Reid Hoffman | Building Your Startup Board Pt. 2

Foreign Hi, I'm Chris Yeh, the co author of Blitzscaling and I'll be joined by my co author and old friend Reid Hoffman, co founder of LinkedIn and investor at Greylock Partners. This is part two of our two part conversation about building great startup boards. You can find part one on the Gray Matter podcast feed or@greylock.com graymatter that's G, R, E, y matter, all one word. And now let's return to the discussion. So you mentioned there are a couple of different types of board members. The management team, the investors, the independent board members, which you've been before, and I think all three of those. And it seems like these different kinds of board members play different roles. You mentioned for example, that the independents really play this role of moderating between management and ownership. So help me walk through this. How should we think about choosing the different board members of each type? How are they different? What are the things we're looking for?

So management tends to be, if you're a founder, tends to be one, two or three of the potentially co founders. And generally speaking, a lot of boards tend to resolve to only the CEO being on the board because of that direct relationship where part of what the board is doing is interrogating the co on how they're running, all the kinds of things. And occasionally it is useful to have a board member also on, you know, another founder on the board. But you have to have a very tight relationship between that founder and the co, or a very good working relationship for that. Because too often people say, oh, I have my alternative channel to the board, I have my own relationship where, you know, one of the metaphors that I use for boards is this, you know, when I'm training people to be board members is a kind of a simple traffic light analogy, which is the relationship between the CEO and the board is green light, yellow light or red light. And it's important as a board to be super clear on that, even if you're not necessarily super clear with the CEO, because you could be red light with the CEO but not tell the CEO yet. Green light is you're the CEO, you're making the decisions as a board. If you're interfering with that beyond like, oh, are you taking a big lease? Are you selling a company, are you a financing round or other kinds of things, then you're generally speaking distracting value lowering value. And sometimes of course the board is uncomfortable and say, well, we're not fully green light. But the whole point of this model is to say, well, if you're yellow light. The specific rules around yellow light are you either resolve to green or red within a fixed time frame. So when you go, we as a boarder at yellow light with the CEO, we have the following concern. We're going to do the following work to figure out if we're green light or red light. And then you're one of those two. And if you're red light, then you're essentially, you know, where you are with red light with a CEO. Are you selling the company? Are you looking, looking for another CEO? What is the thing that you're essentially trying to do? Because you're essentially red light with the CEO and yellow light is only a time delimited fashion. One of the failure points of words is to be indefinitely in yellow light because then by the way, you're destroying value in the company. And so the thing that when you're looking at you say, okay, well we can have management and common shareholders, but they have to be additive into this process. Now investors, the vast majority of businesses, especially the vast majority of big businesses, the vast majority of Silicon Valley businesses, end up having investor board members. And selecting your investor board member is something you do carefully, something you put a lot of work into. You basically want to have someone where you as a entrepreneur want to be thinking about the fact that you have an upside you're playing for and can, can this person help you get to the upside? Also downsides you're managing, can this person be a good downside help as well? And then almost for sure. All startups go through a valley of the shadow, which is like everyone's kind of scratching their heads going, was this a good idea? We're running into trouble, it's a problem. And you want your board members, both VCs and also independents to be people who are there with you in the valley of the shadow. Now, the valley of shadow may be the business is challenged and economic outcomes, but the valley of shadow could also be the business is being challenged. Like, you know, you're a social media company and the world around you is saying the failure of democracy is your fault. Or you know, there's other ways. And so you want to have the people there with you in the valley of the shadow, your business goes through an emergency. Do the people help you with the emergency versus panic about preserving their own brand, you know, which I'm sure a lot of boards did in the COVID pandemic, you know, kind of as an instance. And so you really want to give that thought to the, both the upsides and the downsides, how you're doing it. And obviously that's a person who not only has the skill set and network and the judgment and the catalyst, but also goods Good team with you and it's good team with the board and you're composing the board a team and so you're generally speaking looking for all that. And one of the things that entrepreneurs most often make a decision on is they go well I just take the valuation from whoever's valuation is highest, they believe in the business the most and that's what I should do. And you're like actually, in fact that could actually be a long term destructive value if you're not selecting the right board members. Now another mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs do is they go, well look, I just want a board member who's like a public shareholder who's just along for the ride. And by the way, that's at least not destroying value as per our earlier conversation. But you're really neglecting like one of the things that a financing round brings is a chance to bring entirely new network strength. It's one of the reasons why like financing From Venture Firm 1 and then moving to Venture Firm 2 is really useful because you're adding another network and adding more people as opposed to just always doing kind of internal rounds is very helpful and so you want to be adding to that. And so there's a whole set of characteristics that by which you should have an active theory. So that's the VC member and then on the independent what you're partially looking for is obviously some of the same things about. Now independents tend to be more help with the upside versus the manage the downside. Independents usually tend to not be as full time jobs so they tend to have unlike VCs who this is like kind of why they're getting a salary from a fund and all the rest. Independents tend to be the hey, this is the thing I do alongside X. So it's slightly different. And as I was mentioning before, one of the really important things is the independents are kind of playing catalyst and bridge between the management and the investors. They're also kind of sometimes responsible for things like dealing with comp and re up and so forth. But they're also sometimes like okay, I'm an industry expert and my commentary and knowledge of what's going on in industry can be very important in it. Now I may or may not know the right go to market strategy for a startup. I may or may not know the right way to be hiring sometimes by the way you get an independent board member who is that perfect person adding in to strengthening the CEO, strengthening executive team, spending time with them about how to do things. So sometimes that's the skill set that you're particularly looking for. And so you know those the kinds of things you look at. And by the way, this is kind of different than to some degree the public company oddities. Because the public companies, you want this person who's independent, who doesn't have interest, you want everyone to have a strong kind of ownership interest. Both in that blended way. That's kind of ownership interest, including obviously, you know, for startups is helping the COB come up the learning curve as fast as possible, be strong as possible, you know, have the greatest positive impact to the business and the greatest longevity for the business.

