Startup Boards eBook: How to Build Your Board
Over the past several months, I’ve published two series of posts on the Bolster blog about Boards. The first series is designed to help CEOs better understand how to build, diversify, and scale their boards of directors. I’ll write about the second one next week. Both series of posts will feature in the second edition of Startup Boards, a book originally published in 2014 by Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani. The second edition, which is also co-authored by me, will be out late this year or early next year.
As I’ve gone about building our business at Bolster, including leading several dozen board searches for companies of all sizes and stages from pre-revenue to public, I’ve noticed that there are still a lot of questions among company leaders about board-building best practices. Without a lot of documentation and analysis about private company boards, most startup CEOs learn about building and managing boards through trial and error. As a result, this critical component of corporate governance is often under-utilized. Directors’ skills and networks are under-leveraged, term lengths are rarely re-negotiated, and board diversity becomes an afterthought.
This is why I set out to publish a comprehensive look at building boards, written from one CEO to another. You can read the full series here:
- The New Way to Scale A Board of Directors
- The Purpose of a Board
- Size and Composition of Boards
- Board Evolution and Turnover
- Diversity in the Boardroom and The Importance of Appointing First-time Directors
- What to Look for in a Director
- How to Recruit and Interview Directors
- How to Onboard Directors, Especially First-time Directors
- How to Compensate Independent Directors
- How to Build a Director Bench or Advisory Board
- How to Evaluate Your Board
The team at Bolster also compiled all of these posts into an eBook you can download by clicking on this link, entitled How to Build Your Board. No matter where you are in your journey as a CEO or company leader, I hope this is a resource and reference for you to look back on over time.
By the way – if you’d like to get access to more content like this or start a search for an independent director for your own board, you can sign up as a Bolster client here.