How to run a startup board meeting

The most valuable part of board meetings isn't the meeting. It's the prep.

I’ve participated in board meetings for 10+ years. I ran board meetings as Head of Finance at Intercom and now as CEO of Equals, and I've seen the good, the bad, and the utterly chaotic.

Here's what I've learned about how to run effective board meetings to drive your business forward.

Start with Mission and Vision. Every. Single. Meeting.

No matter how dedicated or committed a board member is - even if they’ve invested millions into your company or are the perfect investors - they’re only dropping into your company every few months. I can’t emphasize this enough. They don’t have the same context that you have. They don’t live and breathe your company in the same way that you do. And so, it’s really important to, at the start of every meeting, remind everyone of the context for why the company exists and what you’re setting out to accomplish. This gives color and context to everything that’s about to be discussed.

Equals’ Mission Statement

So, I start every board meeting by recapping our Mission and Vision. Sometimes, it's a dedicated slide; sometimes, it's just the first 5-10 minutes reminding everyone where we're trying to take the company over the next decade. This sets the stage for the strategic, high-level conversations you want to have.

The State of the Union is your moment

This is the CEO’s time to address the board. I use it to give an open and vulnerable assessment of where we are as a company. Some folks structure this as “what’s working and what’s not.” Which I’ve used in the past and have found to work. Lately, I have tried to just talk through the 3-5 most important things happening at the company. That naturally leads me to talk through some things going well (where we want to double down) and a couple of areas where I’m concerned and see an opportunity to improve/fix.

A redacted version of a slide from an Equals’ board meeting in July ‘24

I treat this section as if there were no other discussion on the remaining slides; I would have covered my best assessment of what’s happening at the company right now. That’s what you want the board to know. We’ll often spend 20-30 minutes on this slide, discussing each point as a group. 

Product first, not finance

This was a hard lesson for me. My background is in finance. I like to run through the numbers. I like to get into the minutiae of the business. And yet, we found that whenever we started the board meeting with metrics, that’s where we’d get stuck. Board members oftentimes also tend to be numbers people :) They like metrics. They like to ask questions and dig in. While that can be helpful, it’s a surefire way to spend board meetings stuck in the details.

A redacted version of a slide from an Equals’ board meeting in July ‘24

The biggest shift we made that’s helped has been in pulling the product section to the beginning. After all, product is the most critical long-term bet the company is making. It is the company. And so leading with a discussion about product, treating it as an opportunity to share what customers are saying, how customers are using the product, and what you’re going to do to continue solving customer problems, puts the emphasis of the early stages of the board meeting on precisely that topic, which is critical for long-term success. 

Focus go-to-market on strategy over tactics

There’s always a pull to show all the fun things you’ve done in marketing. Your new website, that first billboard, your freshly published book–the list goes on. You should share these efforts, but only within the context of your GTM strategy. 

A redacted version of a slide from an Equals’ board meeting in July ‘24

What are you trying to achieve with your sales and marketing efforts? And more importantly, are they working? Start here. Aim to dive into questions like: Are your channels aligned with your stage and ACVs? Is your approach right for your market? This is where you want the board's pattern recognition. Then, show how you're executing against that strategy in the market.

A slide from an Equals’ board meeting in July ‘24

The business update tells the metrics story

In this section, I like to focus on telling the entirety of the business story through metrics. Starting from the top, how do we acquire customers? Down to the bottom line, how much cash are we burning? It’s a comprehensive overview of the company through numbers. 

A redacted version of a slide from an Equals’ board meeting in July ‘24

Don't let admin derail you

Every board meeting has an admin section. This is the part everyone else (should) find boring, but your lawyers love it. Review your board minutes, approve changes to 409a, approve option grants–things like those are discussed in this section. 

This section should be boring. To ensure this, any contentious items should be discussed beforehand, outside of the board meeting. You don’t want to surprise anyone here, say, with an outsized option grant or a meaningfully different 409a valuation. The admin section should be a rubber stamp, not a debate.

Some tactical tips

Here are a few more narrow things I’ve learned over time. 

Length
Ninety minutes is tight but doable in the early stages. As you scale, meetings get longer but less frequent. Over 3 hours, unless you’re a pre-IPO or public company, you’ll lose people. 

Attendees
Keep it focused. Bring in department heads for their sections only. Post Series-A, include your head of finance as secretary. Later stage, add corporate counsel.

Pre-reads
Send the deck 2 days in advance. I've tried fancy memos, but honestly, a clear deck works just as well.

The real value is in the prep

There’s a lot of prep that goes into a board meeting. Sometimes, it can feel like you spend a lot of time preparing for the meeting, and then afterward, you leave and think, well, nothing about that conversation really changed my thinking or our trajectory. That’s not a bad thing! That’s often indicative that you’ve prepared well for the meeting and that there’s strong alignment across the board. 

And that’s what I’ve found to be most of the value of board meetings. It’s been in the preparation. Much like sending monthly investor updates in the early startup days, so much of the value of board meetings comes from having to sit down every couple of months and put pencil to paper in articulating the State of the Union, your product roadmap, your go-to-market strategy and every metric that matters across your business. It’s ok if that’s the value. 

Focus on the preparation, and the rest will take care of itself.