Founders Need to Prepare Mentally for an Exit | Matt Blumberg | Part One & Two | The BOSS Podcast

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

Thanks for taking the time from your busy schedule to join me in another episode of The Boss Podcast. My guest today is Matt Blumberg. Matt is the founder and CEO of Bolster, a talent marketplace for on-demand executives and board members, and the author of the new book Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams. Matt is like a spiritual brother of mine. He's dedicated his entire career to creating startups, scaling them, and sharing best practices of what works and what doesn't work. Matt, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Absolutely. It's great to be here.

Matt, we have so much to talk about and so little time. So let's just dive in and talk about your book. This book is fantastic. In fact, I just sent it off to all of our portfolio companies and said, this is a must-read. You have to read that. What led you to write that book? Like, what series of events got you down to the point where you're like, this is the book I'm going to write, this is the topic I'm going to write about?

So my first book led to the second book. So I'll tell the story of both. So Startup CEO, which is the book I wrote in 2013, and then did a second edition in 2020. It was designed to be an instruction manual for the first-time CEO. And I wrote it because I really wished I had had one and just, you know, felt like there's so many people that are starting companies younger and younger with less and less experience that, you know, just kind of jotting down for them, here's how to do a whole bunch of things, was something I had been wanting to do for a long time. So I had this blog, startupceo.com, with hundreds and hundreds of blog posts of, you know, my experience as a founder. That plus some new material turned into Startup CEO, the book, which is 65 chapters of how to do X, Y, and Z. How to hire someone, how to do a pitch deck, how to run a board meeting, how to work with an EA, that kind of thing. That book spawned a lot of questions from CEOs along the way. There's one chapter of that book called The CEO as Functional Supervisor, which is one of the important parts of the job of being a CEO is you got to You gotta manage the head of sales, and you gotta manage the CTO, and you gotta manage the CFO, and the head of HR. And most CEOs have never done any of those jobs, right? At most, you've done one or two of them. So I had all these questions from CEOs who were reading Startup CEO saying, man, what I really need is an instruction manual for how to manage each of the people on my team.

Mm-hmm.

So that was kind of the genesis of Startup CXO. And what I decided to do was pull together people that I'd worked with in my career who were 20-plus-year C-level executives in each of the different functions— HR, finance, marketing, sales, etc.— and have each of them write, you know, 20 chapters about what it's like to run that function at a startup, what it's like to scale that function, what are the critical competencies, what do you do, what do you do when. What do you not do? How do you relate to the other functions on the executive team? And basically we put all of that together in one book. So Startup CXO is a book of books. It's got sections for each major functional area written by a functional expert. And then it has some connective tissue that I wrote in at the beginning, at the end, and in each section about, you know, sort of how I think about that function as a CEO.

That is really interesting. You know, I talk a lot about the horse and the jockey, right? The horse being the business product And then the jockey being the entrepreneur. And a lot of the times, we're focusing on the product, right? We're trying to, as an investor, I'm looking at the product, I'm looking at the product. Is the product good? Because a lot of times, you can't judge the entrepreneur, right? It's really, especially if they're a new startup entrepreneur and they've never ridden the horse before, right? They're bound to make some mistakes. But what you're saying is give them some initial training that says, hey, this is how you do this. This is how you do this. Watch out for this. Avoid these minefields and so on and so forth. So do you find that when people read the book and then they come back to you, that they come back and go, I've tried this with these functional area leaders and this really worked and that really worked? And does that lead you to a third book?

There is a third book in the works actually. It's going to come out early next year and it's called Startup Boards. So we have Startup CEO, Startup CXO, Startup Boards. Startup Boards is actually a second edition of a book that was first written by a longtime investor and board member of mine, Brad Feld, from Foundry Group out in Colorado, with another venture capitalist, Mahendra Ramsinghani. I've written a tremendous amount about boards from the CEO's perspective, and I've been an independent director on a bunch of boards. Here at my current company, Bolster, one of the things we help CEOs do is build their boards. So we're doing a Startup Boards second edition that That'll come out early next year that hopefully will sort of complete the set for The CEO.

