As we wrote in Bolster’s Founding Manifesto, one of the reasons we started Bolster was to create a new way; a faster, easier, and more cost-effective way, for startup and scaleup CEOs to grow their boards of directors and make them more diverse.

There’s a lot of research out there that the more independent a board is, the better it performs for companies — and that there’s a high degree of correlation between more independent boards and higher performing companies as well. There’s also a lot of research out there that shows that teams which have diversity of gender and race/ethnicity perform better. And everyone who has ever been on a high-functioning board of directors knows that a board is a team.

These facts are well known, yet it is still the case that most private company boards are overwhelmingly made up of founders and investors who are still largely white and male. I believe that the lack of independence and diversity on boards is a big miss for the whole startup ecosystem, and it’s a part of the startup game that we at Bolster want to help change.

Startup boards are tricky things. One of the very unique aspects of a CEO’s job that sets it apart from other executive positions is building and leading a board of directors. But most startup CEOs have either little or no experience building and leading a board, so that part of the job tends to default to a “because that’s the way I assume it’s always been done” kind of task. Of course, if you’re not intentional about building and managing a board, you’re likely to get lousy results. 

Building, shaping, and leading a world class board is one of the single most important things startup CEOs can do to help their businesses thrive and become industry leaders. It’s on par with building and leading an executive team. I’ve seen amazing companies held back by weak and ineffective boards and investor syndicates, and I’ve seen so-so companies succeed because the strategic advice, experience, and accountability coming out of the board room drives the management team in extraordinary ways.

So how is Bolster helping startup CEOs change the game with respect to Boards? We are doing three things. 

First, as you know, what gets measured gets managed. Our first-of-its-kind Board Benchmark application will soon produce an industry standard set of data around private company boards. You can’t find data on private company boards but we’ll soon have important data like size, composition (independents/management/investors), independent director compensation and diversity (gender/race-ethnicity/age). This will help answer questions that I know I have had many times over the years as a CEO such as 

• How big should my board be at this stage? 
• How many independent directors should I have? 
• What is the right profile of an independent director? 
• How many options should I give a board member? 

Starting next week, we’re opening up our Board Benchmark application to any company who creates a free Bolster account. It will tell us a lot about the baseline across the ecosystem, and it will answer a lot of questions startup and scaleup CEOs have but can’t get answers to. Although this is an ongoing real-time benchmark tool, I’ll post some results here when we have enough critical mass to start reporting out.

Second, Bolster is in the talent business, and helping match VC-backed companies with a strong diverse slate of board candidates who are well-matched with their company is at the core of our business. We are already working on many searches for independent board members, and we’ll only be doing more of them as our client base and member base grow.

Finally, this blog post is the beginning of a whole series of posts about startup boards that we hope will demystify them a bit and help change the world’s thinking about how to grow them. Some of the material I will borrow from other blog posts I’ve written, or from the Board of Directors section of Startup CEO. Some will come from other influential VC and CEO bloggers and from Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani’s book Startup Boards. But much of the content will be new. And because Bolster is a two-sided marketplace, roughly half of the content will be aimed at startup CEOs and the other half at executives who are interested in serving on boards and aren’t sure how to get from where they are today into a board room. We’ll be sending out all the CEO posts as an eBook to CEOs who complete the Board Benchmark study, and all the Member posts as an eBook to Bolster members who fill out their Board profiles. I’ll post both of those eBooks here eventually as well.

For CEOs, the topics we will cover include 

• The purpose of a board
• Size and composition on boards
• Board evolution & 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 directors
• How to build a director bench or Advisory Board
• How to evaluate your board

For executives searching for a board role, the topics we will cover include 

• What startup corporate boards look like
• How to prepare yourself to get on your first board
• Should you serve on an advisory board?
• How to interview for a Board role
• What you need to know about board compensation
• How to approach your first board meeting
• How to think about corporate governance as a board member
• How to be a great board member
• How to give advice or difficult feedback as a board member
• Making sure your voice is heard during a board meeting
• How to know if you’re doing a good job as a board member

We believe that boards can make or break a company and we intend to chart a new course for startup boards. I look forward to sharing thoughts and data with you on that topic in the weeks to come.

