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 sent Brad a great document which I want to amplify here:

Some of these rituals are more important than others (or at least more widely applicable), but they’re all worth reading. I am definitely going to start incorporating some version of the “Dory and Pulse” ritual into my meetings to make sure we’re covering everything that each director wants to cover in meetings (or answer smaller things ahead of time).

Thanks to Reid for this great contribution to the world of Startup Boards.

This is the second post in the series…. the first one When to hire your first Chief People Officer is here).

While all CXOs are important to a company, the Chief People Officer is the one role you don’t want to get wrong because People Ops impacts every facet of a company. If you hire the wrong people—even one wrong person—you’ll regret it, and so will everyone else in your company. If you short-change the onboarding process you’ll create tons of work for others in the company to answer questions, teach people the systems, and help them get up to speed quickly—not to mention the frustration of the new hire. And of course, if you or your employees do anything illegal, discriminatory, or harassing, you’ll end up in legal trouble and you’ll lose—big time. So, it’s not enough, if you’re expanding rapidly, to “just get a Chief People Officer,” you need to hire a great Chief People Officer and I have found that great Chief People Officers do three things particularly well:

The most important characteristic or attribute of a great Chief People Officer is that they believe their function is strategic. In Startup CXO Chief People Officer Cathy Hawtrey wrote about the ways in which HR/People can be a strategic function and not just a tactical corporate function.  It’s true of most functions, but for whatever reason, (likely past experience), HR leaders frequently don’t view themselves or their functions as strategic, which is not only a huge missed opportunity but maybe says something more important about the confidence level of the Chief People Officer.  If that’s their frame of reference, then they will likely be tactical managers, they’ll keep the trains running on time, but you won’t be able to anticipate the changing talent landscape, much less be strategic about it.  If they believe they can move the needle on the business by improving engagement and productivity and efficiency, if they believe they can make the executive team more effective by helping you with team facilitation and coaching…they can do anything.

A second important characteristic of the Chief People Officer is courage—they have the courage to call you (you, the CEO) out on things directly and firmly when they see you doing or saying anything that is a bit off. It could be around language, inclusion, values, authenticity, or anything else, but they don’t let it slide or ignore it. The CPO, along with you, are the principal stewards of the company’s values and culture.  Even the best CEOs benefit from having a watchdog from time to time.

A third critical trait of a great Chief People Officer is that they think about investment in People in terms of ROI.  It’s one thing to run a killer recruiting function and fill seats efficiently, with high quality, as asked.  It’s an entirely different thing to start the recruiting process by asking if the role is needed, at that level and compensation band, or whether there are other people, fractional people, contractors, or shifts in lower value activities that could be put to work instead.  Only heads of People with deep understandings of the business can transform the function from a gatekeeper/”no” role into a business accelerator.

A great Chief People Officer is all of these things—strategic, courageous, and financially astute. Above all, great Chief people Officers know that they are the role model within a company and that their behavior, their language, their inclusiveness is setting the tone and providing a template for others to follow. 

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

I wrote a colorfully-named post years ago called Onboarding vs. Waterboarding, which detailed out some of the general principles around onboarding new employees that our companies have used over the years. A few weeks back, one of our clients and fellow CEOs of a Series C Ed:Tech company asked me for tips on onboarding senior executives, and some of what I said varied from or built on that earlier post.

Here are a few of the themes we riffed on:

1. Treat the new hire onboarding like you would a merger integration. Why? Well, because adding a new exec to your company is kind of like…a merger integration. Make a long checklist. Assign each item an owner and participating parties. Have a weekly meeting with all key stakeholders specifically to review the onboarding plan. In other words, don’t just leave it up to you, the new exec, and a Day 1 overview meeting with “business as usual” check-ins. Make it its own thing.
   
2. Take great care to communicate expectations and changes internally when the new exec starts. Any new exec, but especially one in a newly-created or upgraded role, will carry a new role description which by definition changes expectations and responsibilities both of the new exec’s role and of other execs’ roles (and possibly your own role or Level-2 team members’ roles). Make it super clear to the organization both in a meeting and in writing what those changes are. If people used to go to you for X, and now they have to go to New Exec for X, don’t leave that to the guesswork and imagination of your team.
   
