I just set up FeedBurner on my site to start tracking readers.  I should have done this a long time ago (where long time = 7 days ago when I started my blog).  I’m pretty bummed with the stats that are available on TypePad.  By pretty bummed, I mean that the stats are essentially useless.  They don’t have any information on click-through nor do they tell me either what aggregators are  hitting my site (although I can see a little of this in the referrers section, which is pretty much the only part of their statistics that I find useful) and they definitely don’t tell me how many underlying readers there are for my site because they can’t surface information on how many customers each aggregator is pulling for.    I’m going to write a future
post on the vanity of blogging, but suffice it to say for the moment that I (and most bloggers that I know) check my stats pretty regularly.  Its not that I’m specifically trying to vie for a large audience (although it’s nice to know that the work I put into my site is being seen by others), but I’m still interested in how many people are reading what I’m putting out there.

So FeedBurner will help this problem, but the way its works is to essentially alias my site through their system.  That’s fine, but anyone who has already pulled my site into their aggregator won’t show up in these stats since they aren’t pulling from the aliased site (they don’t exist as far as FeedBurner is concerned).  I could solve this, I suppose, by hosting my own domain, using MovableType (or some other software) instead of Typepad and redirecting all of my site traffic through FeedBurner.  Then again, the reason I’m using Typepad in the first place is so I don’t have to do that.

I’m just venting. Brad told me the very first day I started blogging to set up FeedBurner and, as I sometimes do, I basically pushed off his advice until it became very clear that he was completely right and now I blame him for not locking me in my office until I set it up a week ago.  Seriously, though – setting up FeedBurner right away would have allowed me to capture the information I want.  By waiting a week, I basically lost information on several hundred readers that I can’t recapture until I either create my own site or until TypePad improves their stats.

So if anyone from SixApart is out there listening – sharpen your statistics and make them into something that’sactually useful for your users.

[end of rant]

Today Foundry Group announced that we’ve invested in Gist and I couldn’t be more excited about what they are working on (see our blog post here; Gist’s post here).

Gist has developed a powerful product that helps users find and sort information about the people, places and companies that are meaningful to them ("where your inbox meets the web") . It’s an implicit service – they use information contained in your inbox, calendar and contacts to determine the strength of various connections and surface both public and private information about topics that are both timely and relevant for you. For example for an upcoming meeting Gist will organize not only news stories and social media mentions of the company and/or people you’re meeting with, but also organizes all of your correspondence with people from that organization (separating out email, attachments, etc.). I use it every day to help me sift through the mass of data and information that’s important to me (see my post on that subject from a few weeks ago here).  For Foundry, the problem Gist is attempting to solve is right at the intersection of Email and Implicit Web – two themes that we’ve been involved with for many years.

We’re extremely excited to be working with TA, Steve and the entire team at Gist

Making decisions for your business can be hard even in normal circumstances. Right now, in this time of great uncertainty and high emotional stress it’s even harder. I’m on countless calls a day now where I’m trying to talk through with people in our universe (CEOs, GPs of other funds, fellow board members, etc.) critical decisions that in many cases will define the future for the businesses involved. How to react in a time like this is complicated and in most cases is not obvious. Just how bad things may get is unknown, as is how long this will last and what effect that will have on various business sectors and on specifics businesses is unclear. Below are a few thoughts that I’m using to guide my own decision making in this time of crisis.

• Don’t Panic. I say this all the time. 1) Don’t Panic; 2) Gather data; 3) Make informed decisions. The order here is important. This is especially true when times are crazy and there’s even more pressure to make rapid decisions. Take a minute to breath and calm yourself. Think about what data you can gather that will help inform your decision making and what time frame is reasonable to allow yourself to make that decision. Give yourself a little space to collect the information you need to make as informed a decision as you can given the unknowns that will inevitably exist as well as the time frame that’s reasonable for the decision at hand.
• Move quickly but don’t rush. Related and not in opposition to #1, you can still make decisions quickly and decisively, but do so without rushing. When you’re stressed it’s easy to interpret that stress as a need to just get things done. Don’t fall into that trap. You can still move rapidly without rushing.
• Prioritize. When you’re making quick decisions and have a lot of information hitting you at once, it’s tempting to try to just get things off your plate. But that’s a bad way to organize your work even in the best of times. I’m a consistent user of Asana (but you could use Trello, Todoist, Wunderlist, etc) to prioritize my days. It’s especially helpful when things feel out of control to have the framework that a well though through task list provides. Use it to help you prioritize the decisions you need to make that are urgent and to keep track of what’s left to do.
• Be comfortable with ambiguity. One of the most challenging things about making decisions for your business right now is how much we don’t know. That’s disconcerting but you’re just going to have to deal with it. Hopefully your business is well instrumented so at least you’re getting some data in. Take in what you can, recognize that you won’t have perfect information and make the best decisions you can at the time, recognizing that some decisions will need to be revisited when you have more information.
• You can’t control what you can’t control. There’s no sense in focusing on things that are out of your control. So focus in on the things that are within your control.
• Make contingency plans. One of the things that I’m encouraging companies that I work with to do is to engage in some scenario planning. I’ll have a longer post up tomorrow about this but the general idea is to free yourself from pressure in the moment by coming up with multiple plans of action. If we see X we’ll do Y (times a bunch of different scenarios). Your thinking ahead of time will more likely be clearer than in the moment. And you can revisit your thinking over time (before you’ve actually had to implement what you’re working through) and have the benefit of multiple looks at the same set of problems.