And you've typically been either as a founder or as an investor on one side, but you've been independent board members. You mentioned Peter Thiel brought you in over PayPal. What are the things that you've learned as an independent board member that perhaps people wouldn't normally learn just as a manager or investor?

Well, what I would say is that the independent board position is different than like people say, okay, all board members, true, are responsible for the well being and shareholding of the company. But by the way, other board members in these concentrated positions in these private companies have distinct interests. So for example, a classic one where there is some conflict of interest, a point of view of judgment of where to take risk and so forth between investors and management is hey, we should be giving out equity grants or we should doing refresher equity grants. And obviously the management is like, oh, that has to be really rich and we have to be giving a whole lot of it and blah blah, blah. And the investment's like well actually in fact that's part of the 100%, the zero sum value, that's transfer value. Those should be as as little as possible. Like for example, one of the most often speeches I've heard From many different VCs is founders should never be re upped. Which is not actually my point of view. I actually think founders should be re upped. But I also think by the way then they go well, they should be re upped. Like you are hiring me as CEO. It's like, no, no, no, you're actually completely motivated by the fact that the VCs are right, that your ability to inflect the percentage ownership you have is what really matters. That we can't give you an equity grant that really tangibly makes a difference relative to the equity grant that we gave you. So you shouldn't be expecting a equity grant that's in the same order of the magnitude that you started with as a founder, or as the same order of magnitude as what you would need to give if you were hiring a CEO who was fresh. But you still should be earning something, because the principle should be as everybody is earning some equity as they go forward as a recognition to the work they're doing for the entire company. That's the way doing. So anyone who's on an equity plan should be earning equity sometimes, and not just the co, but other positions, executives, and so might be much less on the refresher grant because you have a natural incentive to continue to work hard to get your base equity grant, if you're a strong owner, to be worth more, because that amplifies your own network value. So there's a tension point. There's one of n tension points between management board members and investor board members is how that works. And an independence job is to help sort that through because they are much less in that immediate conflict of interest, seeing the world differently. You know, the wise people, you know, one wise woman has her hand on the trunk, one wise man has his hand on the tail, kind of saying, oh, this is a different animal, and so forth. You have that kind of perspective, you know, Rashomon as a way of kind of looking through it, and you help with that. That is actually, I think, a central thing. Another one is to say, you know, like, okay, so while ultimately it's all board members collectively to be thinking about how do we increase the performance as a team sport of the board. You know, one of the things that is most natural for independents to be the right sortal for that is that independents are more of the board members who serve at kind of at will, at the will of the company and so forth. One of the questions that people don't ask that often is when should a board member naturally time out? Or when should a board member be fired? Who fires board member? The answer is the board. And the kind of people on the board fire a board member. But it's very difficult to fire an investor board member, because part of how that works is, hey, I put in X millions of dollars and I have a board seat. And you know, sometimes you can trade them for another GP at that firm or something else if it's really. But it's like, boy, that's a very expensive act to do, so you kind of be stuck with them. Well, the independent board member is then meant to be the more flexible board member. It's meant to be the board member who creates the glue, the cohesion, the catalyst, the bridges. And by the way, that that changes. It's much more okay to have independent board members on tours of duty and the board and then to essentially, you know, they may elect to change, you may elect to have them change. And that's one of the conversations have now. It's one of the strange things about how the board is organized that appointing a non appointed firing board members tends to be a collective board exercise. Now, when you're a privately held company, the independent slots tend to be governed by the last preferred round and tend to be the serve at the pleasure of the combination of the management and the investors. And so therefore there's a legal structure for changing around. But that's part of the reason why the independent board member also has this zone of different competency, contribution to the team sport, contribution to what the OKRs are for the board and so forth. And that's one of the things that you should do as an independent and also that other board members should be looking for from an independent.