3. Get out in front of the fact that your exec team has changed. As I always say, any time you change one person on a team (add or subtract), you have…a new team. Treat a new exec onboarding as such, though this will take time. Team dynamics will change, and you need to drive that process. You also need to make sure any shared language and tools on the team take a beat and include the new person. Did you run a DISC or use Myers-Briggs two years ago with your exec team? Great, do it again with the new team. Did you do a major trust/vulnerability exercise at an exec offsite last year? Better do a new one from scratch. This may sound like extra overhead, but it’s worth it. You don’t want the new person to always feel like the new person who is missing an inside joke. Plus, those kinds of things are always good hygiene for exec teams.
   
4. Begin with the end in mind. On Day 1, your new exec won’t know where the bathroom is, unless you are an all-remote company of course. Your objective is for the new exec to be just as autonomous as all other execs ASAP. So, work backwards from 90 or 180 or some other number of days on the question of autonomy. Build this into your integration checklist and weekly integration check-ins (see above), but note this is also a mental evolution both you and the new exec (and the rest of your exec team and the new person’s direct reports) need to go through. Some areas will be more logical for the new exec to be autonomous on Day 1 or at least Month 1. Some will take longer. Be explicit about defining those things.

Special thanks to my friend Amir for inspiring this post!

Why I Love My Board, Part III

My prophesy is starting to come true.  In Part I of this series four years ago, I asserted that

Fred may be the only one of my directors who has done something this dorky, this publicly, but quite frankly, I could see any of us in the same position.

Now, Brad Feld is no shrinking violet.  As far as I’m concerned, he made his film debut in the memorable “Munch on Your Bones” video (short, worth a watch if you’re a Feld groupie) something like 6 or 7 years ago for an all-hands meeting I ran.  But his newest short feature film, “I’m a VC,” made with his three partners, Jason, Ryan, and Seth, is a must-see for anyone in the entrepreneur-VC set and puts him up there with Fred in the pantheon of “this dorky, this publicly.”

What’s in store?

Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a math geek, or a student of humanity, Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham has a great post this week on the USV blog about data storage and how much we as a human race can consume.

It’s quick, worth a read, and it uses math terms that I’m pretty sure even my wife, dad, and Board members who went to MIT don’t know off the top of their heads (of course, having said that, I’m sure one of them will shortly email me to prove me wrong with their command of 10-to-the-21st power).

Brad’s conclusion is great…once the battle shifts away from storage, where will it go next?

Are You As Versatile As Running?

Today was my first day back in the city after two weeks working and playing at our house in the mountains.  And a beautiful day it was — 46 and sunny!  I went for a great run, reflecting on how incredibly versatile running is.  Less than 48 hours before, I had also been running, but bundled up, in a 17 degree snowfall, wearing my new Icebugs (thanks for the tip, Brad), up and down the hills of a quiet country road at 6500 feet in Idaho.  Today — sea level, flat, urban, sunny and crisp out, wearing shorts (I’ll let you guess which was easier).  How versatile can a sport be?

Are you as versatile at work?  Can you be that go-to person for your manager, the all-weather team member who gets called on to take on any kind of project as needed?  I don’t care how specialized your job is or how big your company is.  That’s the kind of employee you want to be, trust me.

But, you say, what about me?  Don’t I get a say in things?  Can’t I have my own career ambitions and interests and steer the kind of work that I do?

You can!  You should!  I tell people at Return Path that all the time.  And the best part about is that while the two above statements may seem at odds with each other — be able to do anything (with a smile) and do what you want to do — they’re actually not.  The very best employees who I’ve worked with or who have worked for me over the years do both and mix them together to their advantage.

Work your career path with your manager, your mentor, your HR leader, your CEO.  Understand what’s possible long term at the company.  Figure out what you’re good at and what interests you (read, among other things, Now, Discover Your Strengths to get there).  Learn what it takes to earn a promotion to the next level.  Get yourself generally in line to rise through the ranks the way YOU want to.  Obviously, to get to that next level, you’ll need to work your butt off, harder than others around you, with better results and higher quality.

But you also have to be a utility infielder, to mix sports metaphors.  If your company or your team needs you to do something a little different from what you’re doing today, the difference between doing it well with a smile on your face and doing it merely satisfactorily with a grimace could be the difference between that next promotion and not.  And it’s really both those things — doing it well, and having a great attitude about it. 