Overall I’m seeing high degrees of anxiety and concern about making the “right” decision. That’s understandable given the circumstances. Recognize that no one really knows what’s going to happen here and that your job is to make the best decisions you can. “Right” doesn’t exist in times like these.

One of the big uptrends in technology is the rise of DevOps. Whether your organization is a large enterprise or a fledgling startup, DevOps can help.  We have seen this first hand in many of our portfolio companies and the market in general.  This is why we are excited to be working with Eric Norlin and the Gluecon team and DevOps.com in bringing Camp DevOps to Boulder on May 20^th.

Camp DevOps is a follow up to the successful DevOps conference we help host last fall here. That conference was very well received and we think Camp DevOps will be even better.  Held at CU Boulder Atlas building, it is a full day chocked full of DevOps. There will be keynotes, technical tracks, business tracks, panel discussions and something called “Hello World” which are hands on technical training sessions.

The lineup of speakers for the show is great with keynotes from Sanjiv Sharma of IBM (and author of DevOps for Dummies), Rajat Bhargava of JumpCloud and Howard Diamond of MobileDay. Plus we’ll be there! You can see a full lineup of speakers and register at http://CampDevOps.com

The show is only $49.99 and that includes breakfast and lunch.  If you are already going to Glue admission is free. Also if you buy the admission for Camp DevOps you receive a $100 credit for Gluecon as well.

This will be a great event for the Boulder community on a subject that is near and dear to many of our companies. Hope to see you there!

In the latest lob into the morass that has become somewhat of a sport amongst journalists and those that follow the venture capital industry, Carl Schramm and Harold Bradley write in BusinessWeek about “How Venture Capital Lost Its Way”. The evidence? Venture capital funding is down – from an “astonishing” 1.1% of US GDP in 2000; and in the 3rd quarter of 2009 down 33% from the same period a year earlier. To add to Schramm and Bradley’s collective horror, “two areas crucial to American progress cry out for capital-intensive investment: clean energy technology and biotech. And the VC industry isn’t delivering it. (Info tech, which by now requires few capital investments, still accounts for the lion’s share of those shrinking VC investments)” 

While I strongly believe that the venture capital model is (and should be) changing, this kind of journalism, drawn on incorrect interpretations of the data serve only to sensationalize and add little to the real debate on venture capital. It poorly sets up the 2nd half of their article that talks about the VC funding model (more on that in a post later this week). Here’s my view:

Is there a problem with the current market for VC funding?

Comparing anything about Venture Capital to the markets of 1999 and 2000 is a fools errand. Without question, the venture markets (and the markets in general) were completely overblown in that time period. There were too many venture firms and too many companies getting funded. While this might have been good for some VCs that managed to cash in on the bubble (I, alas, was not one of them – my venture career started in the very dark days of late 2001) it was clearly bad for the industry as a whole (none of the participants benefit when an industry goes through a bubble and burst cycle such as the one that venture capital and technology did during that time period – and we’ve been struggling to “normalize” the industry ever since). I’d argue forcefully that we’re still searching for the optimum level of venture capital funding. Schramm and Bradley seem to be relying on a “less = bad” analysis of the funding markets and are completely ignoring the question of equilibrium (whether we’ve reached one, what the right level of funding should be, etc). Markets function optimally when there is balance and while this balance in private markets such as venture can be illusive, we’re much closer to that balance now than we have been at any other time that I’ve been a venture capitalist (and certainly much more so than in 2000).

