Jason M. Lemkin says CEOs can use board meetings as a forcing function. If your exec team sweats before the meeting, that anxiety pushes you toward crisp slides and real focus. Let the board be the enforcer so you don't have to be the bad guy with your team.
I didn't necessarily have to do that again for the board.
I hear you and we can move up. I think it's, if they dread the Monday morning meeting, then I think you have the CEO's helper, right? Is dreading the Monday morning. If the team doesn't dread the Monday morning, sometimes I find the board meeting is the helper. If they dread the board, if they're sweating, if your manager team is like getting hives for a week before the board meeting, I actually think that's great because then the CEO doesn't have to, doesn't have to do it. I have an external force where they're going to Yeah, you don't want them work— you want them working on their slides for 20 minutes, not a week. But if they're sweating it, I don't know. I just don't— I think I'm a good guy, but I don't mind being the bad guy, the bad guy, if it helps the CEO to not have to be the bad guy. Right? Sometimes you need, you need someone else to be the tough, the tough one. It can't always be you. Right?
I think it's a good point.
Okay. Let's— should we dive into some of these meta learnings? I'll tailor them to our convo.
Couldn't be a bigger fan of stats or Jason M. Lemkin, so I'm here for you. I love it.
Okay, let's do two things and you were kind enough to pre-answer them, but I just like to do a vibe check these days because it, I think the vibe has been so volatile the last 24 months since SaaS, right? A negative from folks thinking we're in the greatest downturn since the tulip crash to exuberance and AI, like this just, it's a whiplash time. So, you've seen it all. You're chairman of HubSpot, you're at Sequoia, you're seeing an entirely different category, right? In clean tech. So are we, were we in a downturn? Are we in a downturn? What's the vibe check as we talk today?