I love running, because I can do it at any place, at any time, as long as have my running shoes.  Our best employees are similarly versatile, because they are self-directed and work hard and do things right, but also because they do what needs to be done when it needs to be done, even if it’s outside the scope of their day-to-day or not explicitly in the critical path of their next promotion.

As most of you know by now, I wrote a book that was published last fall called Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business.  I’m excited to announce that, starting on January 20th, the book has now been turned into Kauffman Fellows Academy (KFA) online course called Startup CEO.  Similarly, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s highly successful Venture Deals is also going to launch as Venture Deals KFA online course on February 24th. Both will be offered initially on the NovoEd platform.

The parties involved in getting it off the ground (besides me) were the team at Kauffman Fellows Academy and NovoEd.  Clint Korver, a serial entrepreneur and Stanford adjunct professor, spearheaded the project, and between filming the course and now, he switched jobs from KFA to be the COO at NovoEd, so he has been on all sides of this.   NovoEd is a very unique online educational platform that gives students the ability internationally to work together in teams and collaborate on assignments and peer review one another’s work.  So far over 1,300 people have signed up for Startup CEO from countries as far-flung as the China, Brasil, Iran, the U.K., Australia and, of course, Silicon valley..  This is an exciting extension of the book for me to watch unfold.

The class itself is a very unique format, a bit of “the entrepreneur’s studio” model.  For each chapter of the book (there are 48), I filmed a 5-10 minute Q&A with Clint in front of a live audience of a dozen startup CEOs in New York.  This was a serious production – much more than I expected – with a three-person former CNN production team of Kevin Rockwell, Chuck Afflerbach, and led by former Emmy Award winning CNN Correspondent Rusty Dornin.  Preparing for the class this way was fun and gave me a good opportunity to further crystallize the main point or theme of each chapter.  Having a live audience was super helpful to see what worked and what didn’t work.

As I stared at a dugout of dispirited 14 year old boys Saturday afternoon in our tournament championship game, I found myself talking to my fellow coach Mitch about a book I’d read a few years ago (turns out 14) called Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End, written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor. While that original blog post is pretty specific to something that was going on at that point in time in my prior company, the thinking in the book about momentum and the role it plays in our psychology, about sports, about business, and about life in general, is timeless.

Watching this team of teens go through ups and downs within an hour was incredibly stark and clear. In the first inning, we made three errors (just jitters from being in the championship…the Bulldogs are better than that!). Those opened the door for our opponent to post a few runs and take a quick lead. It was as if the wind had been taken out of our sails, as if all 11 kids just took a punch to the gut. They were shocked and pretty listless in the dugout, and nothing the coaches could do or say shook them out of it. They just *knew* they were going to lose, so why try? Their confidence was gone. It wasn’t until we staged our own big rally, later in the game, where all of a sudden, one, then two, then three base hits and the kids were going bananas, up at the fence of the dugout and screaming, cheering each other on and feeling all of a sudden like we could win the game.

The swing in momentum took about 5 minutes in each direction. And all that was involved was a couple quick negative/positive indicators/actions.

The bottom line is that we still lost the game 10-5. But the energy that came from a couple positive developments that stopped a downward spiral and started an upward one was palpable and instructive. As one of my other fellow coaches Jay said to the boys after the game, “Boys, the lesson from today is that Everything Matters. We lost 10-5, but when we were only down by 5 runs with the bases loaded, how much did we regret those couple of errors in the first inning? Without those, we would have been down by 2 runs with victory in reach.”

It’s the same in startups.

When you run a startup, you regularly take three punches to the gut in a row — a client cancels on you, you have a web site outage, an employee quits — and all of a sudden, you view the world through a dark lens of, as my long-time friend and Board member Scott Weiss used to say, WFIO, short for We’re F#%ked, It’s Over (pronounced whiff-ee-oh).

And then, the opposite happens, and it’s like the heavens part and the angels start singing a hallelujah chorus. You win a big new deal. You get unexpected positive press or a key blogger or tweet creates massive buzz for you. Your CFO pings you with the news that revenue is surprisingly high this month. WFIO is suddenly replaced with what I’ll call WGTWIA — We’re Going to Win It All (let’s pronounce it wig-twee-uh).

