Struggling with who should be on your board? Call an electrician.

There are two reasons why people tend to speak with needless complexity about most issues: (1) they have a vested interest in making others believe the issue is more complicated than it really is, or (2) they don’t actually understand the issue. Case in point: nearly every discussion about the composition of corporate boards. I […]

My SPAC Experience Summed Up in One Acronym: PCWTS

An awful lot of attention has been afforded the raging SPAC marketplace. Some of the commentary has been objective and additive, while much of it has come from those who either don’t understand SPACs or those who have a conspicuous dog in the hunt. When you get beyond all the uninformed, conflicted stuff, fast-tracking a company from […]

Unlocking Shareholder Value with One Hard Conversation

I spend most of my time in boardrooms and board meetings. I know it’s been fashionable over the years for people to carp that most boards are comprised of old white men, who do the bare minimum to collect a check. The first part is unfortunately true. I’ve not found the second part to be […]

Emails, Boardrooms, and Attorney-Client Privilege

In each of the 10 years my firm has been in existence, I’ve witnessed a disastrous boardroom situation. All of them had three things in common: (1) email; (2) impaired reputations; and (3) they were completely avoidable. Email has been around for a long time, so you’d think that smart, seasoned executives wouldn’t misuse it. You’d be […]

The Importance of a Great Chair to Small-Cap Boards

I am on the Editorial Advisory Board of Small-Cap Institute, Inc.  With SCI’s approval, I thought I would share one of their recent articles that every small-cap officer and director should consider reading. Unlike in most mid- and large-cap companies, it’s common for small-cap companies to be operated and governed by those who are either […]

Lesson Learned: Brand Stewardship Requires Relentless Vigilance… and Then Some

Last week, I was reading a terrific article to be published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review by Professor Elizabeth Pollman entitled, “Startup Governance.”   I made my way through the lion’s share of the article when I saw the below footnote on page 43. Professor Pollman cited a comment that I made a couple […]

Sorry VCs, Direct Listings Are Not a Magic Elixir

Spotify Technology and Slack Technologies, each multibillion-dollar companies, listed their shares for trading on the New York Stock Exchange in the past two years. But unlike the typical initial public offering (IPO), neither company received any financing proceeds.  Why would a company go through all the trouble of an IPO and elect not to raise […]

The Case for Deregulating Small-Caps

There are roughly now half the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market and the New York Stock Exchange as there were in the mid-1990s, and there is no shortage of dire media pronouncements about what it all means. The alarmists tend to share the same economic biases, and the arguments in favor […]

Small-Cap Boards Can’t Afford to Ignore CEO Communication Skills

Seasoned small-cap fund managers are forensic observers: they parse everything they read and hear. Many have learned that small-caps are risky enough on a good day, but when the company is also run by a CEO who is a poor communicator, the risks escalate. Yet it’s amazing how few small-cap boards monitor and evaluate the […]

Why Today’s Founder CEOs Should Google… Google

Lore has it that when Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page raised some $25 million from venture capital icons Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital in 1999, they promised they would hire a CEO to run the company. After announcing in July 2001 that Eric Schmidt would be CEO of Google, Brin and Page went […]