Oh, that's amazing. I think that's really— I can't wait to give this out to all of our portfolio companies. It's very exciting. I mentioned in the opening that you've had this incredible career. What elements of your career prepared you specifically for Startup XO and all the books, I guess? I think now we should talk about it more broader than just that one book because you're a serial writer.

I guess, yeah. I am also a sitting CEO, so that's where most of, uh, that's where most of my time goes.

That's why they're so good, right? Because you have real practical boots-on-the-ground experience.

Yeah, I, um, like to think of myself as a student of the craft. Everything I do, no matter what it is, but, but, you know, being in business and entrepreneur and founder and CEO, I want to be as good as I can at it. And a big piece of that is making sure I'm constantly learning, and I'm learning from Outside sources, as well as learning from you know my own experience and the experience of my team, and doing retrospectives all the time. And I think with with all of that and the passage of time and experiences at different companies, sort of you know those those come together to give me not just the passion to do my job and do really well at it, but kind of document it along the way. And there's a great a great as it relates to the books, there's a great quote from Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate. writer, she said something to the effect of, if there's a book that you want to read and it doesn't exist, you're obligated to write it. You must write it. That was— I really felt the case with both of the books so far.

I've done a dozen— I've done 12 exits as an entrepreneur and they're all different. Every single one has nuances here and there. I'm wondering, with your experience of exiting a startup, what What has your experience been like in exiting these things? Is it the same as me where every one of them is a little different and there's nuances here and there, or do you feel like there's some things that are consistent from entity to entity?

Well, first of all, I haven't done a dozen of them. Good for you. There's certainly a lot of things that are different from situation to situation, but I can give you a couple of thoughts of things that I think are consistent from time to time or Or things that, that I've tried to do from time to time. So, and these are, I think, all sort of about the, the mental side of being a founder or a CEO. One is you want to prepare yourself mentally and emotionally for an exit way before you exit. The founders that I know that have had the hardest time leaving a business have been the ones who didn't do that. You know, I think you can simultaneously say, hey, I'm going to be in this business forever, and, you know, I'm the founder and it's going to be great, and also have in the back of your mind, well, what if I'm not? You know, what, what's going to happen someday? So I think that sort of mental preparation of what's it going to be like to have someone else run this thing, um, was very helpful for me, uh, in, in our exit. I think related to that, I am a big believer in marking transitions. And I think one of the ways that I certainly help myself and try to help others in our organization mark change, manage change, is to mark transitions really effectively. So, you know, the opportunity when you're exiting a business to say thank you to the people that have helped you along the way, to say goodbye if you're leaving the company.

Yeah.

To help all of them with the transition from one owner to another or one CEO to another, you know, I think is something that, you know, that is pretty important as well. And then finally, it's around exiting, really wanting to leave the organization, whether it's the products or the customers or the people, in the best possible shape. So that, you know, when you hand that baton off to the company that bought your company and you're handing things over to them, that you're really proud of what they're taking.

I agree 100%. I think it's really— that transition is really important to do it, you know, with grace and respect and honor, I think is a beautiful thing. I was at a— the other day, day before yesterday, I was at Camp Pendleton at the Marine Corps and I was doing a war game exercise with A whole bunch of colonels and that sort of thing. And one of the things I saw on the way is a change of command. And the way that they handled the change of command was just— it was beautiful. I just stopped and watched it and it was absolutely beautiful. And it— when you said that, it made me think about that, right? About this respectful honor in terms of transitioning, you know, yourself and your role to the next person who's taking over that. I think it's Really cool that you mentioned that.

It's an honor to be compared to Marines.

Yeah, it was really cool.

I mean, they had—

it was joint forces, so it was people from all different branches of the military. It was a really fun exercise, actually. I want to ask you a question, go back to the book a little bit. I had this thought when you were talking and I came back and forth and I decided I should ask this question because I think the listeners would really appreciate it. Tell me about the role of a CXO, and what does that entail? Like, unpack CXO a little bit.

