Nicole Quinn is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Known as the “brand whisperer,” she’s backed iconic consumer companies like Goop, Calm, and Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs. I met Nicole a long time ago at a retreat for VCs organized by Jerry Colonna, where we go talking about the daily life of a VC in depth.
In this episode we talk about her experience serving on boards of high performing consumer companies, how she looks at the role of a board member, what she did to level up her skills and what makes consumer companies unique.
Chris Morton is the founder of Lyst, sat on the board of Depop and started Starboard, with the mission to make Startup Boards live up to their potential.
In this conversation we go into his personal story, look at what makes a good board, how the experience as a founder is different from the one of a board member and, most importantly, talk about how founders and investors see rate their boards.
https://www.starbrd.com/
Talking to Anna Brandt from Invested about Startup Management Teams, Boards and what makes or breaks a good collaboration between the two was really insightful. She is an expert in working with Boards and Founders on one of the toughest questions that both face:when is it the right time to work on succession and how do you do it successfully?
Anna has worked with many of the most successful European Scale-Ups like N26, Zalando or TomTom and consulted even more on their effectiveness and important transitions. Together with Noor van Boven she runs Invested, a new kind of platform / investment firm.
http://www.invested.team
Paul Gambill was the CEO of Nori, a tokenized Carbon Removal Marketplace. In this episode he tells the story of how a conversation that could - and probably did - happen in any Board, sealed the fate of his company. We unpack Paul's learnings, how he would structure a Board in the future and why building Category Defining Companies requires a different governance.
I invited Paul because I read his 5 part series on better Board Governance and found it a great summary of how to make more of your board. You can find it on his Substack:
https://www.inevitableandobvious.com/p/the-25m-empty-board-seat
Louis Chatriot is the CEO of Alma, a French Buy Now Pay Later company. When I met Louis at a conference it was impressive how he looked at governance in his company. He had spent more time thinking about his board and how to make it effective than many other CEOs. And he seemed to be a very grown-up CEO, looking at his role without ego and with a lot of clarity.
In this episode, we dive deeper into the relationship between CEO and board, why he thinks you should be smart and lazy, and why he hired not one, but two independent board members.
Ali built and runs Inkitt as the CEO. It took the company a while to find the model he currently operates on and he shifted his view of the Board substantially on the way. Oliver is the CEO of Speedinvest, a Seed Stage Fund who invested into the seed round of Inkitt and is now serving as a board member, nominated by the founder.
In this episode we talk about why it is so important to pick the right people, how you can transition Board Members out of the board and what truly matters in the relationship.
Tim Porthouse is a former startup founder and witnessed what it means to scale a company to over 400 people and 400 million ARR before exiting it in 2008. He's now coaching founders and especially CEOs on how to grow and improve, just like coaches of top athletes do. I wanted to talk to him because he wrote a great piece on boards on his substack, "The Obsessions of a Startup CEO Coach". I recommend reading the piece and of course, listening to this episode.
We talk about what great relationships in the Board look like, why they are important, what 100x time is and why the Board Meeting ultimately is the founders / CEOs meeting.
https://timporthouse.substack.com/
https://timporthouse.substack.com/p/heres-what-im-obsessing-aboutmay
He almost needs no introduction as Fred has been investing for over 15 years in the US and in Europe as a General Partner with Accomplice, Accel and now Stride, a fund he started with Harry Stebbings from 20VC. He backed 7 billion dollar companies from Seed onwards, including Zoopla, Deliveroo and PillPack (now Amazon Health). He describes himself as "endlessly curious and a first principles thinker, passionate about making venture a better product for founders ". This passion for venture and how to make it a better product for founders clearly transpires in this episode.
In this episode I talk to Travis Pittman from Tourradar and Remco van Zanten, who is currently the Board Chair of Tourradar. It's an interesting conversation on the role of a chair or independent member in the Board, when to get one and how Boards can work together well.
Tourradar went through interesting times after COVID hit and forced the travel marketplace to completely reinvent their business.
In this Episode I talk to Matt Blumberg, the co-author or "Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors", THE book on boards in high-growth companies.
He is the CEO of Bolster, a company reinventing executive search to be more founder-friendly, placing executives for everything from a project, to a fractional role, to full-time role, to a board seat, with better technology and differentiated engagement models. He sold his company Return Path in 2019 after reaching 100m$ in revenue and working with the likes of Fred Wilson from USV or Brad Feld.