Are VCs falling short in their funding of CleanTech and Life Science and favoring IT?

Schramm and Bradley site the PriceWaterhouseCoopers study on 3rd Quarter 2009 investing to back up their assertions. Yet the study contains data that completely contradict a number of their key points. In fact event the title of the PWC press release that announced the 3rd Quarter funding results contradicts the conclusions that Schramm and Bradley draw from it: “Venture capital investment increase in Q3 2009 driven by clean technology sector, according to the MoneyTree Report” (I’ve added the italics). The very first paragraph of the release states in part: “The increase in dollars invested was driven by several large rounds in the Clean Technology sector, one of which is the ninth largest deal since 1995.  The Life Sciences sector (biotechnology and medical device industries combined) also had a solid quarter relative to other industry sectors, leaving Software as the third highest investment sector, a notable decline in industry ranking.“ I won’t quote it here to limit the length of this post, but if you click over to the press release take a look at the 3rd paragraph which is entirely focused on the shift of capital from IT to CleanTech and Life Sciences.  Also missing from the Schramm and Bradley article was that the 3rd Quarter funding totals were actually up from the 2nd Quarter (their article implies that venture funding is falling off a cliff – clearly not the case).

Is there still a market for IT investing?

As an IT investor, of course my answer is going to be a resounding “yes"!” But don’t take my word for it – just look around you at the amazing pace of continued innovation in technology and the Internet. From new ways to communicate (Twitter, Facebook), to new ways to advertise your business (Google, AdMob, etc, etc) to new ways to play games with your friends (Zynga), there’s still plenty of innovation going on in information technology.

What’s sad is that there’s a real debate to be had on the future of venture capital and the changing VC model (see my partner Jason’s take on that subject here). If we drop the pretence that “VC is Dead” perhaps we’ll finally get to the interesting part of the conversation…

Short post today from a portfolio company of ours and how they describe their culture and mission. I love it and thought it was a good way to end the week.

I had the chance last week to speak to a group of non-profit executive directors from about 80 local Denver/Boulder/Longmont non-profit agencies as part of a session sponsored by the United Way on “Getting the Word Out – a Mass Communication Seminar”.  I sat on a panel with a bunch of local newspaper editors which consisted of an hour of the editors talking about the best way to fax or e-mail them stories so they’d get their attention followed by 15 minutes of me saying that instead of all of that, their organizations could actually be their own media, that there was larger conversation going on across a much broader community which they could/should tap into, and that perhaps rather than pitching stories to newspapers they should think of the newspapers as added distribution for the stories they’ve already created.   Don’t get me wrong – I think print media is great and I enjoy reading (on-line, of course) many of the local papers in my area.  But the power of new media is that it takes away the control that traditional media has on the flow of news (not to mention the determination of what is news-worthy) and puts it into the hands of the masses.  And while a story in the local paper may reach one set of constituents, a well organized (but not very costly) web site (or even just an organization blog that doubles as its web site) can get multiple messages out to multiple constituents (i.e., flickr photos of a recent fundraiser; a MySpace page to recruit college-age volunteers, dynamic web site or blog for posting updates, responding to national stories, etc.). My message was really that there’s a whole lot going on out there that non-profits (or any organization) can tap into to raise the profile of their group or cause and ultimately spread their word more broadly. The key take-away for me, however, was not all the great things that organizations can do to broaden the reach of their message or influence the media related to their work, but rather how foreign this all was to this group of relatively tech savvy execs.  Most had some kind of web-site, although the vast majority didn’t update the content on the site even monthly; and while more than half had heard of blogging (and other forms of new media), almost none had any experience either reading, commenting on or contributing. For me this was a fundamental disconnect and good to keep in mind for future conversations. I sometimes take for granted that this world in which I spend so much time has gone mainstream, but the reality is that it hasn’t yet. I was thinking of all these great Web2.0-ie  things they could do to broaden their web presence, engage their constituents in conversation and generally spread the good word; they were thinking “what’s blogging again?”

Slow and steady wins the race….

I’ve come to realize that many – most – entrepreneurs suck at reading pitch meetings. Frequently what I hear from a company CEO is completely uncorrelated to what I hear from the VC they were pitching. In thinking about why this is, the answer is actually relatively straightforward:

VCs are predisposed to give good meetings. AND By being equivocal at the end of a meeting they preserve maximum option value.

