Choose Your VC Investor Carefully

I was with the author until almost the end, when I reached this line:

  But it’s the job of the CEO to control the board tempo.

This is absolutely wrong. The CEO serves the board, not vice versa; it is the role of the board chair to keep things moving, not the role of the CEO.

It's easy to accuse board members of getting in the way because of their egos, but it's not necessarily true. In many cases board members become "activist" only due to losing trust in a CEO -- not necessarily losing so much trust as to want to replace the CEO, but enough that they want to "push back" against anything they see as an attempt to keep them in the dark.

Needless to say, I think the joint position of "President/CEO and Chair of the Board" is a very bad idea from a governance perspective.