Following are some board meeting rules that were recently presented to me and my fellow board members by a CEO at one of his first board meetings at a newly funded early stage company.  I thought they were brilliant.  Feel free to pass them out at your next board meeting. Be supportive of the company: Tell us the […]

Scott Converse – the CEO of ClickCaster – has a long and very personal post about his experience in the run up to his first board meeting.  I’m sure he’ll have a follow up post after the meeting today.  If you are a first time entrepreneur who has just raised money, or are just starting […]

Pascal Levensohn – the founder of Levensohn Venture Partners – wrote a comment to my post title The Agenda (in the Board of Directors series) that I wanted to promote to a full post (since I expect only some of you read comments.)  Pascal linked to a presentation he used to moderate a panel on Best Practices […]

I’ve been to a zillion board meetings (ok – let’s guess between 1,000 and 2,000 assuming 10+ / month for the past 12 years.)  While the food is usually lousy (but not always, as I’ve seen a marked improvement since I wrote my Board Meeting Food Is Usually Shit post), I’ve found a more troubling […]

I’ve been to zillions of board meetings (and lunch meetings) over the past decade.  The food at 98% of them is shit.  We had a board meeting at FeedBurner today.  Lunch was – nope – not “yet another soggy sandwich.”  Dick and crew treated us to Thai food – yum.  It took virtually no extra […]

Well – I gave Fred 36 hours to put up a post about the fun we had at dinner with Wikipedia and – since he hasn’t yet – you’ll get it from me. Once a year, Return Path has a board / management retreat (from Thursday noon to Friday 2pm) that serves as our October board […]

I had a great board meeting today at Quova and a near perfect board meeting at Rally last week.  While it’s a pleasure to be involved in both companies since they are both performing very well, the structure and tempo of each board meeting really turned me on. I had started to notice a disconcerting […]

I’m sitting in a technical advisory board meeting for one of my companies (Rally Software Development). I’m moblonging from my Danger – pretty cool (at least to me). We’re having a great meeting. I’ve sat in on a bunch of these over the last 10 years since I started investing in (vs. running) software companies. […]

As Jim and I continue our Board Meeting series, we’ve decided to address a question that we are often asked – “How Many Board Meetings Should A VC-backed company have?” Our general answer is “as many as you should for the stage of the company that you are.” We define stage loosely, where you evaluate […]