Yeah, so first of all, CXO, if people aren't familiar with it, is just Chief Something Officer. Uh, so, you know, any, any C-suite leader in a company. So I think there are, you know, maybe 4 important things you have to do to be an effective Chief Something Officer— Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, Head of HR, Head of Finance. One is you have to really understand all the details that go into making your function work. So, you know, fortunately, by the time most people get to be a CXO, they've come up through the ranks of their function. They may not know all of it, right? Think about it. If you come up through marketing, maybe you were a brand person, maybe you were a demand gen person, maybe you were a digital person. So you may not have done everything, but you really have to understand all the details that go into making your department function. The second thing, which is sort of a layer up from that, is you have to have a strategic framework for your department or a reason for being, right? As they say in French, a raison d'être. I'll give you an example of this. My longtime CFO and multiple-time co-founder, Jack Sinclair, who wrote the CFO section of the book, talks about finance as a partner.

Mm-hmm.

His strategic framework for the finance and accounting department is to partner with the business, to partner with fellow executives and decision makers to provide them with actionable information. Whether you like that particular thing or not, that's an example of strategic framework for a functional department.

I think it's really beautiful because a lot of times they're at odds with each other. Finance is the unappreciated bad guy and poking holes in all the sales. I think it's really important in that comment about partner with them and really work with them and try to establish a relationship where you're weaving through the tapestry of the business functional areas together, I think is really, really cool. And I know in your book, I read that part of it. It's just really— I think your book's really good, by the way. You know, I've been building companies for 25 years and I thought it was really good. And I can't say that about all these types of books.

So, thank you.

Yeah, really well done. As you know, a lot of times scaling a business is harder than starting a business. For the listeners, I wanted to know if you could give us some advice on the major issues and what comes up when you actually switch from that growth mode to that scaling mode and they're usually really close together and crash into each other.

Yeah. I mean, I'll give you a couple of things that I've learned over the years. One thing in terms of myself that I've always found is Is obsessing about seeing around corners, not just about knocking out the tasks that are in front of me. People will always be driven by the urgent, right? The things that someone's throwing at you that you've got to react to. But the ability to have a longer horizon and operate in multiple horizons at the same time is so important. So yeah, you've got to clean out your inbox every day, but You also need to make sure you're making the quarter and that you're set up to make next quarter and that you're going to make the year and that you're thinking about next year and the year after. That gets trickier with organizations that are scaling rapidly, but is even more important. The second thing for me is thinking about the organization as a talent machine. So not just thinking about like, hey, how do I hire the best people for the job at the moment, but how do I get the organization to produce the best people At level 1 for level 2 and at level 2 for level 3 so that over time you're not constantly having to hire in senior people all throughout the organization, but your organization is growing talent. The third thing for me that I think is really hard for founders is what I call learning to love the teardown. It's really easy to tear down someone else's work and build it back up as your own, And it's really hard to tear down your own work and build it back differently. And if you're the, you know, the architect, the founder, the CEO, you know, the people and the processes and the systems you put in place for a $2 million business are really different than the ones you need when you're a $10 million business. And you have to be the one to tear it down and build it back up.

That is incredibly wise. That is very true. You have to restructure as you go through the different gates along the lifecycle of a startup. I agree 100%. Give us a little more on that. So, if you're essentially this talent machine, right? So, you're hiring a certain type of person and then you're fostering their development until either they get moved down, move out, or you move somebody in or they move up, right? So, are you hiring somebody that you think can be there in the future or are you hiring somebody that you need right now? Like, what of those 2 is the primary focus?

You know, yes is the answer. And it depends a little bit on the job, right? Different different teams and different departments kind of function differently. So here are two examples that are extremes, right? Sales. You know, most if you talk about an enterprise sales organization, you're talking about an organization that can have many many different levels in it, and each level as you move up carries more quota and works on more complicated accounts. And it's incredibly painful when quota walks out the door, right? When you have a senior sales rep with a big book of business walks out the door. But it's a lot less painful if someone who's handling smaller accounts, commercial accounts, mid-market accounts can bump up to that role and pick the book of business up. So a selling organization where you can start with SDRs or BDRs and move them into a junior rep and move them into a commercial rep and move them into an enterprise rep You know, is is the example of you hire someone for what you need today with an eye toward what you need tomorrow. But at the same time, you need today's job done and and you need it done well. And we always you know we always told people you don't have to be here to get promoted. And what what I mean by that is there are you know there are some people in life that are just great doing their job. And they don't necessarily want the next challenge and the next challenge and the next challenge, and that's okay too. So it's kind of balancing that out to make sure that you have enough stability in your organization, but you also have people who are promotable to the next level at all times.