The Rumors of Email’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, Part V

Thank goodness I can finally write a positive piece under this headline, and not a rebuttal like I did here, here, here, and here.

It seems like there are signs of an email marketing renaissance left, right, and center these days.  First, the industry has enjoyed significant growth this year.  Every vendor I speak with in the space except for one or two is posting record numbers — whether they sell data, technology, or services.  And lots of vendors have been swallowed up by larger multi-channel CRM or DM companies for nice prices.  Every marketer or publisher I speak with is investing more money into their email programs, and they are seeing stellar returns.  In fact, their most persistent complaint is that they can’t get enough good names on their lists fast enough.

But beyond those signs, the much-maligned email channel has finally garnered some positive press of late.  First, as, Ellen Byron wrote on November 23 in her Wall Street Journal article entitled “Email Ads Grow Up – Department Stores Discover Devoted Fashion Fans Read Messages in Their Inboxes,” consumers are beginning to much more easily separate spam from commercial email they want, one consumer even going so far as to call emails she receives from retailers “like a quick shopping trip…a guilty pleasure.”

Byron also went on to quantify what some mailers are doing to tilt the balance of their marketing spend ever so slightly in the direction of email.  For example, The Gap is diverting over $26mm that they spent last holiday season on TV towards online and magazine.  And analysts point out that no matter how much marketers spend on their email programs, it’s still a small fraction of what it costs to create and insert a big print or broadcast spot.  I couldn’t even find the full article to link to, but it wouldn’t matter, as you have to be a Journal subscriber to read it (annoying).

And today, email industry guru Bill McCloskey wrote an admittedly self/industry-serving piece about how he is seeing the signs of this email renaissance moving into 2006 as well, starting with the fact that trade associations like the ESPC and the DMA are doing more to step up to the plate in terms of defending and promoting the email channel with the press and consumers.  He also cites the fact that consumers are getting more used to spam and mentally separating out good email from bad email as a reason for the comeback.  Bill even goes so far as to say that “email will surpass search in the battle for marketers’ hearts and minds.”  The full article is here, but warning again, you have to be a Mediapost subscriber to read it (free but still annoying).

It’s nice to see the media tide turning here towards a more rational, balanced position on email.  It’s not just about spam and scams — it’s about the power, customization, and intimacy of the channel!

5 Ways to Get Your Staff on the Same Page

[This post first appeared as an article in Entrepreneur Magazine as part of a new series I’m publishing there in conjunction with my book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business]

When a major issue arises, is everybody at your company serving the same interests? Or is one person serving the engineering team, another person serving the sales team, one board member serving the VC fund, another serving the early-stage “angels” and another serving the CEO? If that’s the case, then your team is misaligned. No individual department’s interests are as important as the company’s.

To align everyone behind your company’s interests, you must first define and communicate those goals and needs. This requires five steps:

1. Define the mission. Be clear to everyone about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there (in keeping with your values).
2. Set annual priorities, goals, and targets. Turn the broader mission into something more concrete with prioritized goals and unambiguous success metrics.
3. Encourage bottom-up planning. You and your executive team need to set the major strategic goals for the company, but team members should design their own path to contribution. Just be sure that you or their managers check in with them to assure that they remain in synch with the company’s goals.
4. Facilitate the transparent flow of information and rigorous debate. To help people calibrate the success, or insufficiency, of their efforts, be transparent about how the organization is doing along the way. Your organization will make better decisions when everyone has what they need to have frank conversations and then make well-informed decisions.
5. Ensure that compensation supports alignment (or at least doesn’t fight it). As selfless as you want your employees to be, they’ll always prioritize their interests over the company’s. If those interests are aligned – especially when it comes to compensation – this reality of human nature simply won’t be a problem.

