I love me a good framework. And Geoffrey Moore is the kind of good product/marketing frameworks for technology companies. Moore’s Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption is a must-read for anyone managing a larger technology organization (start reading it when you get to 200-250 people – it’s never too early to worry about disruption). More important, it’s really a companion book or coda to Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past, so if you haven’t read that one, start there and read both sequentially. Zone to Win is quite short and punchy, and it doesn’t disappoint.

I can’t believe is that I never blogged about Escape Velocity before since it was a very influential book in how we managed a bunch of things at Return Path in the later years when we got larger and were more in “disrupt or be disrupted” mode. I’ll start with the essence of that book before I move onto Zone to Win. Escape Velocity‘s principal framework is to divide the different product lines/lines of business you have into three planning horizons:

• Horizon 1 (H1): Current businesses that should be profitable and sustainable
• Horizon 3 (H3): Nascent R&D efforts with the potential to be disruptors or game changers
• Horizon 2 (H2): The bridge between H1 and H3 where an R&D effort that is taking off is scaled and hopefully achieves the eponymous Escape Velocity

The essence of the book is to talk about how larger companies become completely slavish to H1 businesses, their cash cows, and struggle to escape from their pull, whether that’s internal resource allocation or customer-driven demands. Failure to innovate properly beyond H1 businesses is why companies die. But the rest of the book is a lot less memorable, and it doesn’t quite prompt you into action.

That’s where Zone to Win comes in, and it helps me understand where we really got a couple things really wrong at Return Path (as an aside, Moore once met my Return Path cofounder George at a conference, and when George described our business to him, he said “Ah, a blue collar business. Those can work, too.” I think I understand what he meant by that, although it doesn’t sound like a compliment!)

In Zone to Win, Moore shows you how to put the three Horizons into action by creating an overlay framework to managing your company to help optimize all three zones simultaneously. The four zones are:

The key takeaways for me from this framework as well as the notes of where we got things wrong at Return Path, even while acknowledging that we had to play across H1, H2, and H3 simultaneously, were:

• Performance Zone: Managing your main H1 business in a way that drives growth and customer success for the long haul
• Productivity Zone: Managing your main H1 business for optimal profitability and scalability
• Incubation Zone: Starting new H3 businesses and hoping they work
• Transformation Zone: Getting your H3 business through H2 and into H1 to the point where it’s at least 10% of your overall revenue

What we got right at Return Path was first recognizing that we needed to incubate new businesses as the growth in our core business started to slow down, as well as recognizing that we needed to step up our game in managing the core business for performance. So, Moore would say something like “congratulations, you drew up the correct strategy.” But we fell down on implementation for reasons in three of the four zones. Our problem with the Performance Zone is that we discovered the three horizon model too late — there were several years where we were running R&D experiments in the middle of the core business, which created chaos. By the time we got religion around it, we were constantly playing catch up redesigning our management processes — like the teenager still wearing his kid clothes looking awkward and misfit. In the Productivity Zone, we did invest in productivity, but we weren’t aggressive enough about insisting on End of Life for some programs or products, and and we were bogged down by a convoluted legacy implementation of our CRM system that we never wholesale fixed. But the biggest problem we ran into was in the Transformation Zone, where we tried to jam two new businesses through that zone at the same time instead of focusing all our energies on one. I bet we could have pulled off even more of a transformational success with our security business (the one further along) if we hadn’t also been trying to get our consumer insights business through H2 at the same time. At least Moore notes that’s the hardest zone to get right, so I don’t feel quite so dumb.

There were probably other exogenous factors that caused us to fall down on implementation, too, but I think this had a lot to do with it. And don’t get me wrong, Return Path was a success in the end. It just could have been more successful if we had caught this book and adhered rigorously sooner. It was even published in time — somehow we just missed it. We were lured by customer traction and market pull into thinking we could do both. And it’s certainly possible that we were advised against this by one or more of our board members and plowed ahead anyway.

