Iman Abuzeid discusses why marketplace founders need investors who understand their specific model, not just generalists. She explains how to extract real value from board members through structured deep dives and one-on-ones, and why certain investor types like healthcare specialists can hurt early-stage companies.
Chapters
And a few other founders in the community have asked about this, which is, you know, the importance of having marketplace investors on board and even kind of constructing a board with, you know, specific, I would say, investors like Jeff Jordan that are so experienced in the world of marketplaces. And then also too, like how you lean on them as board members.
Yeah, I think having marketplace investors and technology investors more broadly is very important for several reasons. One is that they, I explicitly avoided healthcare investors in the first 2 rounds because tech investors are more risk-taking and are more generous with their valuations and the amount of capital they invest. So that was really important. And we are a technology company at the end of the day. Second is I think they provided a lot of strategic advice to us, right? So If you've seen, let's take Jeff Jordan as an example. If you were the CEO of OpenTable and the president of eBay, and you were the early investor and board member at Pinterest and Instacart and Airbnb, I mean, that's a lot of learnings, a lot of mistakes, a lot of, you know, so he's able to advise me in a way that's way more nuanced than a standard, more average, you know, tech investor, and certainly way more than a healthcare investor. And so, as far as like getting value out of board members and investors, I think that was part of the question as well. Look, I think at the end of the day, the responsibility is on the CEO to get value out of their investors. Okay. So, that means structuring all of it in a way that you get the value. So, what I mean by that is when I have quarterly board meetings, and board meetings are not supposed to be a dog and pony show, right? So, like all the historical, what did we just do in the last quarter? That's sent out ahead of time anyway. And the majority of the board meeting is spent on what I call deep dives, right? And that's like specific problems that we are brainstorming with the board. And that is our opportunity as a leadership team to extract value out of their brains, out of the board members' brains. And you have to like, like, so we intentionally design things in that way so we can get value out of them. It's not supposed to be a one-way conversation. And then in addition to that, I tend to, with some of our key investors, I tend to have a one-on-one with them, even in between board meetings, because that's another opportunity to get deep into certain problems. And the problems can really range. Like, there could be like a senior exec I'm struggling to figure out, right? Or it could be, you know, another, you know, a growth plateau that we hit, right? That we need to break through. Or, you know, we're, you know, starting to, you know, we started investing heavily in PR back in 2019. So that was a bunch of stuff we had to figure out. And it can honestly be a whole range of topics.