So let me ask you this. So one of the things I tell people when I'm talking to them is that I see all the time, you know, I did this study on why entrepreneurs fail. It was like this 5-year thing and, you know, 1,200 interviews and hundreds of thousands, like 5 people. It was a big, big project. And when I did that and I was learning why they failed, One of the reasons is that they hire senior-level executives when they're still in pre-seed or seed or even Series Seed. And those people are used to hiring people to do the job and not actually rolling up their sleeves and doing the job. And a lot of times, they don't even know how to do the job. They know how to hire the right people to do the jobs.

Right.

How would you— how— what kind of, I guess, advice would you give to an entrepreneur when they're in the situation where it's like, okay, well, I need somebody that can roll up their sleeves and work in a startup. But I also need, you know, an FAL, you know, a functional area leader, but I can't afford them right now and maybe the person that I'm hiring to do the job now can't do that, but then they might be upset when I hire over them. How do you handle that sort of a scenario?

Yeah, it's really tricky. There are, you know, there are a couple different thoughts that I have on that. One is I think hiring for stage experience is just as important as hiring for, you know, functional experience or domain experience. And, you know, finding people that are comfortable at whatever series you're at and understand what that is and they've done it before is really important. You know, not to be promotional, but one of the things that we do at Bolster, which is my new company, is we place interim executives and functional mentors and other things too, like board members and full-time executives. But interim and fractional executives are incredibly helpful and useful for early-stage companies who can't afford full-time C-level help in every seat, but who do need to augment a more junior team with some experience. So I think the gig economy has moved upmarket, and I think the notion that you can have that expertise without having them W-2 full-time is here to stay.

I agree. Well, hang on, Matt. We have to take a quick break, but coming up in the second part of my talk with Matt Blumberg, the founder of talent marketplace Bolster, And the author of the new book Startup CXO. Matt discusses the importance of adding independent directors to your board.

My mantra for startup boards is what I call the rule of ones, which is add independent directors from day one, only have one member of the management team on the board, and for every one investor, have one independent. And that's, I think, a good recipe for building a balanced and highly effective board.

Learn more about the BOSS Business Operating Support System at bossstartupscience.com, or you can reach Gregory Shepard at gregoryshepard.com. This has been a production of Forbes Books. Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses. A recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

Thanks for joining me for the rest of my conversation with Matt Blumberg, the founder and CEO of Bolster, a talent marketplace for on-demand executives and board members. Matt is also the author of the fantastic new book Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams. Matt, I wanted to get into the brain of a founder. When you're a founder, you know what the company looks like in your head, but sometimes it's tricky to align your go-to-market strategy with your product teams. The Valley is littered with several visionaries that were bad managers, plain and simple. How did you find the best way to navigate that?

Yeah, it is, um, it's a problem for 2 different reasons. One is, uh, is you may be too far ahead of the team, and I'll come back to that in a second. The other is you might be wrong. It's one thing to have good instinct and you sort of know what the company you want to build is and have it fleshed out in your head, as you said. But for me, I think instinct and vision must be informed by data at every turn. It's a balance, and it's a balance for founders because you, on the one hand, you have vision and you might be inventing a new category and Customers aren't going to tell you what they want because they don't even understand what you're trying to do. At the same time, you have to be willing to some extent to co-create product with customers. If you're putting something in market that customers aren't taking to, you got to learn from that. I think one thing is just rooting the work that you do in data and in primary data from the market to translate what's in your head to the team. Then the second part of that, which gets to your question is making sure that your team comes along for the ride with you, that your team is also collecting that primary data and they're doing it with you and you're having an opportunity to interact with them regularly. I always refer to this, you know, at my company as bringing people along for the ride. And you can't be too far ahead of them. You have to be on the journey with them.

That is very true. I've done that myself a few times where I have to actually catch myself. Often, running off into the future and then realizing, hold on a second, I got to make sure the team's with me.

Right.

