How should board meetings be prepared and run?

Mike Lazerow · Aug 2, 2021

Investors should pre-brief the founder before a board meeting to help structure it, because a meeting that just regurgitates information you could have read beforehand is worthless

Deep-diving with the founder in advance lets the actual meeting cover what matters

Scope: describes his own practice on boards he sits on

26:06 20VC: Mike Lazerow on Why How You Operate As a VC Is More Important Than Who You Are and What You Have Done, Why Boards Are More Important for the Entrepreneur than Investor & How The Best Entrepreneurs Prep Their Boards & Extract Value From Them

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

Founders should set the board agenda, pre-socialise topics with each member and never surprise them; a board member who arrives without doing the pre-read is dispensable

Board members have to do the work too — if they don't, you actually don't need them

50:33 20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"

Harry Stebbings · Sep 11, 2024

Founders should call each board member for five to ten minutes before the meeting to surface and often resolve their concerns so they never need board time

50:51 20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"

Cem Sertoglu · Nov 20, 2024

Sensitive topics should never surface for the first time in a board meeting; the investor's one-on-one relationship with the founder should be used to introduce and time them.

A healthy board dynamic runs through both the boardroom and one-on-one conversations, and once the few important topics are chosen carefully, raising them shouldn't be a problem.

23:49 20VC: Turning $16.5M into $2.1BN; Lessons from the Greatest Venture Investment in European History: UiPath | Why VC is Not Being Commoditised | Why Price Does Not Matter | Lessons on Loss Ratio, Selling and Signalling with Cem Sertoglu

Michael Eisenberg · Jun 19, 2024

Board prep should be a data-rich letter rather than a presentation, upfront identifying one to three strategic issues the CEO needs input on, with calls beforehand

Attacking a concentrated question stops the meeting from sprawling into endless numbers and product plans

46:20 20VC: Foundation Models are the Fastest Depreciating Asset in History, Lina Kahn is a Threat to American Capitalism, PE is Not Coming to Save the M&A Market & How China Could Overtake the US in the AI Race with Michael Eisenberg

Clay Bavor · Jul 4, 2026

Boards should be run on written memos sent in advance rather than decks presented in the room

Writing is thinking on paper and it is very hard to hide from writing; giving board members soak time means they arrive prepared to challenge rather than be presented to and managed

Scope: six to ten page memos written by the two founders

38:21 20VC: Open Models vs Frontier Models: Who Actually Wins? | The $100,000 Token Budget Every Engineer Will Need | Why Forward-Deployed Engineers Are the Future of Enterprise AI with Clay Bavor, Co-Founder of Sierra

Ed Sim · Oct 27, 2023

A quarterly, text-only board cadence at seed is valuable mainly as preparation, getting founders into a rhythm before they have a real board 12-18 months later

The first six months founders are heads down building; the board process is preparation for the pace that comes later, not a mechanism for the investor to help build the product

24:02 Seed stage board cadence is preparation for later real board rhythm not active help

Stephane Kurgan · Jul 28, 2023

Founders' communication with boards fails in two directions — dumping too much operational detail on investors, or withholding information beyond what lets a board member be effective — and the latter requires a direct 'that's not the deal' conversation

Investors and board members can't help with granular operational detail, but they can't function without the information they need

18:46 Founders fail boards by either dumping operational detail or withholding needed information

Harry Stebbings · May 6, 2022

The best managers delegate board presentation work to their functional leads; founders of scale-up companies who build the decks themselves are spending their time wrong

40:06 Delegating board presentation to functional leads not founders building decks is better time use

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

Operators should control seagull board members by opening every review with three things that are green and three that are red, and refusing to add new items to the list

You already know your own business; having the confidence to set the agenda keeps the seagulls away, while help on the reds is welcome

49:22 Open with three green and three red items and refuse new additions to control seagull boards

Zachary Bookman · Dec 6, 2024

A CEO should run board meetings tightly and end them on time, staying visibly in control of the agenda

Marc Andreessen walked out the moment a board meeting ran past its stated end time, which Bookman read as a stark lesson about managing the board meeting

50:19 End meetings on time to demonstrate agenda control

TJ Parker · Jun 5, 2023

The best approach to board management is to build normal human relationships with investors and board members — texting, calling in good times and bad, meeting socially

Boards work when the relationships resemble the ordinary relationships you build in the rest of your life

55:00 Build informal personal relationships with board members outside formal meetings

Christa Quarles · Jul 29, 2021

CEOs systematically presume too much context in board presentations; boards show up a handful of times a year and retain very little, so material must be built to rebuild their context

Sitting on a board herself showed her that directors arrive having to reshift their own context and understand the problem from scratch

35:35 Boards retain little context between meetings so materials must rebuild it each time

Christa Quarles · Jul 29, 2021

It is the CEO's job to size and prioritize the board's questions by business impact and tell the board explicitly which ones are 1% movers and distractions

The board has no way to size those opportunities inside the organization, so only the CEO can rank them; boards usually respond well to being told

36:59 Ceo must size and rank board questions by business impact and flag distractions

Christa Quarles · Jul 29, 2021

The right way to handle a board member's pet peeve is a dedicated deep-dive session approached with curiosity, and then to resolve it rather than let it recur meeting after meeting

You may be talking past each other or missing data on a market externality; and an unresolved recurring question becomes a stuck state that frustrates both sides

38:13 Dedicated deep dive resolves recurring board pet peeves rather than letting them recur