Jason Lemkin and Harry Stebbings discuss the value of board meetings. Lemkin explains he initially disliked board meetings but changed his view after becoming a lead investor, emphasizing the fiduciary responsibility of the lead and how regular board meetings provide critical checks (revenue, cash, sales/marketing). He argues board meetings force management teams to prepare structured slide presentations that create discipline, accountability, and a useful external forcing function for VPs. He warns against founders doing decks themselves and against using informal tools (e.g., Notion) in place of slide decks.
Chapters
I do want to ask. You mentioned board seats and board meeting. I've sat on them, Jason. I thought they were pretty useless and ineffective, to be quite honest. Do you actually find board meetings help?
I have changed my mind. So when I started investing, I felt there was nothing more torturous than going to a board meeting. Okay. I remember my first investment was Pipedrive. Vista bought them for 1.5 billion and I had to be tortured to go to those board meetings. I'm like, I got you your VP of sales, your cfo, I gotta do this again. I thought I sold my company so I didn't have to go to board meeting. I thought I was supposed to get a break from this crap when you have an exit. And I really thought they were terrible. And none of the first investments that I do did I appreciate them at all. None of them. But time goes on and I've learned a couple of things. First of all, as I transitioned to having more and more number one investor positions on the cap table, I realized that there's a fiduciary obligation in the lead investor and it's very serious. Who's responsible? Oh, you raised 20 million in your seed, great. But who's responsible for that money that it's used properly? And I don't mean going through the books or anything like that, but who is providing every six weeks a check and balance. And that check and balance is that you show up and you report against revenue, you report against cash, and you report against sales and marketing. I actually view this in this age of more and more investors with smaller positions who care less. This fiduciary responsibility when I'm number one is, is weighty. It's weighty. And the ones are on number two or number three. I'm like woohoo. I don't have to do this. So there's Fiduciary 2 and Boy for founders, this is so important. Until you're big, until you're at 40, 50 million. When, when board meetings really are about money around the table. Right until that phase, board meetings are at least 50% for your management team to present. There is nothing few things more valuable to a CEO than having an external forcing function for your VPs to have to hit their numbers. How often a CEO can you yell at your team? I would argue once a year. Now there are CEOs that yell, there are yellers out there. But I would argue you can really only yell at one of your VPs. And I put yell in quotes, whatever this means. I think you can really only Be so upset with them once or twice a year. Otherwise it's demoralizing. People quit. But if every six weeks your VP of sales that's a little bit behind has to report. Harry, My plan for Q1 was 10 million. I'm at 8.4. Here's how that forcing function for you not to have to do it yourself as CEO in each functional area. Sales, marketing, product injury, it's like a nine on the value scale. And that's also as an aside, that's why I beg founders not to use notion at and board meetings. I beg them to force everyone to make slides to spend the time. Because we all love notion. We just put our stuff in our Google Docs and it's so efficient, isn't it? But not only did I think board meetings were stupid when I started investing, you know what I thought was even stupider? Founders using slides. I'm like oh my God, like what? People are still standing up in rooms and then clicking through. I can't believe people are still doing. I get what you do. I don't need to see your presentation. But then I realized as time goes on, the work you force your management team to put into those slides for each board meeting forces organization, self discipline, reporting, goal analytics that otherwise they just don't bother to do. They don't do it. They just write a stream up consciousness or an update to a table. It's not the same. If you don't put the work in, you don't get, you don't get the value out, do you?
No, you don't, you don't. I find the best managers so do delegated responsibility where they say, as you said, they bring their functional leads in each area and then they delegate to them. Because one thing that does worry me is when you see the founder and CEO at this scale up company just spending way too much time doing the decks themselves and you're like you do need to find some form of delegation.
That works here for sure. But I think as we've gone into the era where you can use safes up to 200 million and other things, the presentations of the board meetings have atrophied. And I think it's, I think even if the CEO doesn't get it for their investors, even if they don't really respect any value add from the investors, your VPs take these board meetings very seriously. You may not as the founder but your VPs I got to present to the board. Oh my God. Every VP I've ever worked with gets nervous. That is a gift to you as a founder. Harness that. Harness the fact that they may be comfortable with you as a founder, but they're nervous about presenting to Harry or Jason. It's just Harry or Jason. Give me a break. Why should you be nervous presenting to us? But the fact that they are is an amazing management tool for CEO. Yeah.
I'd be terrified presenting to you, Jason.
Yeah. And that's a gift as a founder because you don't have to yell. Yeah. No, I agree.
