我认识一个顶级的VC总是渴望做领投VC，这也就意味着他是那一轮所有联合投资人中的真正牵头人、组织者和指导者，很可能也是董事会中的代表。作为领投VC和董事会成员，即便不是知己或者导师，他也尝试像个教练一样去帮助CEO。作为一个好的董事，通常的职责包括：董事碰头、准备会议、董事会前一天的会餐、平常跟CEO之外管理层的沟通（慎重认真的）、招聘、等，当然还有审计/薪酬等专业委员会的工作。

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有一种流传很久的说法：假如公司成功了，那是因为创业者；如果公司失败了，那是因为投资人或董事会。有自知自明的投资人知道他们不过是创业过程中的支持性因素，而很多VC和天使投资人不这么看，他们参与进那些根本无法提供增值服务的领域，他们缓慢的决策机制拖延了公司的进展，让创业者和管理团队面临无休无止的额外工作。

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You’re Just the Founder

When the call was almost over my partner and I mentioned, “We want to remind you guys that we’ve been working at founders pay for almost three years. We’d like to adjust our salaries to reflect the new pay scale.”  We had hoped for parity with the new CEO, but any offer of some kind of raise would have made us feel good. Instead, what we got from the VC, was “Who the hell do you think you guys are. You’re just the founders.”  Then he proceeded to give us a lecture of why we should consider ourselves lucky to get this new guy, he and his firm were the ones that were going to do the heavy lifting and we should be happy that we were going to make our money on the stock, etc.

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How To Communicate with your Investors between Board Meetings

Most early stage startups having monthly board meetings. I normally recommend 8 meetings per year. It makes no sense to meet in August or December due to travel schedules of most investors. You can do calls if need be. And I often recommend that board meetings be every 5 or 6 weeks rather than 4 to give enough elapsed time for stuff to actually happen between meetings. Quarterly is too few for an early stage business.

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5 Tips On VC Alignment

One of the hardest things about venture-backed start-ups is achieving alignment.  When there is alignment between entrepreneurs and VCs, all collective energies are directed towards the magic of building an amazing, world-beating start-up from scratch.  When the entrepreneur and VC are out of alignment, the likelihood of success plummets and self-inflicting wounds, rather than market- or competition-related issues, tend to dominate the agenda.

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The best vesting schedule

"Best" as a concept has natural appeal. It’s great to be best, to know you’ve done something in the best possible way, etc. It tickles our pride and makes is feel good about ourselves. In the process, we tend to forget that there are at least two ways to evaluate the quality of decisions: as determined by current information, given knowledge & experience, and as determined by hindsight.

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