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The board diversity problem is a symptom of a much broader problem around lack of diversity in founders that get funded and lack of diversity in VC firms. Most startup boards are made up of a few founders and a few VCs. No wonder you have no diversity on the board. Boards don’t need three or four VCs on them.
Typically, investors don’t take a board seat until you raise your first equity round—which means that it could be *years* before you have a real board meeting: A year of nights/weekends work researching, prototyping, and fundraising. First off, many founders don't really feel the need to have external accountability.
I remember about fifteen years ago, a well-known VC said to me “you need to sell a company within a few years of the founder leaving. Companies can’t sustain their innovation after a founder leaves.” I have seen leadership teams take over great businesses from founders and get them to the next level.
For startups, a good Board is better than no Board, but a bad Board is worse than anything. One component of a good Board is a high value add Independent Board Member, which in my experience, often doesn’t get added early enough (for a variety of reasons). I knew I wanted to help build it from the ground up.
It was a company whose product I believed in and whose founder I liked, but a firm lobbed in a term sheet at a price 33% higher than what I had offered using a very light agreement meant for a much earlier stage company. Then, I read about the idiotic comments made by a co-founder of Rap Genius. No, probably not.
Founders seem to get that. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t mean trust in the sense that VCs think founders are just going to get a fake passport and move to Fiji, or that investors are secretly plotting to take over the company. VCs aren’t experts at every aspect of a startup at the same level across the board.
I have been writing a series on how startup boards get selected, who sits on them and what to avoid. I started this series in part to help entrepreneurs but also to help newer investors because I’ve know with so many new companies you have so many new board members and many people are trying to figure out there respective roles.
It’s your job as a founder to find out the specific risk associated with that attribute and to find out if the reason given is the only reason. But if these people are willing to come on without the co-founder title, that’s between them, you and their employment contract. Let’s first talk about the definition of a co-founder.
It doesn’t matter whether your business model is B2B, B2C, or any other model, you still need to “sell to people” to get your key hires on board, critical partnerships and suppliers, and maybe even a deal from your landlord. co-founder). It set you miles apart from other founders and quickly demonstrate your sales skills.
One of the things that founders have the most angst about is whom they should have on their board and at what stage of the business. This is smart because amazing board members can be transformative with important advice and access and can also help attract other great board members (and team members).
As I shared in a previous post , when I was president of Click Workspace, a startup coworking space, our board chairman delivered feedback that hit me hard: I wasn’t paying enough attention to our financials. Many founders would leave board meetings with lengthy to-do lists. “Isn’t it obvious what I need to do?
Shivani Gupta, EO Queensland, multi-business founder, author, speaker and coach Profit from profit My big learning from EO Malaysia member Fong Leng Wong is: Profit from profit. My first female mentor was the incredible Janine Allis , founder of Boost Juice. Express your view in a calm and professional way.
We we backed Team Grove’s mission (Kevin sourced the deal and joined the board) and just encouraged the team not to ramp up costs like many contemporary startups because we’re going to play the long game. eliminating herbicides & pesticides. ” Enter Grove.
That kind of determination and conviction is exactly what defines the very best YC founders. I can’t wait for all YC founders to benefit from his mentorship and land those crucial first customers faster. We couldn’t be more excited to have Tyler on board. Welcome to YC, Tyler!
Not in the “founder friendly” culture of tech anyway. Investors let him control the board as long as he continued to make them paper rich, and then actually rich--so they couldn’t technically force him out. It’s male founder friendly. Founders have to reckon with that. Travis should hire her back?? The second reason?
I’ve been asked this question a bunch in the last few weeks in response to my post about more diversity on Boards. A Company should have a Board the day it is formed. The Board should contain one Founder (or possibly two) and at least two independent Directors. My answer to this question is simple.
As I said in this post , I am generally a “one share one vote proponent”, but I have supported founder control provisions in a few companies where I was or am on the board. The founder had a 10:1 supervoting provision and controlled a majority of the board seats. We saw that play out with WeWork this week.
Jason sat down with Steve Barsh , Managing Partner of Dreamit, to give founders relevant downturn strategies. Jason answers critical questions for founders, including: How can your company ensure survival? Your primary job as a founder is to save the business. What do investors like Jason want to see from founders?
You get to have interesting conversations with founders and review business plans and then see how these businesses evolve over the years. 1/ From vantage point of being able to see hundreds of companies, good & bad I have some advice for founders - Get to know and love "gross margin."
Clearly the founders and senior executives of a company are the most valuable resources and their time should be maximized on the most valuable tasks. One area I’ve had much discussion with the companies in which I’ve invested in is bringing on board an operationally focused CFO. Board Preparation. Board meetings.
It is unlikely that founders will be able to force investors out of their cap tables via the secondary markets, but a voluntary separation via the secondary market seems more likely to me. I also think startup boards need to evolve. There should be many more independent directors and many fewer investor directors on startup boards.
The immersive three-and-a-half-day programme is based around three key themes – board leadership, cultural intelligence and climate awareness. Each day focusses on a different facet of being a director – you, your board and practical governance. Listen to Board Matters Season 3, Episode 2 to hear more from Maria King.
Contributed by Kevin Xu , CEO of MEBO International and co-founder of the Human Heritage Project. Kevin is co-founder of the Human Heritage Project. The post 3 Tips for Getting Investors on Board With Your CSR Mission appeared first on Octane Blog – The official blog of the Entrepreneurs' Organization.