And what sounds true is that there is the question of what kind of perspective is a person bringing in. And you can bring in a very different perspective with an independent board member than you would just with the management or with the investors. Is that greater flexibility?

Yes. And across a number of vectors. Could be industry could be working on the team, could be where you are at your career stage. And are you trying to hire the inexperienced, super brilliant, out of the box and catalytic person, or the person who has a ton of experience in this industry and knows it in and out, might be a little bit less able to see the new disruptive opportunities. Maybe yes, maybe no because of that. But like, you know, what are those things that fit into. It all comes down to what your theory of the game is with your startup and what risks you're playing and what strategy you're playing in order to get that planning outcome. And how does that, you know, kind of a B Z planning work as you're getting there?

Now another element of perspective that's been getting a lot more attention recently is board diversity. And here we are in the state of California. SB979 is requiring every public company with a principal executive office in the state to have at least one board member from an underrepresented group by the end of 2021. And companies with five to eight board members will have to have at least two diverse board members by the end of 2022 companies with nine or more board members will require to have at least three such board members then. So this is obviously a legal requirement. But talk to me more about board diversity in general. What about board diversity makes sense as business strategy? How should people be approaching this?

Well, it's particularly good for at least two reasons. Why the board mandate to break the old Boys club, not entirely the old white men club, but old Boys club and mostly the equivalent of the white man club with a mallet is a good thing. Because, you know, boards tend to be selected a lot like homophily. They tend to select other people who are like them. They go, oh, well, we'll take Fortune 500 cos. Well, there's relatively few people of color who are Fortune 500 CEOs. You get all these issues and you need to do that. And I think that's a very good thing. And that leads to the second part of it, which is, you know, one of the real strong things that diversity adds is it adds an awareness of kind of like, what are the changing currents, what are the possible landmines, what are the things the business is going to need to navigate to continue to achieve its real potential, both upside and avoid downside. And so diversity in perspectives really adds to that in a very important and critical way. And so super important, obviously on the public side, but, you know, valuable all the way down the chain. One of the reasons why relatively early stage boards should actually be thinking about diversity as early as you possibly can. Now, as we were mentioning, what tends to happen is you go, well, you don't have any board members other than you as the founders, then you take some investors and you have some investor board members. And currently, of course, because the VC community is so massively predominantly male and not with minority people of color, that you end up with a bunch of white men or, you know, the equivalent in Silicon Valley that's, you know, Indian men and Chinese men as well on your board. And then you go, okay, well actually, in fact, this diversity thing is super important for the reasons that I just mentioned. And so it's important to start trying to plan and add to it as early as you can. So when you're thinking about independent board members, that's usually one of the ways that gets added in. It also should be helpful ultimately to. Because, you know, part of how people think about recruiting VCs is other people they've served on the boards with and all the rest of the. That should also help with the diversity problem within the venture industry. Obviously, you should take every shot on goal because we have such an importance of changing this. Part of the reason why Greylock, we work with all rays and other things is you have to think of if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem and how are you doing it. So that's critical. But then for the startup, it's really critical to have the range of radar and perspective about markets and products and talent bases and other kinds of things that help you both navigate the downside and the upside. And that's part of the reason why diversity is not just the right thing to do from a moral perspective, the right thing to do from an inclusion perspective, but also a sound business idea as well.

