A first board meeting is a big and life changing milestone. As founders, you survived weeks of due diligence, followed by a term sheet and then a wire of a few million dollars. Now it is time to be a CEO and experience and run your first board meeting with the investor or investors who sit on your board and blessed the deal.
It can be overwhelming. Here are a few coaching tips, based on my experience as a board member, to help first time CEOs be prepared and maximize the limited time you have with your board.
Checklist For Your First Board Meeting:
- Get On Calendars: Executives’ calendars fill up months in advance. Remember that you are asking for 3 hours of a partner’s time, several times a year. In some cases, investors will have to fly in for the meeting. As a best practice, ask one of your board members’ administrative staff to own responsibility for scheduling the meetings.
- Pick the Best Dates: The board meeting should take place after the quarter ends. This gives your finance and sales team enough time to close the quarter, giving the complete picture of sales data. Your cash runway is a key metric. Missing one deal could have a big impact. Having board meetings after the end of the quarter ensures you have the actual bookings number. (Note: most boards also have standing calls during the quarter.)
- Share Decks: Email your board decks at least 72 hours in advance. This will help the board be prepared to ask meaningful questions and give feedback. Board members might also request that you pull additional information for the meeting. Emailing decks ahead of time gives you and your leadership team a few extra days to meet any such requests.
- Use the Preferred Template: Ask the lead investor if they have a template that they would like you to follow. Chances are they sit on multiple boards and have a preference how they like to review the data. Once you have the template, share it with your leadership team. Have them fill out their section. For example, Sales, Finance, Product, Operations will each have their own slide or slides. Each section should start with a high-level overview of the insights and learnings of the quarter.
- Prioritize Board Discussion: Always have two or three meaningful topics that you want to discuss with the board. Interact with the board as you prepare your slides. They are a sounding board for what you want to cover. Remember they have done this before and can only help when they know what problems you are trying to solve.
- Leave Time for Governance: At the end of each board meeting, you will do the housekeeping: approve stock grants, minutes and other items that the board needs to vote on. Always have the most current cap table handy. That gives the board perspective on the impact on the employee option pool as they approve grants.
- Hold a Dress Rehearsal: 24 hours before your board meeting, meet with your leadership team and do a dress rehearsal. It is important that everyone is on the same page. This might be the first board meeting for them as well.
- Take a Breath: Congratulations on making it this far! Give yourself and your team the credit you deserve for the huge milestones of a Series A raise and first board meeting. There’s a vast amount of work ahead, but this is an achievement to celebrate.
Darren Kaplan - Co-founder and founding CEO, hiQ Labs
About Darren Kaplan
Darren Kaplan is the co-founder and founding CEO of hiQ Labs (www.hiqlabs.com), a data science company, informed by public data sources, applied to human capital to make work better. Mr. Kaplan is an Alchemist Accelerator mentor, working with Augmented Reality, Cyber Security, and HR enterprise SaaS startups.
About the Alchemist Accelerator
Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Learn more about applying today.