Taken in sequence, these steps are the formula for alignment. But if I had to single out one as the most important, it would be number 5: aligning individual incentives with companywide goals.

It’s always great to hear people say that they’d do their jobs even if they weren’t paid to, but the reality of post-lottery-jackpot job retention rates suggests otherwise. You, and every member of your team, “work” for pay. Whatever the details of your compensation plan, it’s crucial that it aligns your entire team behind the company’s best interests.

Don’t reward marketers for hitting marketing milestones while rewarding engineers to hit product milestones and back office personnel to keep the infrastructure humming. Reward everybody when the company hits its milestones.

The results of this system can be extraordinary:

• Department goals are in alignment with overall company goals. “Hitting product goals” shouldn’t matter unless those goals serve the overall health of your company. When every member of your executive team – including your CTO – is rewarded for the latter, it’s much easier to set goals as a company. There are no competing priorities: the only priority is serving the annual goals.
• Individual success metrics are in alignment with overall company success metrics. The one place where all companies probably have alignment between corporate and departmental goals is in sales. The success metrics that your sales team uses can’t be that far off from your overall goals for the company. With a unified incentive plan, you can bring every department into the same degree of alignment. Imagine your general counsel asking for less extraneous legal review in order to cut costs
• Resource allocation serves the company, rather than individual silos. If a department with its own compensation plan hits its (unique) metrics early, members of that team have no incentive to pitch in elsewhere; their bonuses are secure. But if everyone’s incentive depends on the entire company’s performance, get ready to watch product leads offering to share developers, unprompted.

This approach can only be taken so far: I can’t imagine an incentive system that doesn’t reward salespeople for individual performance. And while everyone benefits when things go well, if your company misses its goals, nobody should have occasion to celebrate. Everybody gets dinged if the company doesn’t meet its goals, no matter how well they or their departments performed. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it also important preventive medicine.

My friend George, one of our co-founders at Return Path (according to him, the best looking of the three), has a wonderful and simple framing question for thinking about product strategy:  what job is your customer hiring you to do?  No matter what I’m working on, I am finding George’s wisdom as relevant as ever, maybe even more so since I am still learning the new context.

Why is this a useful question to ask?  It seems really simple – maybe even too simple to drive strategy, doesn’t it?

It’s very easy in technology and content businesses (maybe other spaces too) to get caught up in a landslide of features and topics. In a dynamic world of competition and feature parity, product roadmaps can easily get cluttered. They can also get cluttered by product teams who have their own view of what should be the next feature, module, or content widget. Sometimes looking at product usage data is helpful, but sometimes it produces more noise than signal because it can easily miss the “why” or change day to day.

And once a product is mature, it can be very difficult to understand which of its many elements — even if they are all used — are the ones truly driving the most value for customers. It’s easy to assume it’s the newest, the slickest, the ones that are generating the most buzz. It’s even easier to assume that when it comes to content. But sometimes it’s now. Sometimes it’s the legacy part of the product. Sometimes it’s a small side feature you don’t focus on. Sometimes it’s something you used to do but don’t really do any more!

By asking customers the simple question — what are you hiring us to do for you? — you can start to get to the heart of the matter, the heart of what your strategy should be.  Peeling the onion once you understand that and getting into the specifics of the different tasks or jobs your customer does that derive from your main point of value, as George would say, “jobs to be done,” is much more straightforward. When defining a Job to Be Done:

• Focus on a functional job (not an emotional one, e.g, “I need to look smart to the boss”)
• Try to ensure that you are looking at the whole job, not just a piece of the job. It’s easy to get too narrow in your definition
• Make sure it is the customer’s definition of the job, not yours

There’s always a role and a need for innovative product owners to help define a space, define value, demonstrate it for customers.  This framework is meant to be additive to a high functioning product owner’s job, it can never replace it.

