Boards That Lead, by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem, was recommended to me by a CEO Coach in the Bolster network, Tim Porthouse, who said he’s been referring it to his clients alongside Startup Boards. I don’t exactly belong in the company of Ram Charan (Brad and Mahendra probably do!), so I was excited to read it. While it’s definitely the “big company” version to Startup Boards, there are some good lessons for startup CEOs and founder to take away from it. The best part about the book as it relates to ALL boards is the framework of Partner, Take Charge, Stay out of the Way, and Monitor. You can probably lump all potential board activities into these…
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Startup Boards
Collecting Feedback from Your Board
A friend of mine just emailed me and asked how I collect feedback from the Board after Board meetings. I have a good routine for this which I wrote about a little bit here but have since expanded. First, we are disciplined about leaving an hour at the end of the board meeting for the following three things : All three of these are important, and it’s important to do them every meeting, even if you don’t have any specific issues to discuss. That way, no one freaks out (including you) if suddenly and unexpectedly, there’s a part of the meeting to which they’re not invited. The key to this is really leaving time for it. Now that board meetings…
Swoop in, Swoop out
A fellow CEO with whom I’m friendly was venting to me the other day about one of their Board members. They were stunned that the lived experience they have day in, day out running the business wasn’t something the director internalized at all — and this is a good, well known, high quality VC director. I pointed out that VCs are on lots of boards and can’t get in the headspace of all their CEOs all the time, although the good ones don’t just swoop in and swoop out but do take the time to track all the significant things and the nuances with all their portfolio companies. My friend, the CEO, had a brilliant comeback line that is worth…
Startup Boards: VCs and CEOs need to do their jobs!
Was anyone else as appalled as I am by the contents of Connie Loizos’s recent article, Coming out of COVID, investors lose their taste for board meetings? The stories and quotes in the article about VCs reducing their interest and participation in Board meetings, not showing up, sending the junior associate to cover, etc. are eye opening and alarming if widespread. The reasons cited in the article are logical—overextended VCs, Zoom fatigue, and newbie directors. Connie’s note that “privately, VCs admit they don’t add a lot of value to boards” is pretty funny to read as a CEO who has heard a ton of VCs talk about how much value they add to boards (although the good ones DO add a…
Startup Boards, the book, and also why they matter more than ever these days
My latest book (I’m a co-author along with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani), Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, is now live on Amazon – today is publication day! The book is a major refresh of the first edition, now eight years old. I was quoted in it extensively but not an official author – Brad and Mahendra were nice enough to share that with me this time. The book includes a lot of new material and new voices, including a great Foreword by Jocelyn Mangan from Him for Her and Illumyn. It’s aligned with Startup CEO and Startup CXO in look and in format and is designed to be an easy-to-read…
A Couple Tweaks to Running Great Board Meetings
I love innovation, and process is no different than product or business model in that regard. I’ve run and attended several hundred board meetings over the years, both those of companies where I’ve been CEO or Chairman, and those where I’m a director. I’ve written a lot about how I like running board meetings in Startup CEO, and as I mentioned the other day, I’m a co-author of a Second Edition of Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, which is coming out in June and is available to pre-order now, along with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani. There are two adaptations I’ve made to my standard board routines in the last year…
7 Habits of Highly Effective Boards
(This blog post was first published as an article in Entrepreneur Magazine on April 15.) Creating strong boards can help propel a board forward. Weak and ineffective boards hold a company back. As a CEO, one of the most important (yet overlooked) tools in the playbook is building and leading a board of directors. Throughout my 20+ years of entrepreneurship, I’ve led four companies (including Bolster, where I’m a co-founder and CEO today) and served on eight boards. I’ve learned that strong boards can help propel a company forward and I’ve also witnessed how weak and ineffective boards can hold companies back. Mediocre or mismanaged advice, plus lack of accountability, can do long-term damage to a business as well. Drawing from personal experience and anecdotes from…
Excellent Resource for Effective Board Leadership
I’ve written a lot about Boards this past year related to Bolster’s work in helping founders/CEOs build great boards: The New Way to Scale a Board of Directors My New Startup Board Mantra – 1:1:1 The Startup Ecosystem Needs More Independent Board Members – That’s the Clearest Path to Having Better and More Diverse Boards Startup Boards eBook: How to Build Your Board Startup Boards eBook: How to Succeed in Your First Board Role But more recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about Board effectiveness, as I’ve been working with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani on a second edition of Startup Boards, which will be published in mid-2022. And in the middle of our feverish writing and editing, Reid Hoffman…
Startup Boards eBook: How to Succeed in Your First Board Role
In addition to our work on helping CEOs understand board-building best practices, which I posted about last week, I’ve spent the past several months publishing a second series of blog posts to help current and aspiring directors (really, any senior executive!) understand the behind-the-scenes details of private company board service. This second series is also now an eBook and its content will also feature in the upcoming second edition of Startup Boards that I’m collaborating on with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani. When Bolster published the findings of our Board Benchmarking study, we revealed that 4 out of 5 seats on private company boards today are held by individuals who are white, and 86% of director seats are held by…
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…
My new Startup Board Mantra: 1-1-1
Last week, I blogged about Bolster’s Board Benchmark survey results, which really laid bare the lack of diversity on startup boards. There are signs that this is starting to change slowly — one big one is that of all the board searches we are running at Bolster, about ⅔ of them are open to taking on first-time directors; and almost all are committed to increasing diversity on their boards. This is also something that I would expect to take some time to change. Boards are small. Independent seats aren’t necessarily easy to open up. Seats don’t turn over often. And they take a while to fill, as CEOs are thorough in their recruitment and selection process. My new mantra for…