Moore is a masterful writer. If you haven’t read Crossing the Chasm or Inside the Tornado, for example, if you’re a GenZ founder and you think “wow those books came out before I was born, they can’t be relevant,” you should start by reading them. They’re still 100% applicable today, and Moore’s subsequent editions have updated some of the case studies, even if not totally contemporary — and these are worth reading even as a raw startup (in fact, especially as a raw startup). But once you finish those and your business gets larger, go straight into Escape Velocity and be sure to add on Zone to Win.

Across 22 years and two companies now, our system of giving performance feedback has evolved significantly. I thought I’d take a pass at chronicling it here and seeing if I had any learnings from looking at the evolution. Here’s how things evolved over the years:

• Written performance reviews. The first year of Return Path, we had a pretty standard process for reviews. They were more or less “one-way” (meaning managers wrote reviews for their direct reports), and they only happened annually.
• Written 360 reviews. We pretty quickly moved from one-way reviews to 360s. I wrote about this here, but we always felt that being able to give/receive feedback in all directions was critical to getting a full picture of your strengths and weaknesses.
• Live 360 reviews. In addition to the above post/link, I wrote about this a bit further here and here. The short of it is that we evolved written 360s for senior leaders into facilitated live conversations among all the reviewers in order to resolve conflicting feedback and prioritize action items.
• Live 360 reviews with the subject in the room. I wrote about this here…the addition of the subject of the review into an observer/clarifying role present for the facilitated live conversation.
• Peer feedback. At some point, we started doing team-based reviews on a regular cadence (usually quarterly) where everyone on a team reviews everyone on a team round-robin style in a live meeting.

The evolution follows an interesting pattern of increasing utility combined with increasing transparency. The more data that is available to more people, the more actionable the feedback has gotten.

The pluses of this model are clear. A steady diet of feedback is much better than getting something once a year. Having the opportunity to prioritize and clarify conflicts in feedback is key. Hearing it firsthand is better than having it filtered.

The biggest minuses of this model are less clear. One could be that in round robin feedback, unless you spend several hours at it, it’s possible that some detail and nuance get lost in the name of prioritization. Another could be that so much transparency means that important feedback is hidden because the people giving the feedback are nervous to give it. One thing to note as a mitigating factor on this last point is that the feedback we’re talking about coming in a peer feedback session is all what I’d call “in bounds” feedback. When there is very serious feedback (e.g., performance or behavioral issues that could lead to a PIP or termination), it doesn’t always surface in peer feedback sessions – it takes a direct back channel line to the person’s manager or to HR.

The main conclusion I draw from studying this evolution is that feedback processes by design vary with culture. The more our culture at Return Path got deeper and deeper into transparency and into training people on giving/receiving feedback and training on the Difficult Conversations and Action/Design methodologies, the more we were able to make it safe to give tough feedback directly to someone’s face, even in a group setting. That does not mean that all companies could handle that kind of radical transparency, especially without a journey that includes increasing the level of transparency of feedback one step at a time. At Bolster, where the culture is rooted in transparency from the get go, we have been able to start the feedback journey at the Peer Feedback level, although now that I lay it out, I’m worried we may not be doing enough to make sure that the peer feedback format is meaningful enough especially around depth of feedback!

I hope this post doesn’t gross anyone out or offend anyone. I admit it’s a little weird, and that it’s more accessible to men. Hopefully everyone can get my point, even if men get it a bit more. I’m channeling Brad as I write this. So bear with me.

Here is a picture of a men’s room with floor mats under the urinals.

The difference between using a men’s room that has floor mats and using a men’s room that does not have floor mats is profound in multiple ways. I’ll leave out the specifics, but you can imagine the comparative experiences if you haven’t had one or both.

A really good floor mat, from a quick scan of Amazon and Uline just now, costs $11 if you buy in bulk and is built to last 4-6 weeks. That gives us an annual per urinal expense of about $100 – trivial in the scheme of maintaining an office, restaurant, or place of business.

But here’s the thing. These floor mats are few and far between. I don’t have scientific research on the matter, but I’d guess that between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 places of business have them. Maybe even fewer.

