Bolster’s Board Benchmark Study | Shout-out to Execs Looking for Independent Director Roles

As we’ve recognized the need to diversify our networks to better diversify our companies and company boards, Foundry has been working with a number of firms such as HimforHer, Valence, ReadySet, and others. We’re also partnering with Bolster – a company that, although we’re not direct investors, we have strong ties to through several of our partner funds who are investors as well as through our long, long time relationships with Bolster’s CEO, Matt Blumberg (who was CEO of Return Path in the Foundry portfolio) and Micah Mador (former Foundry Network and Community Catalyst and now Partnerships Manager at Bolster).

Today, Bolster released their Board Benchmarking survey analyzing the diversity, composition, and compensation of 250 private company boards (including over 50 Foundry portfolio companies who participated) and 650+ individual board members. The data show just how much work we still have to do in diversifying our boards. Overall, the data showed that 85% of directors on Foundry portfolio company boards are white but that 57% of our companies currently have open board seats. This presents a great opportunity to build more diversity at the board level. Since Foundry’s network spans 38 partner funds and over 1,500 companies, if half of those companies also have open board roles, our slice of the universe has more than 750 potential open board seats.

Foundry is committed to positive change on a bigger scale and this means diversifying our networks as a collective. To help us do this, we’re partnering with Bolster to invite each Foundry Partner Fund and their portfolio companies into a new type of talent network: The Foundry Collective.

We also recognize that there is inherent bias in the networks of our own company leaders and fund managers. So we’ve also decided to open source this initiative and surface Foundry Partner Fund board opportunities to the broader tech ecosystem, with a particular eye toward boosting access to individuals traditionally under-represented on boards. If you are an executive interested in independent board roles or know someone who would make a fantastic independent board member, fill out a member profile on Bolster using this link. In addition to board opportunities across the Foundry Network, a Bolster member profile will also unlock access to their broader ecosystem of hundreds of startup and scaleup CEOs, as well as content and resources to help you on your journey to the boardroom.

The data show that diverse companies perform better, and through our collective efforts, we can do our part to influence the way board rooms look in 2021 and beyond. This, of course, is in addition to the initiatives we have in place to continue to diversify the executive ranks (and overall ranks) of the businesses we’ve invested in.

You can read Bolster’s full report here and see some highlights below.

Key findings:

• • Only 32% of private company boards have independent directors. Half of boards have open independent director seats they expect to fill in the next 12 months. 
  • Compared with investor or management directors, independent director seats are 3 times as likely to be held by women. 86% of director seats overall are held by men, and 56% of early stage private company boards have no gender diversity at all. 
  • Four out of five seats on private company boards are held by individuals who are white, and 43% of boards are completely homogenous with regard to the race/ethnicity of their directors. 
  • CEOs are broadening their searches to diversify their boards. Two-thirds of CEOs are open to bringing on first-time directors, and 41% of independent directors have either some college or an under-graduate degree only.
  • Board composition tends to over-index on investors and management directors. 59% of boards have more than one management or founder director and 59% of boards have 2 or more investor directors.
  • Men seem to have a slightly higher average earning potential (measured in basis points per year and grant value) compared to women directors at like companies.