And I do think that even though this requirement only applies to publicly traded companies, it's obvious it's going to have upstream effects as we reach back into the private side. Because if you're a privately held company, you're getting ready to go public. It's not a good look and it's probably not ideal to say, oh great, now let's add a diverse board member right before we go public. A you are sort of putting it off until the end. It's much better to have people on board all throughout where you've been building that relationship. And then of course, the other benefit is that I know, having advised a company that had a board practice that helped find board members for publicly traded companies, the first thing that we would do is say, well, what other boards have they served on? And it's like getting that stamp. And the more people who are getting that stamp from a more diverse background, the easier it will be in the future to fulfill these requirements.

Yes. And also this just like hiring, one of the things that's actually super important for setting the culture for growing is the earliest you can where you start having diversity inclusion in your staff. People don't like being the token, they don't like being the one. They like it to be a natural part of the culture where therefore, naturally you end up with the amount of talent. So like, you hire one person of color, hire n people of color, you hire one woman, hire n women, you know, get to a good, you know, kind of. It doesn't have to be an exact percentage mirror of society, but then shows you that you're kind of functioning, you know, kind of as a unit. And obviously there's so few board members that that kind of percentage mirroring is more challenging. But get to it where you show that that is actually in fact part of your culture. That's part of how you're operating. And then, by the way, that sets the ground for where would a superstar kind of minority board prospect want to serve a place that has a natural good cultural fit. They don't want to be the I'm trying to teach you to be diverse. They want to be a team player who's helping the company be as successful as possible. So if you're like, come try to be our token morality defense when we haven't really understood the importance of this subject. Oh please. Very few people want to do that. Oh, come help us play this really important game in the world where your talents and vision and incentives and perspectives added to ours makes us all the better to do that. Ooh, that's exciting.

Now, when we think about board members, you've talked before about some of the mistakes you've seen people make in terms of trying to dictate from the passenger side or the sort of struggle that sometimes occurs over equity grants and the like. But what are some of the other standard mistakes that startup board members make and that people should really strive to avoid that are just simple own goals that they can avoid?

