To Board or Not to Board
I have been spending more and more time thinking about how the VC 'product' has to evolve in future, particularly as an emerging manager without the brand strength of a Sequoia or a16z to entice the best founders to work with us. This week, I was quizzing the founder of one of our companies on how their other investors work with them: what works, what's helpful, what's useless, and so on.
The conversation quite quickly got onto Board meetings, which - it turns out - are not happening for this company. For context, they are a pre-seed company that raised their first round of venture funding last year, so it's still very early days overall.
Nonetheless, I was surprised.
The argument for not doing Board meetings for a company so young essentially boils down to the fact that they need to spend 100% of their time trying to figure out product-market-fit, or nothing else matters. The time sink of preparing for Board meetings, writing materials, actually doing the Board, and so on are not worthwhile when stacked up against that imperative. Any guidance that is needed can be handled with quick 121 conversations. In other words, process strangles.
The counter-argument, which I subscribe to, is that a Board should feel like an extension of your team actively contributing to the journey of figuring stuff out. Board members are further back from the day-to-day detail and can help founders pull up from the trenches and think about what the most important strategic imperatives are over the next 3-6 months. The actual answers will likely never come from the Board, and nor should they. But the most important questions may well do so.
I think part of the problem is that founders see the Board as backwards-facing, focused on the past quarter or month and scrutinising the detail of how things evolve. But Board meetings should never feel like simply reporting news up to Mount Olympus and hoping to get a pat on the head, or to avoid reprimand. If that's the dynamic, things need to change. It's not the concept of a Board itself that's wrong, it's the execution.
The reality is that at the early stage, the entrepreneur calls all the shots anyway - it's no investor's business trying to step in and tell a founder how to do things, otherwise they shouldn't have invested in the first place. And that means that founders have the power to shape the Board in the direction they want. Rather than pushing back against the concept altogether, ask a different question: "What would need to be true for this to be a helpful use of my time?" and work backwards into the agenda, cadence and materials from there.
Think of it as a resource to help, not to hinder.