Parsing this a bit further, VCs take a lot of meetings. And they do so with varied motivations. Sometimes they’re legitimately interested in a market space or even a specific business. Sometimes another VC or entrepreneur asks them to take a meeting and they’re trying to preserve a relationship. Sometimes they weren’t paying close enough attention to your email and said yes when they meant to say no. There are lots of varying reasons why you might find yourself in front of a venture capitalist making your pitch. And the quality of those pitches varies a lot. Even among relatively experienced entrepreneurs their ability to convey their business idea varies widely. But all of that said, once you’re in a room with a VC they generally want you to have a good experience. Part of their business, in fact, is to make sure you have a good experience pitching them. Historically this wasn’t the case, but with the fluidity of information that gets passed around among entrepreneurs and the general accessibility of VCs these days most venture capitalists will try their best to make sure that your experience pitching to them is positive.  This isn’t a bad thing. But it does lead entrepreneurs into the trap of incorrectly reading a good meeting. Good meetings sometimes just mean that the VC you were pitching to was doing their job.

Ok – so you’ve had a good meeting experience. Now what? Most VCs are not particularly adept at reacting to your idea in real time. Sure, they’ll give you some relatively generic feedback. And if there’s some glaring mismatch between their investment profile and your business they’ll tell you. But for the most part you won’t get a lot of specifics out of them. This is less calculating than it sounds – they often just need to think about what you just presented a bit more and by being equivocating they preserve as much option value as possible. To some extent this is changing as the next generation of venture capitalists are more direct, open and reactive to what they’re hearing in meetings (we certainly try to be at Foundry). But for the most part, left to their own devices, the VC you’ve just pitched will try to get out of your meeting without tipping off their hand too much.

The result of these two factors tends to be good meetings where you leave feeling positive, that the person you met with was “really engaged” (a term I hear a lot from entrepreneurs post meetings), but with undefined next steps and no real understanding of where you stand.

This is a mistake that you shouldn’t make.

The solution here is actually quite simple but you need to be willing to be direct. It starts with being a good time manager of your meeting – if you run out of time you won’t be able to do this. Make sure you hit pause 5 minutes before the meeting is due to end to give yourself time to wrap up. Then be blunt: “What did you think?” (I probably hear this in only about 5% of meetings). The right follow up question should then be about what additional information you can provide to the VC you were meeting with. It’s ok to ask what next steps are but most of the time you’ll get a nebulous answer; by coming up with additional information you can provide you create another touch point that you control while at the same time honing in on areas of your pitch that they either didn’t understand or want to dig further into. The combination of these two questions should give you a better idea of where things stand. A few potential things you’ll hear and their general meaning below:

“Let me noodle on this a bit and get back to you” – means “I’m going to say no, but don’t want to do it in person.”

“Hmm…Let me talk to my partners about it” – means “I’m going to say no and blame my partners”

“Let me introduce you to [person] at another portfolio company to get their take” means – “I’m trending no, but want to be sure I’m not missing something first”

“I’d like to understand more about [insert thing to hear more about]” means – “I have some interest but also some questions. I’m willing to put in at least some more work”

“Can I talk to a few customers” means “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and respect neither your time nor your key relationships”

“Let’s schedule another meeting to dig into [thing to dig into]” means “I’m interested and willing to commit more time to this”

Hopefully this is a helpful guide to getting the most out of your pitches and leaving with a realistic view of where you stand. It’s critical in the fundraising process to be spending time with those people who are legitimately interested in your idea and to be realistic about what your actual funding pipeline looks like.

I’d love to hear about your experiences in pitch meetings. And I should probably add to the list above so let me know what other things you’ve heard at the end of your pitch meetings.

The Mobius web-site was spoofed recently. Someone – presumably looking to pass themselves off as a legitimate venture capitalist and needing a web-site to do so – copied our site and changed the name of the firm as well as some of the biographical  information (contacts, team, etc). They even went so far as to pull live feeds from our site that updated our portfolio ticker.