I think that's an incredible comment. When you mentioned data, right? So, that's a pretty broad word. So, there's internal data like you're— I'm assuming internally, you're thinking about leading and lagging KPIs and externally, you're looking at market conditions. Is that what you mean or is there more to it than that?

There's more to it than that. I think part of what I mean by data is just information.

Oh, got it.

Not necessarily metrics, but doing customer discovery, if you're following any form of lean methodology, lean canvas methodology, a lot of that's qualitative. It's not metrics, but it's collecting enough qualitative data in a structured enough way that you have the opportunity to learn from it pretty cleanly.

So in my research, I've noticed that there's this huge drop-off. You see about a 90% failure rate across the board in a 5-year period of time. And after the first year, you notice a huge drop-off. It's like 40%, 50%, depending on the market, in the first year after leaving an accelerator. And so one of the things that I think entrepreneurs are challenged with, and being a serial entrepreneur yourself, Maybe you could shed some light on what causes that and how to avoid that from happening to you as an entrepreneur.

Yeah, this is a topic I'm, I'm really passionate about, and in fact, we're building product for this at Bolster. It's a program called Bolster Prime that's designed to exactly address this, but, but I'll, I'll talk about the, the problem in general, which is accelerators are great for helping founders find product-market fit and helping them find some first money. But those 2 things, and even early customer adoption, right, those things don't equal someone who knows how to be a CEO and how to scale a business. And most founders haven't had a lot of experience in general, and there's only so much you can accelerate experience. You know, even the best accelerators can only teach a team so much about leadership and, you know, sort of make up for years of experience. So I That's tough. No one— I don't think anyone can teach you how to react when things fall apart, and things always fall apart in startups. So, you know, what can you do? You know, look, mentorship is how accelerators work. Mentorship tends to drop off at the end of an accelerator program, so finding more mentors is important. When people ask me in, you know, things like this, or if I'm talking to a founder, give me one piece of advice, the piece of advice I give is don't be afraid to ask for help.

Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

So I'm super excited to talk to the person who was the founder of the internet division of Moviefone. If some of us that are a little bit, a little bit older remember Moviefone, this was a big deal at the time. What do you remember about that time? Is there any exciting, fun, cool stories or any horror stories or, you know, war stories that you could talk about during that timeframe?

Yeah, a few, a few kind of funny ones. So Moviefone, which was 777 Film, hired hired me— the company was started in the late '80s as an interactive telephone company. The company hired me in early 1995. The first thing I remember is there was really almost no internet then. There were dial-up services that had sort of walled garden content and their own UI, but the commercial internet was really at ground zero. You know, to sort of put the timing in perspective, my first job when I got to Moviefone was a project which was figure out if we should build a website or not. So, right, because we had this telephone version, this, you know, touchtone telephone service that was working really well, and America Online and CompuServe and Prodigy were offering us a bunch of money to build a proprietary version of the Moviefone service on their platform for their users only. Then we had this notion of like, well, maybe we should build this thing called an HTTP website. The technology was super crude. It didn't seem like a good idea for a movie site to have this terrible technology. You could barely load graphics. You certainly couldn't load any video, but we decided to go with the experimental website, which obviously ended up working out well. We had to build a lot of stuff ourselves. I mean, I'm not an engineer at all and I taught myself how to do HTML and was in there writing code and helping us get the business launched. But there were no tools like there are today around website management that we just had to kind of figure out on our own. I'll tell you another really entertaining story with this. So we launched the website in 1995. And then I think in 1996 or 1997, we launched an email application called MovieMail, which was also reasonably groundbreaking. It was one of the first sort of commercial email applications that included e-commerce. So, you know, it was sort of, hey, what movies are opening up in your zip code this weekend? And here are the showtimes. And do you want to click and buy early tickets? That kind of thing. We had a big launch event planned in LA. The company was in New York, and we had a launch event in LA planned around the release of a movie called The Net with Sandra Bullock, which was sort of this, you know, internet caper movie.

I recall that movie.