So, urinal floor mats are (a) cheap, (b) easy to acquire, and (c) make a profound difference in the environment. And yet, they are only have 10-20% market penetration at most.

That market penetration is not far off from the prevalence of very good leadership and management in business. I hear stories all the time from executives about absolutely terrible leadership practices. I also hear plenty of stories that aren’t awful, but are evidence of non-leadership or non-management. The experience of working for a good manager, or in an organization with strong leadership, is profoundly different than working with the absence of those things.

To complete the analogy, good management and leadership are also (a) cheap, (b) easy to acquire, and (c) make a profound difference in the work environment. Sure, you can’t buy good leadership online, but it’s not all that difficult to be a caring, supportive, transparent manager. Heck, there’s even a book called The One Minute Manager.

So why the low market penetration of both? It makes no logical sense. It’s not as if most people haven’t had the experience of using a urinal with a floor mat…or of having a really good leader or manager. It’s not as if leaders and decision makers don’t appreciate those things themselves.

The answer boils down to three simple points that anyone who is a manager or leader can do, any day:

• You have to pay attention
• You have to care
• You have to act

Great leaders and managers exhibit all three of these traits. They pay attention to things around them, noting that Everything is Data. They care about people, about experiences, about impressions, about reputations. And when they notice that something is off – however small it is – they care enough to remember and then take the time to act. To make a small change. Send an email. Have a quick conversation. Make a suggestion. Give someone quick praise or constructive feedback.

And to come back to where this post started – it’s also not that hard to have a nice men’s room at your office or business or restaurant. You just have to pay attention to the fact that it’s a much better experience to buy floor mats. You have to care about the experience in the men’s room (for yourself, for employees, for customers, for vendors, for visitors). And then you have to act and either buy the stupid mats or ask an office manager to do the same!

Last week, I wrote about the concept of the Operating Philosophy, and how it fits with a company’s Operating Framework and Operating System and defines the essence of who you are as a company…what form of company you are.

While we had a loose Operating Philosophy at Return Path, we never really crisply articulated it, and that caused some hand-wringing at various points over the years, as different people interpreted our “People First” mantra in different ways. So this time around at Bolster, we’re trying to be more intentional about this up front. We have labeled our company a “Mostly Self Managed Organization” or MSMO (pronounced Miz-Moh). We made those up.

Our Operating Philosophy – we are a Mostly Self-Managed Organization, or MSMO (pronounced Miz-Mo, a term we just made up). The MSMO is the product of years of work, research, practical learning, and thinking on our part.  Self-Management has been important to me my whole career as a manager and leader.  Over the last 15 years, the team and I have studied various forms of self-management with interviews and onsite meetings at Netflix, Gore, Nucor, Morningstar, and Zappos.  While we implemented some aspects of it at Return Path, we are trying to take the implementation a step further here at Bolster from the beginning.

Of all those companies, what we’re doing is probably closest to the Operating Philosophy of W.L. Gore & Associates, which you can find written out online without a name but with the description that “individuals don’t need close supervision; what they need is mentoring and support.” The embodiments of the Operating Philosophy at Gore may be different from those we create at Bolster, but the essence of the philosophies is pretty similar.

Why a MSMO?  We employ smart people, and smart people crave autonomy, purpose, and mastery (according to Daniel Pink) and do their best work when they have those things in alignment.  

So, how do we define self-management at Bolster?  We aren’t going to be a DAO.  I don’t think that model works for a for-profit multifaceted corporation – complete Self-Management is too chaotic.  Leadership and mentorship matter and make a difference in guiding strategy, critical decisions, and careers. Holocracies or other unnamed structures like that of Morningstar are ok, but they are so rigidly ideological that they require an immense amount of work-around, or scaffolding, to be practical.

