the table. And someone who has a seat at the table is participating in whatever strategic conversation you're having can really change the direction of…”

“You know, one of the things that I tell my companies is you can take as long to, you can wait until the board meeting to give good, you know, good news, but you give bad news as fast as possible. And there's, that is a classic trust breakdown from the founder …”

“The right way to do it is come in there strong and be, you know, open to input, of course, and be transparent and share information, but end it with a very strong statement about this is what we should do.”

“You're going to get better input from the board, the more you equip them and arm them with context. If you don't share much context, and you kind of leave them guessing or speculating about the context of what's going on in the business and the industry, the q…”

“The idea that, that a board will discipline management is, is just an absolute fantasy. And that's a core kind of element of the logical structure that guides the workings of the capital markets, the equity markets, and the widely held publicly traded companie…”

“Figure out exactly what your ask is, and then come to us with exactly that ask, and we will go crush it for you. But until then, you're just going to be getting random advice, and it's probably stuff that you've thought about 10 times as much as the board, and…”

“I think that a huge mistake is not bringing in operators and independents soon enough. What happens is you have the normal progression where there are more and more rounds getting raised, and yet another VC Nothing against us, but yet another VC joins the boar…”

“Yeah, the board really starts to shift as you go public from being kind of, you know, more active and probably more, you know, in some cases more valuable in the business to more of, quite frankly, a governance and a legal board in that sense, right, which is …”

“First, you're working for a committee, not a person, and second, if you ever went to that committee going, gosh, I wonder what we should do next quarter, right? They would look at you and say, I think you should help us find a new CEO, right? Because you're su…”

“If you ever take the CEO onto the board, you will be fired. It's just going to happen. You may win, you may lose. Whatever happens in the battle, you will be fired.”

“Yesterday. I think that companies need to put it in as soon as possible. And, you know, I think entrepreneurs have this tendency to think of the board as this Overlord controlling things and they can fire me and all that, but that's not necessarily the case, r…”

“If you actually do the entire year budget plan of equity spend off of your hiring spent or off your hiring plan, And get your board to sign off on it. You'll find your approvals go a lot faster. You can just say, like, here's what we planned. Here's what we're…”

“This would have been a lot easier if they'd been on top of this, if they'd been granting equity along the way, The numbers that they were proposing in the absolute were not ridiculous. If they had gotten there in stages, it would have been a lot easier.”

“Once you're public, I would guess it's probably about eight, the CEO plus seven others. I mean, you gotta have financial experts and comp committees and all the rest of that stuff, but any more than eight is just, I mean, it's just too many.”