I remember that. So we had this whole thing lined up with the studio. They were doing a big ad buy with us, and Sandra Bullock was going to buy the first ever movie ticket over the internet. Everyone was freaked out about doing this live because we were doing it like on Entertainment Tonight. And, you know, no one had any confidence in the internet actually working. So we fly out to LA for this event, and it's me and 2 of the founders of the company, the CEO and the CTO. And the CTO had a server with him. So, and, you know, this is 1996 or '97, so this was a big, like, Dell box. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was not something small, right? And literally packed it as a carry-on. And then we get to LA and he sets up a, you know, a private network in, in the, you know, the venue where we were doing this launch event so that it wouldn't actually go over the internet. And, um, uh, it was, it was so funny, like the, this image I have of this guy Rob with all— with a Dell box on his back making, making it work.

That is so cool. That's the kind of story I love to hear, these old, old stories of Stuff that we did back in the day that people now can't even fathom, especially a lot of the younger coming-up entrepreneurs. I want to talk about your current business, your day job over here as CEO of Bolster. As entrepreneurs, we're always trying to find problems or fix them, and sometimes they find us. And when you looked at this talent marketplace, what problem did you see specifically that's that, you know, made you light up and say, I need to do this, I'm gonna do it differently? And what did you do differently?

So I believe that startups need something different when it comes to scaling their leadership teams and scaling their boards. And when I say something different, I mean something different than lots of ways those things happen today. So if you think about the practice of scaling a startup, and let's focus, you know, either on CXO hire, A leadership team hire or a member of your board. There tend to be 2 ways that those things happen today. One is what I call the I know a guy search, and that's CEO is sitting and talking to an advisor or a board member or a full board and, oh, I think I need a new CFO, or I think I need a coach, or I need an independent board member, and that starts the process of, oh, I know a guy. And that's okay. That's how most placements happen, I think, in the startup ecosystem today. But it's not particularly comprehensive and it also is not particularly diverse. It tends to reinforce the same talent networks over and over again. The second way that startups find executive talent is they bite the bullet and they write a 6-figure check to a search firm. And I don't think either one of those is a great way of scaling a leadership team or scaling a board. I feel like the world has moved in a direction when it comes both to technology to match up buyers and sellers or supply and demand and data to make really surgical matches and the evolution of the gig economy where more and more people are moving jobs more quickly and moving into freelance work. All those things put together convinced us that it was really the right time to introduce a new way of thinking about scaling leadership talent and scaling boards into the startup ecosystem. And I'm trying to draw the comparison here for our market periodically that there used to be one way of doing software development, which was waterfall. And you wrote the PRD and the MRD, and you threw it over the wall to engineering, and 6 months later, 12 months later, a product pops out, and hopefully it's still the right product.

Yeah, and you miss the whole market.

You know, and that doesn't, you know, that doesn't work for startups. So that's why, you know, the Agile Manifesto came about, and now everybody in the startup world develops using Agile method, and you're doing things in 2-week sprints and checking in with the market all the time and co-creating, and that's how things get done quickly. I like to compare what we're doing with scaling leadership talent and board talent to agile, and the other ways of doing it are a little more waterfall.

Ah, so you do agile talent development. It's very, very interesting. Speaking of Bolster, your company recently did a study. I found this really, really interesting of independent board members and board diversity, which revealed that most early-stage boards lack racial and gender diversity. as much as boards in more sophisticated companies. And I'm wondering, when you did this study, are there things that surprised you that you didn't know were going to surprise you? I mean, you know, there were probably things that you were going to go and you were going to say, oh, probably some racial diversity isn't there, blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of stuff out there that's like that. I'm real passionate about this personally.

Yeah.

And but I'm wondering if there are things that you found when you did that Where you, you were sort of T-boned, sitting there going, wow, that I did not know, or I thought differently?

Yeah, there was one thing that I found absolutely, um, stunning, and, and it's not that, um, startup boards lack gender and racial diversity, um, it's that they lack independent directors. So for me, I've always had independent directors on my boards, and, and, you know, I usually try to have as many independents as I do investors, or even more independents than directors. It's never occurred to me not to have that. But in our study, only one-third of the companies that responded have independent directors at all. Two-thirds of them don't have any. Even the Series C and D companies, only 60 to 70% of them had independent directors. Then the majority of seed and pre-seed and Series A companies, the overwhelming majority of those companies don't have any independence. My mantra for startup boards is what I call the rule of ones, which is add independent directors from day one, only have one member of the management team on the board, and for every one investor, have one independent. That's, I think, a good recipe for building a balanced and highly effective board.

