Sample frameDay 344·Entrepreneurship · Governance

Morning. You've recruited staff, customers and investors. Today you recruit the one group that can fire you.

Entrepreneurship.

The First Board

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The question

Can you name, without looking anything up, who sits on your board, who chose each of them, how many votes it would take to remove you as chief executive — and what the last meeting actually decided? Most founders manage three of the four. The fourth is what separates a board from an audience.

The idea

Brad Feld co-founded Techstars in 2006 and has spent three decades as a venture investor sitting on startup boards, and in 2013 he wrote Startup Boards with the seed investor Mahendra Ramsinghani, because the board is the one part of company-building that founders reliably improvise. A board isn't an advisory panel. It's the body that approves the financings, appoints and removes the chief executive, and carries a legal duty to the company itself — which is why a director your lead investor put there owes their obligation to the business rather than to the fund that sent them. The working shape at a first priced round is three seats: you, one other holder of common shares, one investor. Small enough to argue in, large enough to be a real check on you. But shape is the easy half, and it's the duller half that decides whether the thing is any use: whether the people at the table know which of them can vote, whether they get the numbers early enough to think about them, and whether anybody writes down what was decided. The trap is the board you get by default — composed by whoever asked, meeting whenever someone remembers, fed a deck assembled the night before. Boards don't drift towards usefulness.

The framework

01
Three seats is a working shape, not a formality.
At a first priced round the common arrangement is three directors: you, one other holder of common shares, and the investor leading the round. Know the difference between the people at the table. A director votes and carries a duty to the company; an observer attends and has neither; an adviser has no standing at all. Founders hand over board seats every week where an observer right or a standing monthly call would have bought exactly the same counsel for nothing. Work out which of the three you're being asked for before you agree to it.
02
What is this board actually for?
Three jobs, and the list is shorter than most founders expect. It approves the money: financings, share issuances, anything that changes who owns the company. It hires, reviews, pays and if necessary removes the chief executive, which is you. And it holds oversight — the handful of checks nobody inside the company can honestly perform on themselves. Everything else a good director gives you, from introductions to the hard question at the right moment, is advice, and advice doesn't need a vote. Give away a seat only for the three jobs.
03
The cadence and the pack.
Set the rhythm before the first meeting: how often you sit, what arrives beforehand, and how long they have had it. Send the material at least three days ahead — cash and the runway date first, then the milestone, then what's changed since last time, then the decisions you need — so the meeting can be an argument rather than a recital of slides they are seeing for the first time. Ring each director the day before. Surprises sprung in the room aren't candour; they're a governance failure with an audience.
04
Clear the last twenty minutes, then write down what happened.
Two habits do more for a board than any agenda will. Close each meeting with a short session that everyone who isn't a director sits out — no observers, no team — because the conversation your investors would otherwise have with each other on the phone that evening is better had while you can still answer it. Then write the decisions up the same day: what was approved, what was deferred, who owns what and by when. A board that can't tell you what it decided last quarter isn't governing, it's attending, and the minute is the only part of the morning anyone reads a year later.

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