Joe Lonsdale: The 1 hour board meeting

Run an effective board meeting focused on the critical things.

Joe Lonsdale

General Partner at 8VC

Joe’s developed a unique perspective from 500+ board meetings both as a founder and investor. For companies from seed to pre-IPO stage, he’s sharing the best of what he’s learned from world-class entrepreneurs and investors.
  • Product discussions are core to board meetings at any stage, but for earlier stage companies reviewing product demos, roadmaps, and launches is key.
  • Prepare ahead of time to share all scenarios of your business for the next three years via GAAP financials and operational metrics related to sales funnel, marketing efforts, and customer engagement.
  • Engagement, sales, and customer happiness metrics are a huge plus — the more detailed, the better.
  • Plan to send this 48 hours in advance of the meeting. Give the board time to send questions or notes.
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Outline

  • 2 Minutes

    Highlights and Lowlights

    What is working well, what isn't working well

  • 8 Minutes

    Metrics

    Financial: Q1 2020 Financials, 2020-2021 Forecasts. Product: Q1 2020 Engagement Metrics (NPS, Retention, MAU’s)

  • 10 Minutes

    Goals and Milestones

    2020-2021 Product roadmap, Sales pipeline

  • 35 Minutes

    Strategy and Needs

    Open strategy questions. Where we could use your help

  • 5 Minutes

    Closing

    New 409a, Stock Option Grants

Preview

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Before you meet with your board, consider getting a sheet together of your cash-in-hand, spend, and monthly or quarterly revenue from year or two ago to a few years in the future. Learn the numbers and develop opinions about them! As with any business conversation, budget chats should be conducted with rigor.
Joe Lonsdale General Partner at 8VC

About

Joe Lonsdale

Joe was an early institutional investor in notable companies including Wish, Oculus, Oscar, Illumio, Blend, Orca Bio, RelateIQ, Joby Aviation, Synthego, Guardant Health, and in 2016 and 2017 was the youngest member of the Forbes 100 Midas List.

Joe is a co-founder of Palantir, a multi-billion dollar global software company best known for its work in defense and finance. Most recently, he was a founding partner at Formation 8, one of the top performing private funds and the precursor to 8VC. Together, these funds manage a total committed capital of over $3.3 billion. Before that, he founded Addepar, which has over $1.8 trillion managed on its wealth management technology platform, and OpenGov, which modernizes various processes for over 2,000 municipalities and state agencies. He is also a founder of Affinity, Anduin and Esper. Previously, Joe was an early executive at Clarium Capital, which he helped grow into a large global macro hedge fund. He also worked with PayPal while he was at Stanford.

Joe received a BS in Computer Science from Stanford in 2003. He often lectures and writes on entrepreneurship, technology and public policy.

Resources

  • A Note for Startup CEOs on Budget Chats

    CEOs shouldn’t worry about their budget all the time — on a day-to-day basis they should work on managing their company, building an awesome product, developing key relationships, identifying distribution channels, etc.

    https://medium.com/8vc-news/a-note-for-startup-ceos-on-budget-chats-da80fce30bb6

  • Bring in the “Adults”?

    I was on the phone the other day with a talented engineer who is speaking to one of my current favorite sub-10-person companies. It was recently founded by some very talented university students, one of whom..

    https://medium.com/8vc-news/bring-in-the-adults-b3d18222a8d3

Joe Lonsdale: The 1 hour board meeting

Run an effective board meeting focused on the critical things.