Really is. Really is.

The thing that really surprised me was just how few startups have any independence at all. Zero.

Wow. So they just have investors?

Investors and sometimes multiple founders. And I don't think multiple founders is helpful either.

No, I agree. I agree. There's, there's sometimes it's hard to see the forest through the trees, you know, and you need to have somebody from the outside. I want to mention one thing before we have the last question, and this is that under your leadership, Return Path won all of these awards, employer choice awards, including number 2 on Forbes magazine's best companies to work for. And so on. Are some of the findings and the learnings that you did to get you to that sort of a status as a leader where the people that work for you are inspired and just love working there, are those things in this recent book or in a different book? And what were those things? I found that to be so cool. I remember Return Path. So, you know, we— one of the businesses that I built was an affiliate marketing company that I sold to eBay. So I remember Return Path very, very clearly and I didn't know this about you and I do remember that the awards and everything and I was like, wow, that's really cool. I wonder what the guy is doing. Maybe you could share that with the listeners.

I think it was really simple or at least simple in my mind, which was I believe that the best businesses are the ones that care the most about their employees. For me, there's just a really clear pecking order. If you have the best people and the most engaged people and you're not just recruiting good people, but you are retaining them by treating them well and by developing them and growing them, then you will by definition, I think, do the best work for your customers. If your customers are happy, then your shareholders would be happy. For me, it's always been sort of 1, 2, 3, employees, customers, and shareholders. I think that focus on the employee and the employee experience is a large reason why we won a bunch of awards over time. I think we were very innovative in terms of our people practices, our HR practices, but it was It was sort of codifying all that into this culture that we called the people-first culture that, you know, we had a lot of people at the end when we sold the business after 20 years. We had a lot of people who had been there 10+ years and a huge number of people that had been there 5+ years. And, you know, I look at resumes all the time and, you know, the average length of time someone's at a job is 2 years or 2.5 years or whatever.

Yes. It's 2 to 3 years. Yeah, you're right. Exactly. Every time.

Yeah. So we just, we just thought it was a winning business strategy to be a people-first organization, and that led us to, you know, I think lots of good decisions over the years.

When's that book come out?

Maybe, maybe after the next exit.

I was stalking your Twitter and I saw some great pictures of you and your wonderful family, and I don't think that this particular question is asked enough of entrepreneurs. What's the best way to balance the corner office at the business and the corner office at home? How do you balance that work-life when you're a CEO?

Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. One is I've always drawn some pretty hard lines around when I'm working and when I'm not working. When I'm not working, I'm really not working. I'm present with what I'm doing at home. The lines have changed over time. I started Return Path, I was single in my 20s and now I'm in my 50s with 3 3 teenagers. But there have always been hard lines. When I was married and running Return Path before we had kids, I kind of worked all the time and my hard lines were vacations. My wife and I took a few weeks off every year and literally turned everything off, email, computer, phone, etc. Then when I had little kids, the lines became more nights and weekends. It's just about making that commitment.

Yeah. I think that's really why I do the same thing. The word that you said that's really important, I think, is present, right? Because you can be there and not be there.

Exactly. Yeah.

Earlier in my career, I did a lot of that where I was there, but I wasn't even on my phone or anything like that. My head was somewhere else. I think that is a key word. I really, really appreciate your time. I really, really thank you for joining the show. I think your insights are amazing and I recommend to everybody read the book. Thank you so much, Matt. I appreciate it.

Great conversation. Enjoyed it.

I did too. His name is Matt Blomberg. His new book, Startup CXO, is out now, and you can find out more about Matt's talent marketplace at bolster.com. And that wraps up this episode of The Boss Podcast. If you enjoy the show, please take a second to subscribe so you automatically get my new shows when they drop. Also, if you have a minute, I'd love it if you left a review so more folks like you can discover the show. I'll see you next time. Namaste, my friends.

Learn more about the BOSS Business Operating Support System at bossstartupscience.com, or you can reach Gregory Shepard at gregoryshepard.com. This has been a production of Forbes Books.