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Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

reactionwheel.net

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Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#281

Post by mst »

> The advice here is pretty basic: nothing happens in your board meeting. Your board meeting is scripted. The board members should have seen the information presented before the meeting (and not just because you sent the deck—half of them won’t read it beforehand—you must talk to them.) And you should know beforehand how each board member will react to the information presented. If there are decisions to be made, you already know how each board member will decide, because you told them about the decision to be made and they told you what they will decide. No surprises

This is, honestly, how one should aim for pretty much any -formal- meeting to run - as a high trust means to make a pre-existing consensus common knowledge to all the participants.

(things like design brainstorms are a completely different category, hence the 'formal' qualifier to try and make that clear)

Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#282

Post by sergiomattei »

butwhywhyoh wrote: post #234
munificent wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I intensely dislike the cynicism of this and other similar statements. It's a truism of American culture that any group of people is somehow stupider, meaner, and more hurtful than any of its individual members. Yet our lived daily experience is that often our most rewarding, beneficial, and joyful experiences come when being a member of a group. I mean, we are a group right here and right now in this thread and I as…

The quote is likely referencing large in-person groups. I would argue HN is absolutely _not_ a group in any meaningful sense. We are a bunch of individuals sharing individual thoughts asynchronously. We don't act in unison. 4chan, on the other hand... Using the combined tone of a group of singers as a counterexample seems like quite a stretch. Again -- the original quote: "... the total psyche emerging from the group…

I believe it's a group: Hacker News is a community. That we don't act as a hivemind is a result of our contrarian community culture.

Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#283

Post by profile53 »

streetcat1 wrote: post #238
GDC7 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft, interestingly, was after the opposite Microsoft is like Marylin Monroe, or Michael Jackson or that person who lived to 123 years old. You'll never see a company like that ever again in your lifetime. They did what Standard Oil did, in perhaps an even cleaner and uncontroversial manner. Tons of talent and luck aligned in the exact right way for it to be the phenomenon it became.

You mean luck of copying wordperfect and visicalc? Or maybe the purchased OS and the IBM deal?

In the same way standard oil was just another oil company. Execution and business strategy set Microsoft apart, not unique software.

Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#284

Post by robocat »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #7
vmception wrote: post #2

when you get thrown off of the board you still have your shares. so the trade is still successful by my rubric. I consider all things to be trades, whether I invested in a publicly traded equity, or whether I created a bunch of $0.00 par value shares to sell to a bunch of other people. the rule is the same: don't get married to a company. a board removing you doesn't need any fanfare. you still have the shares.

See also "cram-down round" :-)

Good definition for it and similar terms: https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/Curt...

Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#285

Post by GDC7 »

streetcat1 wrote: post #238
GDC7 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft, interestingly, was after the opposite Microsoft is like Marylin Monroe, or Michael Jackson or that person who lived to 123 years old. You'll never see a company like that ever again in your lifetime. They did what Standard Oil did, in perhaps an even cleaner and uncontroversial manner. Tons of talent and luck aligned in the exact right way for it to be the phenomenon it became.

You mean luck of copying wordperfect and visicalc? Or maybe the purchased OS and the IBM deal?

Microsoft bet on GUI when nobody thought it was gonna be the future

Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#286

Post by jerrre »

jacquesm wrote: post #262
tdfx wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, Zuckerberg's true talent is being thrown into situations he has no life experience to handle and appropriately picking the right people to surround himself with and listen to.

To steal their ideas and screw them over.

that part is normally just silently implied...

Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#287

Post by jerrre »

mooreds wrote: post #130
ksdale wrote: post #99

Once upon a time, I helped a group of friends start a company, and as we were going over the parts of the LLC agreement that outlined what would happen if the company dissolved as part of a fight, the entire group treated me like I was ridiculous for suggesting that they would get in a fight. I told them that if they were planning on staying friends forever, they didn't even need the LLC agreement, they could just pr…

Plan for the divorce during the honeymoon. Then put the agreement in the safe. Two outcomes: * everything goes swimmingly: you've wasted a bit of time and paper * everything does not go well: hard decisions are already made Before I co-founded a startup, I read the Nolo books on partnerships, especially the parts about dissolving them fairly. The details differ slightly if you have an LLC, C corp etc (as long as it i…

Shouldn't you do it before marriage? That also gives you a third possible outcome

* you find out beforehand your ideas about what's fair don't overlap enough to even start.

Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#288

Post by Cthulhu_ »

buryat wrote: post #73
drno123 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who was your investor? So other startups know who to avoid.

2017-10-04 Series A - Numetric $13M Insight Partners — lead investor Hack VC EPIC Ventures Draper Associates Aaron Skonnard https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/numetric-series-a--...

Thanks, I was going to reply myself asking for the poster to call them out - these are shitty investors that should be avoided.

Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#289

Post by ido »

mavelikara wrote: post #249
lumost wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very few times where the finances work out for options. Most employees lack access to the necessary company financials to make an informed financial decision, there is a 100% downside risk and barring early stage founder equity stakes - it's unlikely that the equity will do better than getting lucky on a top stock pick. I have yet to hear a single case of an employee purchasing their options when they left…

> I have yet to hear a single case of an employee purchasing their options when they left and thinking it was the right decision later on. I know at least a dozen ex-colleagues of mine who fit this criteria. When the company in question exited, it created 400 millionaire employees.

that's the problem with anecdotal evidence - you can't really tell for sure a company is going to become a massive unicorn often until very close to the point it does. I've worked at companies that raised many millions of $s and seemed very promising and a few years later went out of business. Who becomes a winner is also not always completely "fair" (as in it depends somewhat on circumstances/fortunate happenstance).

Re: Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs

#290

Post by d1a2n »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #62
anthropodie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude…

Of course, I invite readers to treat Carl Jung quotations as having a credibility proportional to the amount of efforts he made during his life to properly prove and establish the facts he was enunciating: not much.

Hey man, thanks for the invitation, really, but you're literally just some random account on the internet and Carl Jung is a founding psychoanalyst/symbolic thinker. I would invite anyone to regard your suggestion in proportion to the comparative significance of your intellectual contributions.
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