Issue #37: Board Meetings
I remember when building Forager, I had a conversation with our Series A investor right after we closed our financing with his firm. I told him that I didn’t understand what boards were for. It felt like all we did was spend a week cobbling together 30+ slides with a bunch of graphs on them. Every leader on the team was responsible for assembling their own slides, without much of a strategy for the story we wanted to tell from beginning to end.
Admittedly, I didn’t know what I was doing and I stubbornly didn’t think a board was useful. Was it the board we had assembled? Was it my lack of experience? I will tell you, our independent board member ended up playing an incredibly crucial role towards the end when things got tough and we had to decide between a few different exit options.
When things aren’t going well, you dread showing up to that board meeting and going through a bunch of graphs that look more like a heart-rate monitor than a hockey stick. Most of our graphs at Forager were the former.
As you’ve read from me previously, this time is different. Cargado is a different business from Forager. Different tech, concept, different strategy, different team, (mostly) different investors. Our board meetings have been different, too. They have a purpose. They have intent.
The first Cargado board meeting
The purpose of the first one we had, after raising our seed round from Primary, was all about getting the board on the same page about what we’re building and how we plan to build it. It took place in Chicago with our new lead investor (Brad and Zach at Primary) and two of our investors from our pre-seed round (Ty at Ironspring and Esteban at Zenda Capital).
We were only four weeks post-launch of our initial product and had been receiving a ton of mostly positive feedback, with a lot of comments about what else our users wanted to see in the platform. We also talked through a few strategic items like our early challenges of operationalizing our go-to-market process. The board told me that I needed to bring on a Chief of Staff. They mandated it – I needed to spend all of my time on doing the most impactful things only I can do, which included selling, expanding our content strategy, and supporting our product and engineering team.
Fast forward three months and I ended up hiring a Head of Operations and a head of GTM, which allowed me to focus on doing the things I do the best. That also resulted in an even further evolved board meeting for our second board meeting.
The second Cargado board meeting
We went into our latest board meeting with an updated perspective from the first one. Our product had only been live for a few weeks when we had our initial board meeting. This time around, it had been live for four months and the growth was there. But we wanted to make a few specific changes to our strategy now that we had four months’ worth of data. We put together the deck and sent it out a few days in advance, with the expectation that the board read most of the content ahead of time. Because we shared the slide deck so far in advance, the team was able to add comments in the deck and have a back-and-forth ahead of time. This allowed us to focus on the absolute most important items in the actual meeting.
Our GTM slides had the right growth metrics that you want to see at this stage. We were just starting to lay the groundwork for hiring our first two salespeople and outlined those plans. The team pressure-tested our logic around those hires and agreed with the logic to add some additional talent that was needed to support growth in other areas. One of the big discussions, though, centered around shifting from founder-led sales to scalable sales. We’re already starting to see proof points that we can make that transition, but it’ll take time.
Our product roadmap also had all the key products we know our customers want and need. It’s been designed to help our customers grow their businesses, knowing that we’ll grow alongside them.
The other topic was something that isn’t existential, but not quite something I can talk about in this newsletter. Suffice to say that we had a key metric we wanted to improve and we spent most of the board meeting discussing this topic. We had prepared different potential paths we could take to drive that metric up, and we walked away from the board meeting united around the strategy we would take.
For only the second time ever running a board meeting, I left feeling certain that we had complete alignment and a clear strategy going forward for what we want to accomplish. In the two weeks since that board meeting, we’ve taken several steps to see that metric improve, we’ve continued to add new customers and more seats, and we’ve accelerated our timeline for a few key hires that should move the needle even more for us.