(As a small post-script, Friday December 6 marks 20 years since we started Return Path…a fitting day to post a bit of a tribute to George!)

Americans have long operated under an unwritten deal with media companies (for our purposes here, let’s call this the Old Media Deal). The Old Media Deal is simple: we hate advertising, but we are willing to put up with an amazing amount of it in exchange for free or cheap content, and occasionally one of those ads slips through to the recesses of our brain and influences us in some way that old school marketers who trade in non-addressable media can only dream of. Think about it:

– 30 minutes of Friends has 8 minutes of commercials (10 in syndication!)
– The New York Times devotes almost 75% of its total column inches to ads
– We get 6 songs in a row on the radio, then 5 minutes of commercials
– The copy of Vogue‘s fall fashion issue on my mom’s coffee table is about 90% full page ads

The bottom line is, advertising doesn’t bug us if it’s not too intrusive and if there’s something in it for us as consumers.

Since I started working in “New Media” in 1994, I’ve thought we had a significantly different New Media Deal in the works. The New Media deal is that we as American consumers are willing to share a certain amount of personal information in exchange for even better content, more personalized services, or even more targeted marketing — again, as long as those things aren’t too intrusive and provide adequate value. Think about how the New Media Deal works:

– We tell Yahoo that we like the Yankees and that we own MSFT stock in order to get a personalized home page
– We tell Drugstore.com what personal health products we buy so we can buy our Q-tips and Benadryl more quickly
– We tell The New York Times on the Web our annual income in order to get the entire newspaper online for free
– We let PayTrust know how much money we spend each month so that we can pay our bills more efficiently
– We let Google scan our emails to put ads in in them based on the content to get a free email account
– We give their email address out to receive marketing offers (even in this day and age of spam) by the millions every day

Anyway, after a few years of talking somewhat circuitously about this New Media Deal, my colleague Tami Forman showed me some research the other day that backs up my theory, so I thought it was time to share. In a study conducted by ChoiceStream in May 2004, 81% of Internet users expressed a desire for personalized content; 64% said they’d provide insight into their preferences in exchange for personalized product and content recommendations; 56 would provide demographic data for the same; and 40% said they’d even agree to more comprehensive clickstream and transaction monitoring for the same. All of these responses were stronger among younger users but healthy among all users. Sounds like a New Media Deal to me.

Don’t get me wrong — I still think there’s a time and a place for anonymity. It’s one of the great things about RSS for certain applications. And privacy advocates are always right to be vigilant about potential and actual abuses of data collection. But I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that we have a New Media Deal, which is that people are willing to sacrifice their anonymity in a heartbeat if the value exchange is there.

P.S. Quite frankly, I wish I could give spammers a little more personalized information sometime. They’re going to email me anyway — they may as well at least tell me to enlarge a part of my body that I actually have.

Book Short:  the Garage Workbench of the Future

Makers:  The New Industrial Revolution, by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail (review, buy) and Free (review, buy) is just as mind expanding as his prior two books were at the time they were published. I had the pleasure of talking with Chris for a few minutes after he finished his keynote address at DMA2012 in Las Vegas this week, and I was inspired to read the book, which I did on the flight home.

 The short of it is that Anderson paints a very vivid picture of the future world where the Long Tail not only applies to digital goods but to physical goods as well. The seeds of this future world are well planted already in 3D printing, which I have been increasingly hearing about and will most likely be experimenting with come the holiday season (family – please take note!).

As someone who, like Anderson, tinkered with various forms of building as a kid in Shop at school and in the garage with my dad, it’s fascinating to think about a world where you can dream a physical product up, or download a design of it, or 3D scan it and modify it, and press a “make” button like you press a “print” button today on your computer, and have the product show up in your living room within minutes for almost nothing. This will change the world when the technology matures and gets cheaper and more ubiquitous. And this book is the blueprint for that change.