We looked up information on the domain on whois and on some of the registry sites, but the most interesting data came from one of our portfolio companies – Quova. Quova has mapped the IP space of the internet for physical location. If you give them an IP address, they can tell you where it is located (the data are extremely accurate to the country level; very accurate to the city level and beyond). They can also tell you some useful things about the address (connection type; carrier; proxy info; device; etc). We’ve been investors in Quova for several years and I’ve worked with the company pretty closely since I joined Mobius. In this time I’ve had the chance to talk with some of the company’s customers (who use the data for things like fraud detection and localized marketing), sat through demos of the company’s service, talked with their technical team, etc. I’ve never really had the chance to use the service . . . until now. I was amazed with the data they were able to come up with and it was very helpful to our IT group who was trying to gather more information about the site in question. The Internet is often described as a place without borders. In reality that’s not correct. Technology exists that gives us the ability to define these borders. Technology also gives us the opportunity to take some of the anonymity away from the Internet and to create boundaries around our on-line lives. There is such a thing as ‘there’ on the internet (as opposed to ‘anywhere’) and I think we’ll see an increasing use of this technology to make each of our experiences on the Internet both safer and more relevant (just the past year has seen the ability to localize searches; more geographically targeted banner adds; etc. – often powered by Quova’s technology) and more profitable (routing traffic that was previously unserviceable, for instance, to a partner site who can service the traffic, etc.).  Think of the Internet as comprising both a virtual ‘there’ and a physical ‘there’ that combine to create our experience (and may separately be relevant to enhancing that experience). It’s not hard to come up with the ways that the combination of these data will quickly change our on-line experiences.

This is the 3rd post in my “Designing the Ideal Board Meeting” series.

I didn’t mention this in my prior post but thought of it as I started writing this section on how to put together a good board package. Companies often bias to wanting to hold their board meetings a few weeks after the end of each quarter. The rationale is that this allows the board to review quarterly results. For private companies, I think this is a mistake. For starters, since this is a general bias across the industry you’re fighting for your board member’s time just when everyone else is as well. Not only are these meetings hard to schedule but you’re asking your board members to focus on your business at the same time they’re distracted by being asked to focus on a bunch of other businesses. I also think this is a bad idea because it sets the tone that your board meeting should be focused on reporting. It shouldn’t, as I’ll outline below. Reporting is important but often for startup boards not a very good use of the time you have together. Now – on to the topic at hand, putting together your board package.

So, you’ve been communicating regularly with your board and you’ve sent around and received feedback in advance on your board agenda (both covered extensively in my last post, Designing the Ideal Board Meeting – Before the Meeting). How do you construct a set of board materials that’s informative, insightful and sets the stage for a productive meeting? Here are some thoughts:

Tell me what you think. All good board packages start with some kind of letter from the CEO giving context on the business and what s/he is hoping to cover during the meeting itself. This can be in the email to which the materials are attached, or better yet as a separate letter that accompanies the rest of the board material. This is your chance to tell your board how you’re feeling about the business. What do you want to highlight for them? What things are non-obvious but that you want to be sure aren’t missed? Are there areas you’re struggling with that you’ll be asking the board for help on? How and why did you choose the topic or two that you’ll be doing a deeper dive on in the board meeting? This is always the first thing I read when I receive board materials from a company and, for me, is the most important part of any good board package. Side note: some companies have several of their senior staff write up a similar note to the board. I generally find that helpful, but the key is to guide them away from reporting (it leads to inconsistency and generally is redundant with your other board materials) and towards analysis and interpretation of what they’re seeing in their areas of the business.

Report, but report consistently. The goal of the first portion of your board materials is to report on your business. This will vary a bit from business to business, but the general gist is to highlight the KPIs of the business overall and then have a brief KPI/report from each department or functional area of the company. The key here is consistency. In a later post I’ll share a few examples of the kind of reporting that I find most helpful, but the idea is to develop the outline of a board package that can be updated meeting after meeting. It’s surprising how few companies actually do this and instead start from scratch for each meeting. Not only is it not time efficient for you and your team, it’s hard on your board members – the lack of consistency in reporting makes it hard to compare board meeting to board meeting and hard to find the information you’re looking for meeting after meeting. Keep in mind as well that bullet-point style reporting is an incredibly poor way to convey quantitative information. Your KPIs should cover the key financial and operating metrics (and health) of your business and the department level reporting should include functional level KPIs followed by some bullets that outline key areas for discussion at the meeting.

This isn’t your E-Team meeting. I was on a board once that consistently sent out 160+ page “board decks.” I put board decks in quotes because they really weren’t – they were essentially Executive Team meetings disguised as board meetings. The ensuing board meetings were long, boring, and consisted of the board mostly listening in to the executive team’s discussion about the details of the business (to their credit they changed this after I asked them to consider a different format for the meeting). As the saying goes: “I must apologize. If I had more time I would have written a shorter note.” Long board decks may seem like you’re being transparent but from my perspective it’s just being lazy. Take the time to distill the key aspects of your business so your board can efficiently but effectively understand the business. Your board doesn’t operate your business – they provide oversight and guidance. Help them do that with the materials you provide. I’m not going to give you a page maximum but if you’re more than about 20 or 30 pages for the reporting portion of your board deck, you’re probably too long (see below for “deep dive” topics, which I’m not referring to here).