Well, the first that I've already mentioned, but I think it's worth going in a little bit more depth, is because a company is fundamentally hierarchical, right? So the executives work for the CEO, the managers work for the executives, the individual contributors work for the managers, you know, blah blah, blah. Then the CEO works for the board, right? And so they go, oh, so that's a reporting relationship where we, the company, manage the company and the CEO is our employee. And that can be in lots of subtle ways. Like the earlier thing I was mentioning about boards that tended to keep a CEO in a yellow light position for a long time is, well, you're not letting them be the CEO. So you don't actually in fact know whether or not they are green light or not. You don't know that they are protracted yellow light. CEO is almost certainly undervaluing the company, whatever the outcome could be. And you as a professional or high quality operating board should make that decision quickly, not slowly and with specific questions and specific intent. And so, you know, be super careful about not running the company. And by the way, that goes all the way back to what does your dialogue look like? So like, for example, I am like, you know, on board, you will very rarely hear coming out of my mouth, you should do X, right? Usually that's in something that's kind of like a super legal specific, you know, like, oh no, you got to hire a lawyer to look into that, right? Because it's like, no, no, no, there's legal liability there. You may not know it, you need to hire a lawyer to do that. But most of the time you think, well, okay, should you refocus your whole business around advertising as per the earlier example? It's like, well, the right way to do that is to say, hey, look, here are three reasons why advertising might be your most central business. These are the reasons why it's a really good business model. This is the reason why it could be a good business model for you and why you might think that that is the business model for you. And it's worth thinking through. And you should have an active point of view. I'd be curious once you get to your active point of view, what it is, what your reasoning is, right? And I might challenge you on it if I think you've got some holes in your reasoning. But you know, that's kind of an intervention as a board member. Or you might say, hey look, I understand that you know, Executive X, you know, isn't perfect and that you don't really want to focus on replacing them right now because you're so busy with all these other burning fires. The question to ask yourself is that will always be the case and the longer that a sub functioning executive is in place, it's a cancerous rot within the organization and the culture. And so yes, you may not elect to make a change right now, but you should have an active theory about when you're going to make the change, where that changes sooner than later, how you're going to pull it off. Because by the way, recruiting while you're actually operating everything is one of the reasons, many reasons why startups are hard and relatively few people should be founders and startup executives and everything else. Because it's the I've got a full time job running this business and I got a full time job recruiting new people and I have to do both. And those are just two of the multiple full time jobs that I have and that's part of the difficulty and stress of it. But you look those kinds of things. And so the broad thing is how you talk to the CEO and so forth also has an implication on are you modeling you CEO, you work for me, I get to hire, fire and compensate you as opposed to the it's your gig, it's your ball and I'm trying to help as much as possible. Then I guess maybe the last general area that I would refer to in this question, although there's probably some areas that I may come back to and haven't really thought of with the full question is too often and this plays almost to like what we're saying is changing role of board on basis size of size of organization, all of the phases of the organization, all blitzscaling is they think general business applies to startups. So like one instance which we already talked about was well okay, so if you get to a generally large scale business and a board, therefore the board is trying to decide if the management team is doing the right thing and that's ultimately how do you hire, fire and compensate the CEO and, and what are you doing there? And then they go well okay, so I'm on the board of a 10 person company or a 20 person company and I got the CEO and I'm sitting there and I'm thinking well you know, we should discipline the CEO. They're not hitting their objectives. They gave me this, these numbers for the last quarter and da da, da. And you're like no, you shouldn't do any of that stuff, right? Because now you might say hey, you're missing your quarter, it's a real problem. And by the way, as we get bigger that'll be a real problem for the CEO. Mention those kind of things, totally fine. But what you're trying to do is saying look, our bet is on the CEO. Our bet is on this happening because our bet as a startup board member is look, this company by default is dead. This company by default is not worth anything and we are doing heroic, unusual acts, you know, jumping off a cliff, similar plane all the way down in order to try to make it worth something. And ideally of course worth a lot of something. That's the risk trade off for the percentage of failure versus the upside. And you're the bet because if the bet doesn't work with you, we're not going to be able like you go, you go to some other founder class person say hey, come take over this other business. And they're like well but I'm working on my own business so why would I take over this other thing? Which you'd only be asking me if it was in trouble. Where I've got this new idea that I think is fresh in the world so it's super hard to recruit for. It's one of the reasons why whenever you're thinking about like okay, like the super entertaining things that I get is people say wow, we should get a CEO for this, like Jeff Weiner or Satya Nadella and you're like okay, Take two or Reed Hastings or, or take some of the iconic CEOs in the entire tech industry and say we should get them. Most companies, the vast majority of tech companies are going to get within a thousand miles of being able to recruit one of these people. You have to be thinking about like, well what it isn't that there isn't high quality talent. You got to be thinking about like what kind of talent could we find? What the percentage of success and failure is, what level of time does it take? Right. As all part of doing that. And that's part of the. Yes, that applies in general business. But startups have these time frames that are like, well, we either prove ourselves in next month or we die. Then you tend to go, well, we try to get this CEO, founder, et cetera, to do as best they can and if they don't succeed, they die. Okay. Right. And that's different than the normal theory. The kind of thing that, you know, you, Chris, having a Harvard mba, you know, know is taught an MBA class, but is actually in fact very different for how these games operate.

Exactly. Because at the end of the day, the role of the board member, even though the CEO reports to you, is not to be the boss. And that is something that sadly some number of investor board members fail to.