While we may look back on this book in 5 or 10 years, and say “DUH,” which is what many people would say now about The Long Tail or Free, for right now, this gets a WOW.

(Post 4 of 4 in the series on Scaling CROs – other posts are, When to Hire your First Chief Revenue Officer, What Does Great Look like in a Chief Revenue Officer and Signs your Chief Revenue Officer isn’t Scaling)

Assuming your CRO is on track and scaling with the company so that you’re not having to mentor or coach them, I’ve found a few ways to engage with the CRO that have been particularly fruitful. Here are a few tips on making every moment with your CRO well-spent.

One of the easiest ways to carve out quality time with your CRO is during travel time, or in and around events.  Particularly if you’re a B2B company that engages with clients during the sales process, you’ll probably find yourself at a lot of client meetings and events, either internal or external.  Your CRO will be there, too, which gives you a great opportunity to spend large blocks of time together in transit, or a good deal of time together socially. One thing we learned during the work-at-home pandemic is just how much time we save by not traveling.  So when life resumes to normal, why waste time in an Uber or on a plane when you can have a deep strategic conversation or even a personal/social one with one of your senior executives? Of course, you have to actually be more proactive in meeting with your CRO since you won’t have events that naturally bring you together, but I’ve found that the early morning time in the hotel gym or late-night drink in the lobby bar before heading up to bed now translates to time I can have with my CRO. 

Another way to engage with the CRO is In a Weekly Forecast meeting.  Jeff Epstein, former CFO of Oracle, was one of my long-time board members at Return Path and he helped us architect a new core business process once our sales team got large and mature and geographically disparate enough that it was hard for us to have a solid forecast.  Both me and our CFO engaged in the Weekly Forecast meeting and because of that we forced the discipline of a good roll-up of all regions and business units. The CRO and all sales managers attended and knew that we were paying attention to the numbers and trends and asking tough questions. Our attendance was a forcing function for the CRO so that they organized a pre-meeting the prior day with all teams and units to prepare, and that in and of itself had a cascading effect through the organization of adding discipline, rigor, and accuracy to the forecast.  It also made me a lot more empathetic to my CRO’s issues with respect to the sales leadership team.

Finally, the other way that I engaged with the CRO was ad hoc, either internally or in-market.  My most successful heads of sales have been good at winding me up and pointing me at things as needed, whether that means getting on a plane or Zoom to help close a deal or save a client, or doing a 1:1 mentoring session with a key employee. So, not all interactions with the CRO have to be initiated by the CEO, and a great CRO will use the CEO, leverage their time, when it’s needed.

(You can find this post on the Bolster Blog here)

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.

It’s good that my friend Brad Feld‘s new book (co-authored by Dave Jilk, who I’ve also known on and off over the years), is divided into 52 chapters and is designed as a bit of a devotional, to be read one chapter per week.

Each chapter of The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors is, as the authors write in the Introduction, worth “chewing on a while.” The structure of the book is laid out as:

The book contains fifty-two individual chapters (one for each week) and is divided into five major sections (Strategy, Culture, Free Spirits, Leadership, and Tactics). Each chapter begins with a quote from one of Nietzsche’s works, using a public domain translation, followed by our own adaptation of the quote to 21st-century English. Next is a brief essay applying the quote to entrepreneurship. About two-thirds of the chapters include a narrative by or about an entrepreneur we know (or know of), telling a concrete story from their personal experience as it applies to the quote, the essay, or both.

That structure is perfect for me. I did ok in Philosophy classes, but I wouldn’t say it was my preferred subject. So the fact that Brad and Dave turned every Nietzsche quote into plain English before applying it to entrepreneurship and disruption was a welcome tactic to make the book as accessible as possible.

