Board

“Choose to architect your board the same way you architect your product.”

“Boards are the worst. You should never have any formal control of anything.”

“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…”

“There's not a single shareholder or board who would support willingly giving money from these companies to the public. It would have to be mandated by law.”

“Just as we're sort of achieving that, I'm going to turn around and go back to them and say, we need technologists, people who've built data infrastructure. We need the right skills on these boards. If you're going to make a hundred million dollar investment in…”

“And I always look at like if the board believes that the executive team is not capable of making the right decisions, they should change the executive team instead of trying to make the decisions.”

“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…”

“Had kept control of the board with five seats to there too, but six million dollars doesn't come free, it comes with high expectations.”

“It inspired me when I came back from this to change the business being from Being focused on celebrities to focused on prizes. That was a huge change for us. We got a lot of resistance from our board and the team, but I was not scared of what people thought of…”

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

“I think the truth is that even with your board as a founder, I'm not sure your incentives are completely aligned because it's back to, well, first of all, what is the price on the table, right? Is it a nice two or three X for the VCs on the board or not? Becau…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Titles alone didn't guarantee authority. CEOs holding little equity can be removed by boards or investors, whereas those with controlling stakes can dictate strategy and vision despite opposition.”

“Half the time with pivots, it's ego, right, that you don't do the pivot. So you have founders who sit there and go, well, wait, I raise money on the first idea. I can't go back to the board and tell them that this isn't working. I can't go back to my family a…”

“And there was actually a vote to pivot the company to be on-demand valet.”

“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 …”

“Like, the board was like, this is a bad idea. And we did it.”

“The interesting part is that investors don't want their money back. They did not invest in order to have their money back. They invest in order to make a significant impact, and obviously they don't want to go back to their investors and tell them, guess what?”

“What we did also break was that the board had decided to reject the offer.”

“I think anytime you need a flow chart to explain how your board works and is hired, you're probably starting from a bad position.”

“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.”

“Why are you not building the outbound automation infrastructure, the SEO infrastructure at a fraction of the cost that what is, yes, that pressure will start to disseminate and go around all the boards around the world for sure. A hundred percent.”

“You often get input from investors who have never done what you've done before. And so it's like, well, meaning smart people saying smart things, but it's not actionable.”

“I often hear people on a board say something like, well, good thing we didn't go public, a good thing we aren't public. But they're sitting on the board of a private company that's at a hundred and fifty million in revenue and growing 10%. Like, you're, you ju…”

“I think we're going to look at this period. It's going to be a byproduct of the age of excess. This is going to be like all these companies raised too much money at too high evaluation during the Zerp period. And therefore they couldn't go public. And frankly,…”

“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 …”

“On the founder side being removed, that usually comes because the growth rate of the founder is not keeping up with the growth rate of the company. And so they're falling behind in their ability to lead the company and to make strategy changes that need to be …”

“And obviously you've been aware that this is like a clear shift in what the boards and founders are asking us. And it's no longer like growth at all costs. It's low CAC at all costs for better or worse.”

“We have a board appointed by government, but the board are all industry experts. They're not a lay board. They can engage in quite a sophisticated way, and they've always been aligned and supportive, but they've always been close, and by that I mean we have mo…”

“A lot of engineers report on like sprint points or stuff like that to their board, which are just like totally, totally fake thing to be like reporting on.”

“One thing that I've now heard from a few different people is that the reports about the, a letter being sent to the board about Q star that, that that's not true. And then it didn't precipitate the board's decision.”

“Usually when a board issues something like that, there's fraud, there's something.”

“One, I think anytime you need a flow chart to explain how your board works and is hired, you're probably starting from a bad position.”

“Generally the board is a very They're frightened of risk. They're frightened of getting sued. They're frightened of told the wrong thing. Like, a lot of times doing nothing is easier than doing something that might be very aggressive, that'd be hard, and a lot…”

“I think if you haven't had a relationship with somebody for like 10 plus years, you're never really going to truly understand how they're going to behave in certain instances on a board like this, to be really frank.”

“The board has been involved in literally the most shocking firing in tech, I would have to say, in a decade or longer.”

“You can't just show up on your first meeting and go, Hey, trust me, right? You've got to build that trust. And so there are a few different ways. One they'll say is, you know, make sure you're getting to know each other to your respective board members, your c…”

“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…”

“The number one cause of CEO death is misalignment with the board.”

“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 …”

“And my sense is we're going to see, even in the second half of this year, Lots of boards pulling back, taking their capital back, companies essentially saying, hey, we're capitalized like we're a scaled ocean liner, and now we need to go find product market fi…”

“The concept is you need to align your risk budget with your governance budget, which is to say you can't take on a ton of risk in your risk budget unless you have a board that has the time and capacity and skills to really understand the portfolio and to prope…”

“In the absence of regular regulatory changes that protect this money. You need to have a financially sophisticated actor on the board. And again, I go back to that should be your venture capitalist. And that person should not have conflicts of interest with th…”

“Half of HubSpot's leadership team, more than half are female, and more than half of the board is females”

“One of the, like, methods and tactics there that I used in terms of negotiation is really, you know, talk about valuation multiples that are higher on the current AR, and then with the board, talk about the multiple at the close of the transaction. So you can …”

“By and far through 20, 20, 20, 21, right? This is going to be top line growth at that point, right? Like, you know, you talk to your board, you talk to investors, nobody's paying an enormous amount of attention to the cost of acquiring these customers.”

“We also have something in our documents which says if we need to for safety, the board can just totally wipe out everyone's equity value to nothing.”

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

“I've told some of the boards I'm on, just keep fundraising, just keep the round open, top off if there's money available, because, you know, especially if you raised your round eight months ago, six months ago, those prices, like, if people are still willing t…”

“Having somebody on your board, a coach, a mentor, somebody who's helping you formally to think through those issues from a lens of, I've done this, and I know what it takes to get from 50 to a hundred, to a 152 hundred million in revenue, it's very different t…”

“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…”

“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.”

“I think a lot of managers feel like they have to represent the work of their team. And I think it's such a missed opportunity. Have them be in front of the company, let them shine, let them show their work, whether it's to the board, to the all hands at a quar…”

“So what our governance looks like today is our board makes three decisions. They set our overall risk tolerance, they approve our risk budget as what I've been talking about, and they set benchmarks. Everything else gets delegated down to staff. So the manager…”

“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…”

“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.”