But we aren’t a traditional fixed top-down hierarchy, either.  We are going to run the business in a way that lets people co-create their work and be responsible for driving their own feedback and development with a support structure.  That’s the ideology we have. Letting talented people loose to do their best work is critical; but leadership, judgment, and experience matter, too. If not, why bother having a CEO, or a VP of anything? Why not just pay everyone the same thing and hope they can all figure out the complexities of the business together?

We believe the MSMO is the best operating philosophy to allow high performers to do their best work. 

At Bolster, we are leaning into things like social contracts, peer feedback, career mentorship, individuals translating our Operating Framework into priorities and work, flexible work streams and team leadership, instead of fixed permanent hierarchies, rotating chairs of key company meetings, and market-level-based compensation.  

What we are steering away from are things like traditional titles, micromanaging or overmanaging, traditional performance reviews linked to compensation and complex incentive compensation structures, and fixed organization boundaries and structure.

We’ll see if our MSMO Operating Philosophy works. If not, we’ll iterate on it. That’s the good thing about adherence to an ideology of philosophy as opposed to an ideology of practices. Who knows – maybe the MSMO concept and even its quirky name will catch on!

I’ve always been a big believer in the Operating Framework and the Operating System as two of the management underpinnings behind every well run company.

The Operating Framework is the company’s Mission, Vision, Values, Strategic Objectives, and Key Metrics. Companies have all sorts of different labels for this, from Balanced Scorecard to Salesforce’s V2MOM to Patrick Lencioni’s 6 Questions. It’s what you have to define up front, refresh annually, and tweak quarterly so that people in the company are aligned and know where you’re going.

The Operating System, as I wrote extensively about in Startup CEO, is the collection of practices, meetings, mailing lists, routines/rhythms, and behaviors that your company and team use and depend on to run the business on a day to day basis. It’s what you have to put in place and tweak as needed so work gets done efficiently – the thing that turns the sprint of a raw startup into the marathon of a scaling business.

But there’s a third leg to the stool of company management underpinnings that’s often overlooked and underappreciated – the company’s Operating Philosophy. The Operating Philosophy is the intellectual underpinning of how you want to run and lead the business. It’s related to, but different from, your company’s values. Think of it as the essence of how you want to work and shape the work of others…what defines your form of company.

You can run a company perfectly well without a clear Operating Philosophy, especially with a tight Operating Framework and Operating System in place. But my guess is that you have one, you just haven’t articulated it yet, and you might benefit from doing so. At least that was our experience where we had an undefined but real one at Return Path and have now tried to define one front and center at Bolster.

A useful way to think about these three legs of the stool is the analogy of government (bear with me on this and pretend like our government in the US isn’t quite as dysfunctional as it is at the moment). Our Operating Framework is the Constitution – it lays out the broad contours of what our government does. Our mission, vision, and values. Our Operating System is the collection of policies, practices, and programs that run the country, from the timing and cadence of elections, to the ways the three branches of government enact and execute policy, to the ways state and local governments fit in. Our Operating Philosophy is the Declaration of Independence. It’s our essence. It is what separates our form of government from other forms of government. We are a Representative Democracy, a Constitutional Federal Republic. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Some examples? Zappos is a Holocracy – defined as a system of corporate governance whereby members of a team or business form distinct, autonomous, yet symbiotic, teams to accomplish tasks and company goals. The concept of a corporate hierarchy is discarded in favor of a flat organizational structure where all workers have an equal voice while simultaneously answering to the direction of shared authority. Patagonia (and lots of other companies) is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (PBC or often called a B Corporation), which must by law follow Stakeholder Capitalism and not Shareholder Capitalism. Plenty of crypto organizations are set up as DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), which is a group of people who come together without a central leader or company dictating any of the decisions, built on a blockchain using smart contracts and a currency of tokens that give them the ability to vote on decisions that are made around how the pool of money is spent and managed.

Hopefully that makes sense. Next week, I’ll talk about our Operating Philosophy at Bolster.

I just finished up a coaching call with a late-stage CEO client, and we were talking about a situation where he helped tee up a couple successes for a new senior executive on his team and then promptly gave the exec credit for the successes. That’s good form as a leader – you take the blame when things go wrong but give away credit when things go well.

