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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.

 

  1. Product discussions are core to board meetings at any stage, but for earlier stage companies reviewing product demos, roadmaps, and launches is key.
  2. 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.
  3. Engagement, sales, and customer happiness metrics are a huge plus — the more detailed, the better.
  4. Plan to send this 48 hours in advance of the meeting. Give the board time to send questions or notes.

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

About

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.

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

8VC

Reach new standards in financial collaboration

Learn how Standard Metrics makes real-time data sharing easy.

 

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