The Benefits of Diverse, Independent Boards with Brad Feld

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Brad Feld. Brad and I have been friends for over 20 years across both Return Path and Bolster. Brad is a partner and co- founder of Foundry, and he's been an early stage investor, an entrepreneur for, I'm not going to say how many years that you wrote down.

Brad Feld: A lot.

Matt Blumberg: Many years. Many years. Brad, thank you for being here.

Brad Feld: It is my pleasure.

Matt Blumberg: So today is the view from the boardroom, and Brad, you've been on a couple of boards. How many boards have you been on? 100, 150, 200?

Brad Feld: Some number that is too big to bother with and not probably credible if I said the number out loud, anyway.

Matt Blumberg: And Brad, I have had the pleasure being on at least four boards with Brad, and Brad and I are actually co- authors of a book called Startup Boards. So Brad, my question for you today for our audience is what are a few things that you see founders, CEOs benefiting from as they make boards more independent and more diverse?

Brad Feld: Let me key on the notion of the board and the board as a team for the CEO. And while it's a team that can fire the CEO, so the CEO has to keep that in his or her mind all the time. Really the effectiveness of the board is driven by the CEO viewing the board as a team, in the same way the CEO views their management team. As part of that, You have a lot of different functional capabilities that you would want if you're building a team, and especially in the context of the board, one of the things that's really powerful is to get very different, essentially perspectives, experience, lived experience, frame of reference, to your product. Frame of reference to your culture. Frame of reference to your skills, like variety of those perspectives frames is really valuable. And if all you have on your board is a couple of venture capital investors... Okay, pretty obvious that even if they have different life experiences, you're still getting a frame from one perspective, hence independent. And then as you go to the independent directors who really are focusing on 100% of their energy on the company. They're not confused about whether they have responsibilities to their funds. They're not thinking about the investment that they've made, per se. They're just there to help you, the CEO be successful and the business be successful. As that group has more diversity of whatever characteristic you want to define, that also gets more different perspectives at play for the CEO.

Matt Blumberg: So have you seen this in action? Think of an example, a situation, you don't have to give the company's name, but where having independents on the board or having a bunch of people with different lived experiences or demographics on the board, has made for a better decision.

Brad Feld: Sure. I'm thinking of a board of a technology company where I'm the only VC investor on the board, and the founder/ CEO is on the board, the President is on the board. And then the outside board members, there are three of them. One is a white man who has very deep technical experience with the product that the company's building. So his historical experience and the technical experience and research around that is very deep. One is a black woman who previously was an executive at a company that was very high profile, had raised a lot of money. She was their Chief Marketing Officer, and she has incredible experience with the go- to- market function in the category this company's playing with. She's also a great storyteller in terms of that skillset of a marketing person. So she brings that to the table and she also has very much of a view around the challenges of communicating the efficacy of this technology. The third board member is a white woman who is a COO of a very different kind of company, and that's scaled. And so she's a scaled COO and she brings less industry technology experience, but a lot of business scaling experience, a lot of understanding of how to build out the team and scale it. Although she does have intellectual interest in the product. So all three of the independent directors care about the product, but they are really coming at what they're doing to help the CEO from very, very different perspectives. And then for me as a board member, I get very different lenses and viewpoints from each of them, from their own experiences in the work context, but also from their own experiences in terms of thinking about the customer and what the customer's going to want to do, et cetera. The last piece is that the networks that they each have don't overlap that much. So they're very complimentary networks, both personal and professional. And so we're getting this company and the CEO is getting a lot of different, I think perspective is the right word, but also introductions and connections, some of which it's not at all obvious how they can be helpful, but many of the non- obvious ones, translate into things that do become helpful.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, no, the lack of overlap in networks is really, really interesting and it's really powerful. If you think about the contrast between that and a board where, you have three VCs that have 80% overlap, just a lot more access for the company.

Brad Feld: The conversation between VCs, do you know so-and-so? Oh yeah, I know so- and- so. Like, great. So two of my investor board members know the same person. That didn't help me very much.

Matt Blumberg: Great. All right, one last quick, unrelated question for you to close it out. What is one best practice that you've seen CEOs do to keep themselves calm in a storm?

Brad Feld: Breathe deeply. It's really simple and I find myself doing it all the time. I don't have an anger vector that's very significant. I internalize and absorb a lot of other people's stress, but there are definitely moments where I feel my anxiety level rising. Whether it's in a negotiation or it's in a context of a particular situation or something that frustrates me or something that's gone poorly. And what I find is when I just breathe, it changes my whole orientation towards that thing that's coming at me. And I think it's not a mindfulness conversation. I mean, it's really a physiological phenomena that in the eye of the storm as you describe, it's not, and you should do this and you should do that, and you should do that. It's a very simple thing, which is, you take a pause, you breathe deeply, you recenter yourself on what's going on, and then you just address whatever's coming at you.

Matt Blumberg: I love it. Good practice. Brad Feld from Foundry, thank you for being here.

Brad Feld: See ya.