Ben Horowitz explains that the core value of startup board meetings is as a forcing function for the company to step back, review data, and reassess strategy. He advises founders to prepare a clear overview for the board so meetings focus on high-level issues rather than operational product details. A well-informed board can point out opportunities the company is not pursuing (including acquisitions), but founders should avoid letting the board micromanage product decisions.
Chapters
Probably the most valuable thing that comes out of a board meeting of a startup is it's a kind of forcing function, process, function to get everybody in the company to take a step back and say, okay, what are we doing? How are we doing? Are we on track? And if you don't have a board meeting, you don't actually ever do that. You're kind of in the forest chopping down trees. You're in the war, like, you know, shooting the enemy. You're not looking back and saying, okay, is the game plan right? The board meeting is kind of that time that you can prepare to do that. So to me, the first thing is, as the entrepreneur, do you get that accomplished? Do you get your people to get to a set of data that makes you feel like you've got a good overview of where the company is, and this is a good checkpoint. And if you do that and present that at the board meeting and then kind of have time to discuss interesting issues, then you're doing pretty good. Then you're in the 95th percentile. And one of the things that you'll notice when you're running a company is the knowledge gap between the people in the company and the people on the board starts out small and gets big over time. So when you start your company, your VC will have all these really interesting insights. But then when you're like a year into it and you know every bit of customer feedback, you know the product architecture code, you know, like what you can do and what you can't do, and they come in with out of left field, oh, I think you should put a button here. And it's like, all right, great. So you don't want to put yourself in that position where the board is kind of trying to do the product strategy on what you're doing. Where the board can be useful, though, is what are you not doing? So one of the problems in running a company is you spend all your time and all your energy optimizing, tuning, refining a B, testing, getting really good at what you're doing. But then there's a whole world of stuff you're not doing. And one of those things may be something you should do. And a good board, if you kind of give them the right context, can go, you know, we ought to also do this. And sometimes it might even be, we ought to buy this company, because, like, if we had this and that, then this becomes like a real primary company. And if we just do this, then we're going to have to get acquired at some point. And that's a lot easier to see from the outside than from the inside. You want the right kind of strategy from the board, not the wrong kind of strategy.