But my client articulated a selfish reason to this that goes beyond the “good leadership form” argument that I’d never thought of before:

“When you give them the credit, you win twice.”

What he meant by that is that you get your first win when you bolster the person on your team by giving them the win. And you get your second win when others (the rest of the team, your board, etc.) see the goodness that happened and realize that it happened on your watch as the CEO — either by hiring the person who got the credit, or by orchestrating the broader scenario.

After all, who doesn’t want to win twice?

I wrote a little bit about the experience of being a multi-time founder in this post where I talked about the value of things like a hand-picked team, hand-picked cap table, experience that drives efficient execution, and starting with a clean slate. The second lap around the track (and third, and fourth) is really different from the first lap.

Based on what we do at Bolster, and my role currently, I spend a lot of time meeting with CEOs of all sizes and stages and sectors of company, as they’re all clients or prospects or people I’m coaching. Lately, I’ve noticed a distinct set of work and behaviors and desires among CEOs who are multi-time founders and operators that is different from those same things in first-time founders. Not every single multi-time founder has every single one of these traits, but they all have a majority of them and form a pretty common pattern. I’ve noticed this with non-profit founders as well as for-profit ones.

• They have an Easier Time Recruiting team members and investors. That may sound obvious, but there are significant benefits to it. They also tend to have Much Cleaner Cap Tables, because they lived the horrors of a messy cap table when they exited their last company without thinking about that topic ahead of time!
  
• They have a Big Vision. Once you’ve had an exit, whether successful or not or somewhere in between, you don’t want to focus on something niche. You want to go all-in on a big problem.
  
• They are interested in creating Portfolio Effect. A number of repeat founders want to start multiple business at the same time, are actually doing it, or are creating some kind of studio model that creates multiple businesses. Once you have a big team, a track record with investors, and a field of deep expertise, it’s interesting to think about creating multiple related paths (and hedges) to success.
  
• They are driving to be Efficient in Execution and Find Leverage wherever they can. One multi-time founder I talked to a few weeks ago was bragging to me about how few people he has in his finance team. At Bolster, our objective is to build a big business on a small team, looking for opportunities to use our own network of fractional and project-based team members wherever possible.
  
• They are Impatient for Progress. While being mindful that good software takes time to build no matter how many engineers you hire, repeat founders tend to have fleshed out their vision a couple layers deep and are always eager to be 6 months ahead of where they are in terms of execution, which leads me to the next point, that…
  
• They are equally Impatient for Success (or Failure). More than just wanting to be 6 months ahead of where they are in seeing their vision come to life, they want to get to “an answer” as soon as possible. No one likes wasting time, but when you’re on your second or third company, you value your time differently. As a friend of mine says in a sales context, “The best answer you can get from a prospect is ‘yes’ – the second best answer you can get is a fast ‘no’.” The same logic applies to success in your nth startup. Succeed or Fail – you want to find out fast.
  
• They are Calm and Comfortable in Their Own Skin. At this stage in the game, repeat founders are more relaxed. They know their strengths and weaknesses and have no problem bringing in people to shore those things up. They know that if things don’t work out with this one, there’s more to life.
  
• They are stronger at Self Management. They are more efficient. They exercise more. They sleep more. They spend more time with family and friends. They work fewer hours.

Anyone else ever notice these traits, or others, in repeat founders?

Fred Wilson wrote an iconic blog post years ago entitled What a CEO does. In it, he outlined three broad themes:

A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.

I wrote a response in a post entitled What Does a CEO Do, Anyway?, in which I added some specificity to those three items and added three key behaviors of successful CEOs. I also added to Fred’s list when I wrote Startup CEO, CEOs have to build and lead a board of directors, CEOs have to manage themselves, and CEOs ultimately have to think about and execute exits.

