As has been widely reported, in the last few months ICOs have raised significantly more money for blockchain startups than has come from traditional venture investors. This can be seen as a sign of the long discussed unbundling of venture capital. The idea is that while VCs bundle capital, advice, governance and possibly services (e.g., help with recruiting), technology may make it possible to separate out these different functions. Today I want to focus on “governance” which is the least und...

Six years ago I wrote three tips on making your board effective (tip #1, tip #2 and tip #3). Since then there is a lesson that I keep on relearning and so I am writing this tip #4 as much as a reminder to myself as anything: your board cannot be effective if it only talks to you, the CEO. Instead, you should make sure that members of your board also have relationships with execs on your senior team. Now I have a feeling that quite a few VCs/board members and also CEOs will disagree with this....

I am very excited about what we are doing over at usv.com with the Topic of the Week. Last week we discussed undoing incumbent marketplaces and this week it is about community ownership of applications. We wanted usv.com to be an extension of the discussions that we have internally and this new approach feels like we are getting closer. Instead of a loose collection of links the topic approach gives the conversation more shape and direction. So if you are interested in the question of who sho...

One of the things that’s particularly difficult in being a startup board member is striking the right balance between supporting a founder CEO and listening to other people from the organization. It is possible to err on either side – undermining a CEO’s leadership by giving too much weight to complaints; or ignoring/not knowing about complaints for too long so that actual problems become very hard to fix. I have personally made both mistakes as a director! The first step in trying to get thi...

A lot of the work of a good board takes place outside of the board meetings (see Tip #1), but the meetings are critical to overall effectiveness. It is the time when the team has the (mostly) undivided attention of the board members and when important decisions will be made (or at least influenced). 1. Schedule your board meetings well in advance, ideally for the entire next year. Most VCs are on multiple boards and have hectic schedules and the longer you wait, the harder it gets to have eve...