I was at a board meeting last week that introduced something new into the mix that I thought was brilliant. At the beginning of each section of the board meeting, there was one slide that was titled: “What Are We Trying To Get Out of This Section.” Before we started into a section, whoever was […]

My partner Seth Levine is writing a blog series on Designing the Ideal Board Meeting. Seth and I have each attended over 27,367 board meetings. Ok, I don’t know the actual number, but it’s a lot. We’ve both been on good boards and bad boards. Boards that have helped companies and boards that have sunk companies. Boards […]

I’ve been to a gazillion board meetings. I’ve written a lot about them including a book called Startup Boards: Getting The Most Out of Your Board of Directors and piles of board meetings posts on this blog. I still do a lot of them, but I’ve definitely been on a quest the past few years to […]

Do you remember your first board meeting? I do. Well, I sort of do, kind of, maybe. Danielle Morrill of Mattermark memorialized her first board meeting on the web in her post Post Series A Life: Reflecting on Our First Board Meeting and What It’s Like Working with Brad. It’s a detailed view of her expectations leading […]

In my new book, Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors, in addition to decomposing and explaining a lot about the functioning of board meetings, I also describe my ideal board meeting. I had four of them this week. That’s a lot of board meetings in a week, but my weeks […]

I’ve been writing about boards of directors some lately – both changing my behavior as well as thinking out loud as I explore reinventing how boards work for the book “Startup Boards” that I’m working on with Mahendra Ramsinghani. All fit in the context of continuous communications as I believe three things about early stage […]

I love getting post board meeting emails that are retrospectives from execs in the meeting. This one came a week ago from Jeff Malek, the CTO and co-founder of BigDoor. They’ve been on a tear lately and are in the process of a massive set of Q1 launches for new customers.  We had a solid […]

I’ve had a string of great board meetings lately. They all had several similar attributes. There were no powerpoint slides: While each company has a substantive monthly reporting package, this was decoupled from the board meeting. I got my taste of financials, metrics, qualitative stuff, and whatever else the CEO wanted me to see on […]

I had a board update call recently that inspired me to write the first of my Reinventing the Board Meeting posts. The call was for a company that is doing great, is extremely well managed, and extraordinarily transparent. Two days before the call a very detailed update package was sent around to the board. It […]