Guests from The Daily Bolster talk about building, leading, and cultivating successful boards.

As a CEO, having the right people on your board should always be among your top priorities.

We can learn a lot about success and growth just by looking at the history of entrepreneurship. Brad Feld and Matt Blumberg discuss what’s changed in the startup world.

The all-star panelists from our recent webinar answer questions about why the board meeting is broken.

A great board is one of a company’s greatest assets. A weak board can kill a company. It’s time to hit the reset button on boards and board meetings.

You want your board to support and buy into the strategy you present to them, but you don’t want them to actually define that strategy.

We’ve done a lot of work around startup boards at Bolster the past couple of years, including working with over 30 CEOs to help them hire amazing new independent board members.

Over the past several years, there has been a lot of public attention surrounding board diversity

Creating strong boards can help propel a board forward. Weak and ineffective boards hold a company back.

Over the past several months, we’ve published a series of posts designed to help CEOs better understand how to build, diversify, and scale their boards of directors.

Over the past several months, we’ve published a series of posts designed to help CEOs better understand how to build, diversify, and scale their boards of directors.

On many boards there isn’t a formal review process for board members.

A lot of CEOs think it’s pointless to give board members any feedback, but failure to do so is just as big a miss as failure to give your staff feedback or failing to ask your staff for feedback.

Advisory Boards can be great sources of help for entrepreneurs. They can also be great things to participate in for people who want to understand and become involved in startups

There are several elements of a compensation package you need to know about for an independent board member

Listen to Bolster CEO Matt Blumberg and Bolster board member Cristina Miller talking with Luminary CEO Cate Luzio.

Here is a presentation from a webinar I did today on Key Strategies for Increasing Board Diversity.

I’ve often said that the hiring process doesn’t end on the employee’s first day. The same goes for new board members -- you have to take their onboarding as seriously as you take their hiring process.

Last week, we released results from our Board Benchmarking Study, which uncovered that only 1 in 3 companies has an independent director on their board.

A board role differs from other roles in business and no matter how accomplished you are in your professional career, being a “great” board member is not just a continuation of what worked for you before.

I’ve always believed that there is a sliding scale of Board member duties that changes dramatically as companies grow in size.

Here is a presentation from a webinar I did today with our partners at Ellevate and Women in the Boardroom that ties a lot of the material together across all the posts.

Depending on your situation, your first board meeting might actually be your second board meeting. I strongly encouraged CEOs to be just as thorough in interviewing and onboarding a new board member as they would an executive hire

Independent directors in privately held early-stage companies are compensated for their board contributions, just like they are in publicly traded companies, although the numbers and currencies are not the same.

Of all the board searches we are running at Bolster, about ⅔ of them are open to taking on first-time directors; and almost all are committed to increasing diversity on their boards.

Today we’re excited to announce preliminary results from Bolster’s Board Benchmarking survey, our analysis of 250 private company boards.

Startup Boards for CXOs Series: Post 4 of 12. By the time you get to the interview stage for a board role, you’ve already been vetted to some degree. Like other high-profile jobs you should take the interview for a board role seriously, and you should be as prepared as possible.

Some people, when looking back at 2020, will remark what a difficult, turbulent year it was. I’m hopeful that founding teams and startups will look at 2020 and say, “that’s the year we drew a line in the sand and started diversifying our board. It was the best decision we ever made.”

Startup Boards for CXOs Series: Post 3 of 12. I’m often asked by accomplished executives how to get on a board and I always tell them that one of the best ways to build your “board readiness” skills is to get in the game. An advisory board role is an excellent way to do that.

Startup Boards for CEOs Series: Post 3 of 9. Now that you’re committed to getting the size and composition of your board right as the foundation to develop your board as a strategic asset, you need to think next about board dynamics. This is particularly important as your company grows.

Startup Boards for CXOs Series: Post 2 of 12. Short of someone calling you up and asking if you’d like to be on their board, or asking you during a networking event, you might be wondering, “Well, how do I get on a board?”

Startup Boards for CEOs Series: Post 2 of 9. How large should your board be? That’s a pretty critical question every CEO contemplates at one time or another.

Startup Boards for CXOs Series: Post 1 of 12. Unless you’ve been a startup executive with regular interactions with a board and regular attendance at board meetings, you’re unlikely to know what a startup board looks like, how it functions, and what you can do to make a big impact.

Startup Boards for CEOs Series: Post 1 of 9. Any series of blog posts about boards should start with the basics. Why have a board in the first place? What do they do? How big should they be? Do you really even need one?

Our Board Benchmarking survey will shed light on the independence, diversity, and compensation of private company boards that’s never been available on a broad basis before.

Learn more about how to most effectively scale your board to support your company’s success