And what’s the difference? Probably nothing big. Probably a couple small things that just happened to break in the right or wrong direction at the right time. That call or email you decided not to return for a couple days until it was too late. That presentation you could have spent an extra 45 minutes perfecting instead of half-assing. That extra run through a new module of code you wrote to make sure it’s fully debugged. Just like a few silly errors in 14-year old baseball because you had the jitters early in a big game.

Everything Matters. In sports, in business, in life. Anything you think is a “throw away” can turn out in retrospect to have made the difference between winning and losing, between success and failure.

I am fortunate in my current job to spend a lot of time talking to other founders and CEOs. I mentor and coach them, my company and I help counsel them on executive and board searches, and I spend time with them at conferences and seminars. Even when I am giving them advice, I always take time to learn what they’re doing, what works, and what doesn’t work. I’ve noticed a consistent set of behaviors and practices common among the successful founder operators – the ones who go on to lead their companies through multiple chapters of growth and sometimes never hire the “seasoned operator” to come in and take over. 

#1 – They are students of the game. It’s easy to get mired in the day to day details of building a business from scratch. The best founders are the ones who take time to watch, read, and learn. They want to see what other entrepreneurs do and they ask probing questions about what works and doesn’t work. They read blog posts, articles, and books. They listen to podcasts and constantly try to apply learnings to their company. They seek out coaches and mentors. 

#2 – They have positive and regular (and sometimes extreme) personal habits. It’s easy to get sucked into working all the time when you’re building a business from scratch and counting every penny and every minute. However, observing how successful CEOs manage their time shows that either very early mornings or very late nights are pretty common, and not in the way you might think. A 4:30 or 5 am alarm for regular exercise, or drawing a hard line around “no work after 6” means the leader is committed to personal time to stay fresh, and connect with friends and family. Abraham Lincoln is quoted as having said “Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

#3 – They know how to leverage themselves. It’s easy as a founder to think you’re the only person who can get something done. Delegation is hard, and it often involves investing more time to train someone else how to do something than doing it yourself. The best founders figure out how to squeeze every minute out of the day by remembering that building a startup is a team sport and that building up the team around them is the key to their own productivity. 

#4 – They have great work hygiene. It’s easy to not respond to emails or texts or Slack messages because they’re not the most important thing you have going on. It’s easy to not send a Thank You note after a meeting or take time to connect with a colleague on a human level. The best founders are the ones who know the power of their own words, the power of their own presence, and who find the time to inject that power into others’ lives.

#5 – They have a recurring belief in creative destruction. It’s easy to create a new company because there’s a need in the market to disrupt incumbents. Creative destruction is central to the story of entrepreneurs everywhere. It’s very hard to apply that same creative destruction mentality to your own work. The best founder operators are the ones who are not just capable of tearing down an industry…but are equally capable and enthusiastic about tearing down their own product, their own team, and their own business processes in order to build them back up. MVPs are often too “M” and need to be replaced and upgraded consistently over time.

None of these practices is the path of least resistance—they require extra effort. I’m not sure what the cause and effect is here. A weak founder with bad product market fit and an untrusting attitude towards employees can’t just start waking up early and reading a lot and magically become successful. But on the margin, enough correlation leads me to believe that there’s something in the combination of these practices that leads to the competitive edge, the informed intuition, the vision, and the ability to motivate the people around them that are common in successful founder operators. 

VCs Are Full of It

…at least that’s what Brad says.  Well, he says a lot more than that, but certainly makes for a good pre-holiday headline, doesn’t it?

Brad’s brilliant advice is not to confuse data – or even worse – anecdotes – with fact.  I’d add to the axiom my own observation that “just because someone says something with extreme conviction doesn’t mean it’s true.”

His whole post is very worthwhile – one of the best ones I’ve read in a long time.  Read it here.

Hackoff – The Blook

Fred and Brad have already posted some pertinent details as well, but here’s a must-read for you – entrepreneur Tom Evslin, who has a great blog, has just launched an online book, serialized as a blog.  It’s about a fictitious Internet bubble company called Hackoff.com (nice name!), and you can subscribe to the episodes of the book, either by RSS feed or by email.  The first episode and various subscription options are all here.

Tom’s a great writer and had front row seats/was a lead actor in the bubble.  The first episode has me hooked.  This is going to be fun!