Get everyone on board with your WHY. The post 5 ways founders and CEOs can diversify their leadership teams appeared first on THE BLOG. Companies with a rich tapestry of diversity are more likely to outperform, as well as create thriving, highly engaged cultures.
Founders still want to get press and investors to notice them, but they dont have a lot of money to work with. When Tinybop first launched, before they ever made their first app for kids, they started a newsletter that featured products they loved for kidsfrom everything from books to board games. What are they supposed to do today?
Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern PA (Ben Franklin CNP) is pleased to announce the appointment of Angie Singer Keating to its Board of Directors as President. Angie Singer Keating is the Co-Founder and CEO of Reclamere, a leading provider of cybersecurity and IT asset management solutions.
There''s been some writing about how VCs and founders interact with each other and it inspired me to take a step back and reflect on what my role is supposed to be with regards to the investments I make and the founders I deal with. Here''s what I came up with. Venture Capital & Technology'
Seasoned founders have a particular way of answering this question. In this Dreamit Dose, Managing Director Adam Dakin presents his view on the right way to answer it after hearing hundreds, if not thousands, of founder pitches. When you don’t state the ask upfront, here’s the incorrect answer most founders give when pressed.
And because you need their money, the temptation is to listen a bit too well, and take all of the advice thrown at you during your presentations and during due diligence and finally from the vantage point of a board seat. Some board members may show dismay. After several months on the board, he spoke up. “I And push back.
Miranda Naiman, a 7-year EO Tanzania member and an unstoppable force for good, is the founder of Empower , a disruptive consulting firm that passionately provides talent, advisory and insight services to clients across the African continent. board director to multiple organisations, coach, mentor and volunteer can weigh us down.
Generally speaking, women are more inclined to listen well, work with others and to offer help--so when the job gets seen as just a lone, final yes/no, where you bark out advice after listening to a founder for five minutes, that might seem less interesting. Bonus: Founders make it too easy for us to be jerks. 3) Access to money.
She has also been successful as part of the Board Member and leadership team driving the investments from Lux Capital, Initialized, Bain Capital, the investment arm of Bain & Company and others. If you had to share, words of wisdom, with a Founder whos about to start their own startup, what would theybe?
I often speak about co-founder fighting and how this ends in lawsuits but this has become much more prevalent. I’d encourage you to watch this quick 3-minute video with some views on what I call “ The Co-Founder Mythology ” that is perpetuated in Silicon Valley. He signed a release and remained on the board.
Operating experience (Helped run parts of CitySearch & UrbanSpoon, tons of product management experience, Board of Hatch Labs which helped spawn Tinder). Wonderful human being who is civically engaged, mother of 3, mentorer of younger founders, hard worker and arguer extraordinaire (so says her current Twitter bio).
“There are things you can do to make sure you’re not alone” Andrea Grisdale, founder and CEO at IC Bellagio and a member of EO Italy. “The entrepreneurial journey doesn’t need to be lonely” Emma Welsh, founder at Emma & Tom’s and a member of EO Melbourne. In fact, I believe it to be the opposite.
As the idea went from innovating on software & systems to launching a company to rolling it out in the field brought on Rahul Gandhi as his co-founder to physically launch the company. Sam & Rahul have worked closely together on “innovate & operate” since the earliest days of MakeSpace. Seriously, this happens.
These are things that other VCs think about, but founders who come to pitch don''t think about too much. One of the reasons why I''m announcing at all is because I realized that it had been a while since I said anything about the progress of the fund--and if you''re an industry person, you might have started wondering. How where things going?
Twenty-five of them have at least one female co-founder. Fifteen had co-founders over 40. Five have LGBTQ+ founders. Three teams have African-American founders. I was reminded of this from one of my founders of non-white descent. Three of the founding teams are married couples.
This is a theme I have come back to many times over the last decade but in the wake of all of the headlines about high profile founders, VCs, and companies leaving the bay area, I thought I would return to it. I am not saying that founders will stop traveling to raise money, although I think that may stick post-pandemic.
Brad says: “Talk to people you trust, whether they’re investors, board members, co-founders, mentors, whatever; make sure you’re open about the stress and the struggle you’re going through both financially in the business and personally.” I can personally attest that it’s very easy for a startup CEO to feel alone and isolated.
But if a founder wanted a list of jobs to automate, the BLS’ white collar jobs boards is a wonderful place to start. Legaltech has surged automating demand letters for personal injury, writing briefs for attorneys, & chomping away paralegal work. We could keep iterating through the list.
When I was a startup founder, I had this same issue. That's when I had a conversation with Max Ventilla, the founder of AltSchool, who at the time was running Aardvark. The other day, I was in a board meeting and we were talking about the need for a software engineer. The team already had a lead on board.
A well-known entrepreneur turned VC, who will go unnamed because I am not sure he would want me to share this conversation publicly, once told me “if you remove a founder, you must sell the company within a couple of years or it will start to decline in value.” Some founders are this rare breed of visionaries who can operate too.
Hande Cilingir has the unique and prestigious status as a female-founder of a tech unicorn Founded in 1909 International Women’s Day continues to be both a celebration of women and a rallying cry for women’s equality. In recognition of the day, AI-native platform Insider issued a press release honoring its co-founder Hande Cilingir.
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