🎙 Add The Science of Scaling podcast's newest episode to your weekend playlist. This week, Mark Roberge interviews Jen Grant, COO of Cube to tackle the topic "How to Build an Advisory Board."
Co-Founder @ Stage 2 Capital, Prof @HarvardHBS; Founding CRO @HubSpot; Author of Best Seller "The Sales Acceleration Formula"
You are a first time founder, CEO, sales leader, or marketing leader. Your startup is crushing it. You just landed the big $10 million Series A check. Congrats. Now you're at your board meeting. The multi-decade venture capitalist is feeding you with advice and counsel, and you take it. The problem is... sometimes the advice is wrong. But how do you know? You've never been in this seat before. And how can you push back on someone that just wrote a $10M check? In this episode of #TheScienceOfScaling, I call on my friend and Stage 2 Capital LP, Jen Grant. Jen has experienced the startup ecosystem from almost every viewpoint. She has been a product leader at Google, marketing leader at Box, Elastic, and Looker, CEO at Appify, and is currently COO at Cube and sits on 3 boards of directors. She is one of the few people in the ecosystem that has seen the board meeting unfold from every seat in the room. We dissected the ups and downs of those meetings. Here are a few of my take-aways: (1) A common suboptimal piece of advice from a new investor is to go upstream to the enterprise too early and too quickly. Jen walks us her narrative to manager the pothole that entails explicitly agreeing with the strategy but listing out the organization capabilities needed to do so, the incremental milestones to measure progress toward those requirements, and an estimated timeline with corresponding revenue growth targets that will only be unlocked if the milestones are achieved. (2) Diligence your prospective VC partners. A lot can be learned from the questions they ask about your business through their diligence process. Do these questions spark fresh perspective on your business that you value? Or do these questions signal a lack of understanding on your vision, opportunity, and business model? And, always talk to founders that took that partners in the past to dive deeper into the working relationship. (3) The saying goes, "it is lonely at the top". Jen points out it doesn't need to be. Nearly 100% of Series A term sheets require an independent board member. A critical role for that member is to be a coach and a sounding board (and sometimes a therapist) to the Founder/CEO. Pick someone that has been through the journey in your seat before. Lean on this independent to help filter and manage counsel from the investor board members. (4) Build an advisory board with 1 advisor for each functional leader. Cap the term to 6 months to ensure the advisors are relevant to the upcoming phase of execution. As the CEO, hold a quarterly advisor-only meeting to gain a different lens into the status of each function and enable another communication mechanism through which to drive cross-functional strategic alignment. As a bonus, Jen and I role play how she handles a VC board member that wants the organization to scale revenue faster than it is capable of. Listen to the role play and the entire episode here: https://lnk.to/TSOS!mr
