Building an Outside Board

Hunter Walk at Homebrew has a good post up titled Once You’ve Raised a Series A, Add an Outside Director. For those of you early stage founders who are afraid to build a board because you’ll lose control, Hunter has a good paragraph in the post for you to chew on.

“Sometimes I have founders ask me for advice about Boards and early stage companies which veers into the “I don’t want to lose control of my company” fear. My general belief is that a good Board is 10x better than no Board and a bad Board is 10x worse than no Board, so it all comes down to your investors and whether you’re creating a Board composition that will be there to help you. At the earliest stages there’s very little way to “lose control” of your company when it comes to the actual ownership and Board, unless you’re taking non-standard terms and working with investors who aren’t traditional, ongoing tech VCs. Don’t do that.”

Take your board seriously – go for 10x better than no board.