But recently, as I’ve been coaching a few CEOs, I’ve answered the question differently, because the questions have been a little less about the broad themes and more about how to prioritize — how to know what NOT to do. So in addition to Fred’s wisdom and my other thoughts above, here’s the answer I’m giving CEOs these days:

• First, do what you MUST do. There are some things that are in your job description. Do them first. You have to run your board meeting. You have to pitch investors. You have to write performance reviews for your direct reports.
• Second, do what ONLY YOU can do. There are also some things that, while not in your job description, are things that CEOs and/or founders have special impact when they do. No one can call a team member who just lost a parent or spouse and offer support and sympathy like you can. No one can get on a plane and save a key customer from leaving you like you can. No one can congratulate a sales rep on a key win like you can.
• Third, do what you’re BEST IN CLASS at. Finally, there are things that may be in other people’s job descriptions, but where you’re the stronger executer. I remember reading years ago that Bill Gates, long after he even stopped being CEO of Microsoft and was Chairman, still got involved in some major technical architecture decisions and reviews. Whatever your superpower is, or whatever it was when you were in your pre-CEO jobs, there’s no reason not to jump in and help your team excel at (and ideally train/mentor them) whenever you can.

After that, you can fill in the rest of your time with other tasks. In the world of Covey’s big rocks, this is all the sand. All the other things that come by your desk or inbox that people ask of you. They are the least important. Hopefully this is another helpful lens on how CEOs should spend their time.

I enjoy reading books written by people I know. I can always picture the person narrating the book, or hear their voice saying the words, I can periodically see their personality showing through the words on the page, and books bring out so much more detail than I’d ever get from a conversation. Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products, by Martina Lauchengco, is one of those books. Martina is an operating partner at Costanoa Venture Capital, an investor in both Return Path and Bolster, and I’d known Martina for several years before she joined Costanoa through Greg Sands. She’s the best product marketer on the planet. She’s the also one of the nicest people around.

Product Marketing is a tricky discipline. A brand marketer on my leadership team years ago referred to it somewhat derisively as a “tweener” function, one of those things that’s not quite marketing and not quite product. We didn’t get the function right for many years at Return Path because we treated it that way, thinking “well, it’s neither fish nor fowl, so we’re not quite sure what to do with it.” Then we hired Scott Roth, who has gone on to have a storied career as a multi-time CEO. Scott’s background was in product marketing. He said to me in his interview process, “Product Marketing isn’t a tweener function with no home. It’s a glue function. It holds product and marketing together.” It’s amazing how that simple change in framing, combined with great leadership, led us to completely rethink the function and make it one of the most important functions in the company.

Martina brings that to live with Loved. Simply put, Loved is a handbook or a field guide to running the Product Marketing function. I can imagine it being a section of Startup CXO in that way — it’s incredibly practical, hands-on, how-to, and rich with examples from Martina’s amazing career at Microsoft, Netscape, Silicon Valley Product Group, and Costanoa. And she believes in Agile Marketing, which is always a plus in my book (and I find rare in marketers).

Martina has lots of great frameworks and stories in the book – key responsibilities of product marketing, key metrics, the release scale, the connection to Geoffrey Moore’s TALC, strategies for messaging, pricing and packaging, and more. I won’t spoil more than one here, but I will paraphrase one that I found particularly impactful, a bit of a checklist on the essence of great product marketing:

• Share data around shifting trends in buyer behavior
• Connect your product’s purpose with broader trends
• Rebrand to make your product seem bigger than it is (and save room for expansion down the road)
• Make it free, especially if you’re defining a new category
• Share the “why” and advance access with influencers

If the measure of a book’s impact is how many pages you dog ear or highlight, this says it all about Loved.

I was trading emails a few weeks ago Elliot Noss from Tucows about the current state of the economy after being on a panel together about it, and he wrote:

The market is fascinating right now. Heated competition AND layoffs and hiring freezes. It feel like an old European hotel where there are two faucets, one is too hot and the other too cold.