Realize and even some independents. I've seen the failure on both sides, but more VCs.

Now the thing is, some of the listeners are probably thinking to themselves, okay, sure, Reid Hoffman can choose his board members, but someone like me, beggars can't be choosers. What do you do when you're a scrappy first time entrepreneur? How much control do you have over these things?

Part of being an entrepreneur is there's a lot of things you don't have control over. You don't have control of your competition. You don't have necessarily you have the initial kind of choices on your market. You have, you know, these kinds of choices that are playing out. But a lot of choices, you know, you end up having. And so for example, a classic one for entrepreneurs is you've got one financing offer right from one vc. And by the way, this is the most harsh reference that I ever have given on a vc. But it's like, well, you might consider shutting the company down rather than accepting money from that person.

Oh wow.

Yes. And the reason is, by the way, if a person can be so destructive value, you'd rather fail now than three years from now. Right. If you're going to fail and this person is going to be massively destructive, you'd rather fail now than three years from now. So why accept money and go out the three years, oh, maybe you could sell the company or else. But that, that's, you know, like if this person is going to do reduce value in the business and reduce value in essentially what you're doing, then, you know, not do it. Now that's a limited set of people who are that, you know, toxic Chernobyl, ish, kind of as a way of operating. But that's kind of how you kind of look at those choices. Now that being said, part of the things that you can do is when you end up with a board member who may be suboptimal in some way, is to go and recruit another board member, independent or venture. And part of your job, if you can get them like you get to a hot company and so forth, and you can get a high powered board member. So your job is to help, right, shape the board in terms of play counterpoint. You know, you've got board member over there who's off opining and thinks that they have a perfect knowledge of this and so forth. And look only when you agree with me, but rather than my wasting cycles of arm wrestling with that board member over strategic direction executives, et cetera, if you agree with me, then it's your job to do so, right. Whether or not you're another venture investor or a independent. And obviously you have to recruit someone who's that venture investor independent who has the throw weight that will A has a character decision knowledge, board knowledge could do that. And then B has the throw weight where that other board member will go, oh, okay, if you're telling me that that's not quite right or I should be doing this differently or we should be doing this differently as a company, then I will at least ameliorate or back off or you know, something else. And so that's a way to potentially later fix this. And that would be one of the things you might strategically choose as a way of the building and shaping of your board as a team.

Something about the way you describe that makes me think that you may have some personal experience in playing this role. At one point in time.

I have done it both as an entrepreneur and as a board member. But this is the kind of thing where naming names is, you know, ungraceful.

Well, I do want to close with one set of naming names. And that's on the positive side, obviously we don't want to name on the negative side. But on the positive side, maybe it would be great to have you name some names who are some of the most impactful board members you've worked with and what made them so effective.