Publishing in a shared format? I have some boards that publish their board materials in some kinds of shared format for everyone to read together and comment on (typically Google Docs, but sometimes some other shared format). The idea is that the materials are sent out in advance, questions are asked and answered and the board shows up to the board meeting having already accomplished much of the reporting section of the board meeting. This works for some boards, but I have mixed feelings about it. For starters, reporting without context can be challenging (or misleading) and in large part the substance of your board meeting should be about helping provide that context (more on that in my next post). It also has the tendency to lead CEOs to start the board meeting with: “Does anyone have any additional questions that weren’t asked in the shared doc?”, which as we’ll discuss, is not a great way to start a meeting and engage your board. As a practical matter, I’m often reading board materials on a plane where I don’t always have connectivity (and I’m not alone – many of your board members will do this; it’s simply where busy people have large amounts of uninterrupted time). This formate doesn’t lend itself well to off-line.

Deep dives. We’ll talk more specifically about the time allocation of your board meeting itself in the next post in this series, but for the purpose of planning your board materials you should assume that at least half of most board meetings (and generally speaking quite a bit more than that) should be spent on topics other than administrative or reporting. So pick an area or two to take the board more deeply into. Sometimes this is FYI, but often these are areas for feedback and certainly for deeper discussion. These can be event driven – for example discussing an M&A opportunity or an upcoming financing. Or they can be company specific topics, such as a demo of a new product that’s in development or a deep dive into marketing or sales. This is a chance to make sure the board is up to speed on an area of your business that you need feedback on or simply to give them better context about how you’re thinking about the market opportunity or the forward product pipeline. I find this much more helpful than companies that either report for too much of the meeting, do shallow dives into every functional area of the business (to be avoided!) or get bogged down in things that are ultimately unimportant to the company’s future. Be deliberate here – what areas of the business do you want your board to get smarter on? Where do you need some advice or help? And remember this is a collaborative effort. Part of the reason you’re putting out an agenda early and for comment is to make sure everyone is on the same page about what you’re going to go more deeply on in the meeting. Your board can and should offer feedback on this when you send around the proposed agenda.

Just in time doesn’t work for board materials. This is obvious but also seems to be a real challenge for many companies – you need to deliver your board materials well in advance of your board meeting. For most private companies this is about 4 days in advance. It’s absolutely more than 48 hours in advance (many board members, and most VCs, end up lumping several board meetings together over a handful of days in a location – if you don’t get the materials out before people have boarded their flights to come see you shouldn’t expect them to have read the materials). People use to talk about getting materials out a week in advance but that feels like overkill to me. As companies mature, board packages tend to get longer – there’s simply more to report on. Your timing should reflect the depth and quantity of information you’re trying to convey to your board.

Assume everyone has read the materials. If you’re sending your board materials out in advance you should assume (in fact you should explicitly agree as a board) that everyone will come prepared and have read and spent time with the materials. This should be obvious, except it’s clearly not as it’s amazing how often people fly half way across the country for a meeting but haven’t bothered to read the board package. I was in a board meeting once where it was so clear that several of the board members hadn’t read the deck that we actually stopped the meeting and took a 30 minute break so they could. Not coming prepared is disrespectful of the company and of your fellow board members. Don’t be disrespectful.

Ancillary materials. I’ve been referring to “board materials” here as well as “board package” because you should be sending out more than just a board deck/document. We’ve already talked about your CEO letter. But you should also include the most recent month’s financials. These are the financials you’re sending out every month to the board but include them here so everyone has them in a single email. Also include your cap table, any board minutes you’re asking the board to approve as well as option grants and any other board business you’re planning on asking the board to consider in the meeting. I prefer things like the cap table, financials and option grants to be delivered as separate attachments and not in the body of a larger board deck. It makes it much easier to find and make use of them later and to the extent to which some investors are sharing your board materials with their partners it makes it easier for them to strip out the mundane things that don’t need to clog up their partner’s email.

Next up is how to run the meeting itself. We’ll cover how long you should plan on meeting for, the importance of being explicit about discussion topics vs. decision topics, who from your exec team should attend, and more.