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Your board should protect you!

Berkonomics

All other board functions are secondary. Even venture capitalists who sit on boards where they have significant investments often forget this point. Actually, there are two legal duties of board members. Second is the duty of loyalty… …Loyalty to the corporate person, not to the shareholders who elected the board member.

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The Pre-Board Board: How to Create Accountability Before You Give Away a Board Seat

This is going to be BIG.

Typically, investors don’t take a board seat until you raise your first equity round—which means that it could be *years* before you have a real board meeting: A year of nights/weekends work researching, prototyping, and fundraising. I’ll make it simple. How many is too many, for example?

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Board Diversity

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

The board diversity problem is a symptom of a much broader problem around lack of diversity in founders that get funded and lack of diversity in VC firms. Most startup boards are made up of a few founders and a few VCs. No wonder you have no diversity on the board. Boards don’t need three or four VCs on them.

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The Twenty Year Itch: My Last VC Investment Out of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures

This is going to be BIG.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll complete my next investment. Last August, I passed the point at which I had spent literally half my entire life working in this asset class, having started at the General Motors pension fund doing institutional investments in venture funds and late-stage directs back in February of 2001.

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Should board members be elected “for life?”

Berkonomics

No board member should be grandfathered, guaranteed a board seat forever. We have investigated the restrictions imposed by investment documents and the obvious need to keep continuity on the board with the retention of the CEO position at the very least. How about non-profit boards? And that’s not good.

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Seraf Toolbox: Exit Planning for CEOs and the Board of Directors

The Seraf Compass

As a director on an early stage company board, how do you deliver on your main responsibility as a board member - maximizing shareholder value? And, what do you do to make sure the CEO is doing her job in increasing the value of your investment in the company?

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Fight for balance on your board!

Berkonomics

Picking up where we left off… In my last insight, I described the CEO who stacked the board with two friends, making a majority for control purposes and relegating the investor representatives to insignificance. If the CEO does not fight for balance of the board, outside board members must fight for this to protect the corporation.

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