I wrote one of the essays in the book on creating a Company Operating System, which is in the chapter called “Doing is not Leading.” It’s an honor to be included as a contributor alongside a number of awesome CEOs, including Reid Hoffman, Ingrid Alongi, Daniel Benhammou, Sal Carcia, Ben Casnocha, Ralph Clark, David Cohen, Mat Ellis, Tim Enwall, Nicole Glaros, Will Herman, Mike Kail, Luke Kanies, Walter Knapp, Gary LaFever, Tracy Lawrence, Jenny Lawton, Seth Levine, Bart Lorang, David Mandell, Jason Mendelson, Tim Miller, Matt Munson, Ted Myerson, Bre Pettis, Laura Rich, Jacqueline Ros, and Jud Valeski.

In his Foreword, Reid Hoffman connects the dots perfectly:

Returning to Nietzsche, let’s examine why he in particular is such an apt patron philosopher for entrepreneurs. Nietzsche was rebelling against a stultifying philosophical practice that exalted the past—specifically the ideals and images of former thinkers and former leaders. He wanted to refocus on the now, on what humanity was and what it could become. As part of his rebellion, Nietzsche philosophized with a hammer: he wanted to destroy the old mindsets that locked people into the past, and thus better equip them to embrace the possibility of the new. Nietzsche’s desire to shift mindsets is also why he emphasized new styles of argument. Whereas most philosophers would typically open an argument in a classical form or by reviewing a historical great, Nietzsche would lead with an arresting aphorism or a completely new mythological narrative. He was, above all else, a disruptor of pieties and convention, always in search of new and original ways to be contrarian and right, never satisfied with the status quo. This is exactly the kind of mindset entrepreneurs should adopt. This is why a daily practice of philosophy can be the way that an entrepreneur moves from good to great. And, why a daily practice of Nietzsche is a great practice of philosophy for entrepreneurs.

What I love about the book is that you can read any given chapter at any time without having to read it front to back, and the combination of Nietzsche and entrepreneur essays makes the topics come to list. Pick one — they are organized into five sections, Strategy, Culture, Free Spirits, Leadership, and Tactics — and you’re sure to get both something chewy (e.g, thoughtful) and delicious (e.g., practical).

I honestly don’t get all the buzz about Gmail, Google’s new email service. I took a look at it today to see what the the big deal was.

It’s got a few features which are marginally better than other webmail services, but not too many and not massively better. The free storage is not a big issue for most users, although it may cause a few power users to switch over. The most interesting feature in my mind is the ability to use Google Search on your own email file, which is very useful.

All in all, it’s a good product, but all these people talking about how 30mm people are going to switch over to it must be seeing something I don’t. My prediction (and I’ll happily and publicly acknowledge defeat if I am misreading this) is that they will get a few million new users initially, many for a second or third address as opposed to their primary address, and that many of them won’t stick with it to become active users over a longer period of time. After that, they’ll grow at the same rate, with the same type of characteristics, as Yahoo, Hotmail, and other webmail providers.

Email and email addresses, unlike search engines, are pretty sticky things.

(This post also appeared on Bolster.com and builds on last week’s post where I introduced my new startup, Bolster)

Welcome to Bolster, the on-demand executive talent marketplace. We are creating a platform that is the new way to scale an executive team and board.

We believe that startups and scaleups are not average companies. Their rapid growth means their appetite for talent constantly outstrips their budget — and that they can’t spend months searching for it. Their dynamic industries dictate that they keep pace with bigger and better funded competitors. Their leadership teams — the people and the roles — are always changing. Their CEOs spend a ton of time hiring and coaching their leaders and shaping the complexion and direction of the team. They stress out about big expensive new executive hires when sometimes they just need to level-up an existing manager or “try before they buy.” Their Boards frequently jump in to help, but those efforts can be a little ad hoc and inefficient.