So I guess I should start with how did I end up with Greylock? It's because David Z was my most effective and helpful and competent board member at LinkedIn. The kinds of things that he did, you know, he really dug into the product in various ways and would bring up things like he'd say, look, I think we're crossing the line in all viral things are somewhat spammy. It's like I think we're too spammy in the following ways and here's some techniques and things we should do about. And so was willing to call a spade a spade on like, okay, here. While you're trying to be viral and advertise the value of it, a lot of the market is experiencing this as too negative and we should look at it and refine it some is one example. As another example, part of the reason we raised our Series D is because David came to us and said, look, one of the things we do at Greylock as a partnership is we talk about what the market is, the financing market, the state of the markets that our companies are in and we try to get intel and help to write it. And this is 2008. We think that the market's superheated, we think it's going to crash, we don't know exactly when. And we think doing a preparatory fundraise is a good idea. So we're going out to all of our portfolio companies and we're doing preparatory fundraises. And so under David Z's prompt guidance, assistance and so forth, we raised our Series D in September. And people may remember that in October and November was the credit default swap, the 2008, you know, oh my God, the financial system is going down in flames. There is no capital available. And we walked into that very comfortably because we had had a fundraise that we had already put on the basis of primarily insurance, but based on the fact that David had brought it up and advocated it and so forth and persuaded me and us of it and we had kind of gone out and done and that was like, you know, examples and you know, he's also in the ways that is part of the reason I'm at Greylock is that front seat side passenger driver, which is very collaborative but also direct as per the hey, LinkedIn is spamming too much right now, et cetera, et cetera, as ways of trying to make it work. And actually my last kind of David Z Comment and this is part of a great way I learned this from David as a way to build relationships. Is one thing that both David and I think and both operate on is when you're reference checking a person, you have not gotten to the end of the references until you have found at least one negative reference. And I had actually already known that before David. Now the thing that David taught me in the process by which he was getting out the series B is David not only did all the references, but he kind of walked me through the references, including the negative one, to talk about them and to get on top of it. And it was a way of saying, here is how we are going to be partners. This is how we are partners together as a way of doing it and establishing the transparency, the trust, the ability to talk about difficult subjects like the negative reference that I had in terms of how does that negative reference play into the way that I'm operating and how to think about that. Which meant that we could very much since that day have always been able to bring up, hey, I just challenged you or have this challenge with me or whatever else and bring it up really easily and really collaboratively and make that work. So anyway, so the first person I would say is, you know, most impactful board member because it's part of the reason I'm at Greylock is David Z. So let me give you two others outside of Greylock, obviously, even though Greylock tries to target itself being how to have all its partners be super useful board members. And we, we always work on that collectively as a team. But I'll choose one other venture and then one independent. So the venture person, and this is of course I've worked with many great board members and to those great board members who are not mentioned in my off the cuff choice of two others, you know, my apologies and you know that I love working with you and be a happy reference at any time. But for the venture is Michael Volpe, who's at Index Ventures. He and I serve on the Aurora board together and as part of the Aurora board, the kinds of things that you'll see Michael doing in a really good job is he will be asking the right questions and doing the kind of right balance of kind of that side partner and asking questions about how they're operating. When he asserts information, he asserts information with the kind of level of knowledge that he actually has of them. So sometimes like, look, this is, you got to take this really seriously. I really know this stuff really well and da da, da. And this is an important issue. And then sometimes they look, look, you could look at it this way, you know, some people who are smart look at it this way, could be challenged, we could be have a unique point of view, you know, or hey, I've got this question, but I don't really know the answer. And he handles that level of self knowledge in terms of participating in how you weigh in the dialogue, you know, kind of perfectly. And then finally, you know, like all great board members, he rolls up his sleeves and gets into detailed work. And so now that the Aurora Uber deal is announced, obviously Michael having built the celebrated M and A practice at Cisco, was super, you know, important in kind of making decisions about, you know, how does the merger go, how do you do integration, what are the right ways to think about management, what are the key priorities, and taking two major company efforts and putting them together, et cetera. So Mike Volpe, that's one answer. And then the last answer is independent is Julie Hanna, who I brought in to be the chairperson at Kiva. She's the second most long serving board member@kiva.org and there's a lot of things that Julie really adds to this. Let me just kind of mention two off the top of my head. One of them is she's very rigorous about the board, having performance, having feedback. All of us thinking, what are our okrs as a group, as individuals, all of us taking the time to ask the question, how do we operate better? What's the way that we help Kiva more? What's the way that we help Neville CEO more? You know, all of this kind of thing is one of the things that, that, that she does like super well and treating it as a learning team as well. And then another one is, you know, I mentioned a little earlier in the podcast that one of the things is to spend time with the executives and, and Julie will then go spend the time with the executives to find out like what is really going on in the organization, how to help the CEO, how to help the board, how to get a thumbprint of it, making sure the right connections are like, oh, this executive such and such board member should also talk to them. I want to cross check my point of view on this. Oh, we're having this problem with this executive, their founder. Maybe I should have dinner with them, maybe the two of us should have dinner or this other board member should have dinner and a way of making that work because, you know, she herself is a serial founder and a CEO, kind of working the management executive side of it in collaboration with the board.

So, Reid, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule. That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. You can subscribe to gray matter on soundcloud.com greylock partners. You can also find new episodes and blog posts on greylock.com you can follow Greylock on Twitter at greylockvc. I'm Chris Yeh and thank you for listening.