While a quick rant about European hotel bathrooms could be fun…we’ll just stick to the sink analogy. As anyone who has ever tried to use one of these sinks that Elliot describes knows, they’re hard to use and illogical. Sure, sometimes you want freezing water and sometimes you want scalding water (I guess), but often, you want something in between. And the only way to achieve that is to turn on both freezing and scalding at the same time? That’s weird.

Then I was on another email thread recently with a group of CEOs, when John Henry from Ride With Loop said this:

Whatever the climate, we all surely agree there is no bad time to build a good business.

How true that is!

But here’s the worrisome part. It’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen next. We are in uncharted territory here with a land war in Europe, a partial global oil embargo of a top tier oil producer, a pandemic, supply chain problems, etc. etc. There are days and circumstances where everything feels normal. Plenty of businesses, especially in the tech sector, are kicking ass. And yet there are days and circumstances that feel like 2001 or 2009. It’s tough to navigate as a startup CEO. Yes, it’s obvious you should try to have a couple years of cash on hand, and that you should be smart about investments and not get too far ahead of revenue if you’re in certain sectors (presumably if you’re in an R&D intensive field and weren’t planning to have revenue for years on end, life isn’t all that different?). But beyond that, there’s no clear playbook.

And that’s where the worrisome line comes in. I saw Larry Summers on Meet the Press last weekend, who predicted that

a recession would come in late 2023.

Wait, what? Aren’t things messed up now? Yes, inflation is high, the stock market is down, and interest rates are creeping up. But the economy is still GROWING. Unemployment is still LOW. Summers’ point is a reminder that contraction is likely, but it may still be a ways off, it depends how the Fed handles interest rate hikes (and about a zillion other things), and it’s impossible to predict. That was more worrisome to me. If we’re navigating choppy waters now, it may not just be for a couple of quarters. It may be that 4-6 quarters from now, we are in for 2-3 quarters of contraction. That is a more than most companies are able to plan for from a cash perspective.

Frothy macro environments lead to bad businesses getting created, too many lookalike businesses popping up, or weak teams getting funded. When the tide goes out, as they say, you can see who is swimming naked. But if you’re building a good business, one that has staying power and a clear value proposition, with real people or clients paying real money for a real product or service, and if you’re serious about building a good company, keep on keeping on. Be smart about key decisions, especially investment decisions, but don’t despair or give up.

We’ll all get through this.

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 operator’s manual to private company boards of directors. Brad also blogged about it here.

We’ve done a lot of work around startup boards at Bolster the past couple of years, including working with over 30 CEOs to help them hire amazing new independent board members. Our landmark Board Benchmark study last year highlighted the problem with startup boards, but also the opportunity that lies within: not enough diversity on the boards, but also not nearly enough independent directors — and a lot of open seats for independent directors that could be filled. That conclusion led me to my Startup Board Mantra of 1-1-1: Independent directors from Day 1, 1 member of the management team, and 1 independent for every 1 investor.

As we posted on the Bolster blog last week, our quick refresh of the Board Benchmark study revealed some good news and some bad news about progress on diversity in the boardroom with startups. The good news is that the needle is starting to move very slowly, and that independent directors present the best opportunity to add diversity to boards. Our data shows that half of all new directors brought onto boards in the last year were independents, and of those, 57.9% were women and 31.6% were non-White board members. Those numbers are well above the prior study’s benchmarks of 36% and 23%, respectively (our experience running board searches skews even further to women and non-White directors being hired).

The bad news is how slowly the needle is moving — only 20% of open independent board seats were filled over the previous year, which is a lot of missed opportunity. The main takeaway is that while overall representation on boards is still skewed largely White and male, the demographic profile of new board appointments looks a lot different from the representation on boards today, indicating that CEOs are making intentional changes to their board composition.

Startup boards are a great way to drive grassroots change to the face of leadership in corporate America. More CEOs need to follow up by filling their open board seats and fulfilling their stated desires to improve diversity in the boardroom. This takes time and prioritization — these are the places where we see board searches either never get off the ground, or falling down once they do, for all the searches we either run or pitch at Bolster.

Hopefully Startup Boards will help the startup ecosystem get there.