We believe that experienced executives working as consultants is the wave of the future. The number of career executives who work flexibly and on-demand for a living is skyrocketing in recent years. People are more often “between things” and are interested in plugging into shorter-term engagements while continuing to look for their next full-time role. People are retiring younger, yet wanting to keep contributing. And even fully-employed execs like to advise companies and serve on Boards. Whether these people are career consultants or are looking for a “side hustle” or just to pay something forward to a future generation of leaders, they all have two common problems: finding work is time consuming and they’re often not good at or don’t like doing it; and managing their back office, everything from insurance to legal to tax to marketing, is a drain on time that could otherwise be spent with clients or family.

We believe that a new kind of talent marketplace is needed to meet the unique and complex requirements of both audiences — the freelance, or flexible, seasoned executive, and the startup or scaleup CEO who thinks holistically about his or her leadership team and carefully tends them like a garden. We are building a platform to make instant, tailored, vetted matches between talent and companies without the randomness of a job board and without the theater, long lead times, and cost, of a full service agency 

Service marketplaces like ours work best when they help their stakeholders solve other meaningful, related problems.In this case, we believe that the need for back office services will help executive consultants focus on more important things. And we believe that CEOs need lightweight and dynamic support in thinking through the composition and skills required of their executive teams both today and 6-18 months in the future.

That is the essence of the business we are building. A business to quickly match awesome companies with awesome freelance executives and to help both sides be better at what they do. We are here to make it easier for you to:

• Bolster your executive team. For our Clients, our pledge to you is that we will quickly and cost-effectively fill the gaps in your leadership ranks (whether interim, fractional, advisory, board, or project-based) with trusted, curated talent, and that we will give you a platform to evaluate your overall leadership team and help you think through your future needs as your company evolves. Think of us as a shortcut to scaling your leadership team.
  
• Bolster your board. The best boards are the ones with multiple independent directors who come from diverse backgrounds with diverse points of view. We also pledge to our Clients that we will find great matches to help fill out their boardrooms as their strategic advisory needs change over time.
  
• Bolster your work. For our Members, our pledge to you is that we will find you the right kind of interesting clients and help you manage your back office so you can focus on your work (and all the other important things in your life!).
  
• Bolster your portfolio. For our Portfolio Partners, VC and PE board members, our pledge to you is that we will make it easier for you and your firm to both drive successful on-demand executive placements for your portfolio company CEOs, and to manage and expand your firm’s network of flexible executive talent. 

We are an experienced team of entrepreneurs and operators who have scaled multiple businesses throughout our careers. All of us worked together as part of the leadership team at Return Path, a leading email technology company that we scaled from 0 to $100mm in revenue and 500 employees in 12 locations around the world while winning numerous Employer of Choice awards. All of us have independent experience scaling other businesses, small and large, public and private. All of us have experience being on-demand executives as well — whether interim, fractional, advisory, project-based, or board roles, we know the landscape of both our members and our clients. 

We’ve all dealt with the stress of having product-market fit and market opportunities but not being able to capitalize on those opportunities because we were missing key talent. And we’ve tried everything from executive search firms (expensive, time-consuming, and slow), to leveling up people (will they be able to grow into the role?), to leaning in to our board (hit or miss, inefficient). Heck, we’ve been desperate enough to follow up on the “my cousin’s boyfriend has an uncle, and he might know someone” lead.

We believe there is a better way for startups and scaleups to find executive talent. Along the way, I published a book about scaling startups called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business that has sold over 40,000 copies to CEOs around the world. And our whole team is working on a new book called Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Teams, which is coming out in early 2021. Our team has a maniacal focus on helping startup teams scale and flourish and on helping leaders develop into the best version of themselves. That’s what we’re all about. 
Plus, we have an amazing group of investors behind us who know how to grow businesses like ours and have incredible reach into the startup and scaleup world. More about that later. For now, we are excited to soft launch Bolster and begin unleashing the power of on-demand executive talent to our Clients. Thank you for being on this journey with us. If you’re interested in the somewhat unusual story of how the company was founded, it’s here.