Building your board

Reposting Brian Halligan’s insights on building your board

I’m at the Gulf Coast this weekend. My son wasn’t napping this afternoon so we went for a drive. The road rocked him to sleep and so like one does in Texas we drove to the beach, parked right on it, and are relaxing while he sleeps.

With some time to kill, I came across this post sharing advice for Founders building their boards from @bhalligan Co-founder and former CEO at HubSpot.

It’s concise and valuable so I am sharing here without my personal context.

Original tweet here:

https://x.com/bhalligan/status/1726297539299733666

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The SVB, FTX, and OpenAI debacles have proven that boards are underrated.  Here are some things I’ve learned about building boards from @HubSpot that I hope might help other founders.

1. VC’s “can be” excellent board members.  Yes, they are self-interested, but their interests very likely align with the founders’ interests.  They are on several other boards so have legit experience in the job.  …Btw, if @JoshuaKushner and @VKhosla were on OpenAI’s board, I can’t imagine @Sama getting fired like that.

2. HubSpot’s Series A and B investors had board seats.  Both of them were both former CEO’s and their mentorship of me as a first time CEO was exceptionally helpful.  …Try to find vc’s who have been operators, if you can.

3. Good independent board members are worth their weight in gold.  Gail Goodman was our first.  She taught us a lot about scaling a business in those board meetings.  She also would tamper the vc’s in the board meetings if they got too aggressive with me.

4. Don’t hire “press release independent board members.”  Don’t hire former politicians, former secretaries of _____, movie stars, or athletes.  …Elizabeth Holmes fell into this tempting trap.

5. Avoid hiring independents who have only worked at XYZ giant company — they won’t understand the mountain you are trying to climb after spending their whole career on top of that mountain.  

6. Given what we’ve all seen with OpenAI, it’s obvious, but you want independent board members with experience.  I might be wrong, but if Reid Hoffman were still on their board, I can’t imagine it would have shaken out this way.  Sometimes a lack of experience can be overcome with raw brains and first principled thinking in a senior hire, but not when hiring an independent board member.

7. Build a good board and don’t worry about “retaining control.”  They “should” have the right to fire you.  That accountability is healthy for you and your company.  Trust me, the last thing “an experienced” set of board members wants to do is fire the ceo/founder and if they do, it will be after lots of feedback over a long period of time.  …If they fire you, in a very very high percentage of cases, it was probably the right thing for your company. 

8. Board members should act like grandparents, not parents.  If they act like parents, they are too involved.  

9. Every year, you should run an anonymous 360 review of each board member (including yourself).  That feedback should be delivered by you and your expectation should be that they work on the feedback they got, even the vc’s.  Feedback is the breakfast of champions.

10. As the ceo/chairperson of your board, you “can” replace a board member.  We had one of our vc board members replaced by a different partner from that same fund who was a better fit.  Be careful when doing this, though.

11. You should replace independents when your company outgrows them.  They should see it coming through the 360 reviews.

Sam Bankman Fried and Elizabeth Holmes would have likely been fired if they had a proper board, but wouldn’t be in prison.

Sam Altman would have avoided this major headache if he had a proper board.