Typically, investors don’t take a board seat until you raise your first equity round—which means that it could be *years* before you have a real board meeting:
A year of nights/weekends work researching, prototyping, and fundraising.
You raise your pre-seed round and if you’re lucky and good, you can get to an equity round in 12-18 months. Many people extend this round and don’t get there for two years.
Until that point, how do you create the accountability necessary to stay on track and achieve your goals?
First off, many founders don’t really feel the need to have external accountability. It makes sense—to be a sounder in the first place means having a strong sense of agency and believing in your ability to manifest something out of nothing without a lot of help.
Not only that, founders get a lot of warnings from other founders about “losing control” and to be careful about ceding too much power to investors.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Investors don’t actually like to do more work than necessary—and replacing a founding team is a lot of work. In an ideal world, we check in every now and then and the founder is completely on top of everything they’re doing, shares enough reporting to indicate that, and is totally self-sufficient.
That’s the founder we want you to be so we’re able to spend more time kitesurfing, microdosing, or tweeting our misguided libertarian leanings in the face of a crypto market losing billions (Read more…)