Tribe Talkin’ Ep 5: Making Dysfunctional Boards Functional

Transparent Venture Capital by Tribe Global Ventures

Today’s deep dive segment looks at the issue around functional vs dysfunctional boards, and discusses an article we’ve released with some ideas and processes to help solve issues such as:

• Poor communication between the board and management
• Lack of respect
• Destructive conflict
• Self-interested behaviours

We know fish rot from the head, so a well-functioning board is very important to the overall health of a company. https://tribeglobal.vc/dysfunctional-to-functional-boards/

Before we get to this deep dive topic, we recap on an earlier episode where we discussed our personal preference for co-founding teams. This was in response to some listener feedback we received. It gave us an opportunity to clarify the context of our sharing of these ideas, and provide a bit more detail on our co-founder and sole founder position. We really appreciate all feedback and would love to hear from more of you.

This discussion provided a great segway to reviewing the final episode of ‘Founder’, which featured the journey of Brighte's sole founder Katherine McConnell.

We loved this episode as it was a return to looking at healthy entrepreneurship, with an entrepreneur who is trying to do something noble in the pursuit of facilitating a faster uptake of renewable energy, whilst fully integrating with her family and taking them on the journey.

We also look at a nuance of Katherine being called a sole founder, partly being enabled by her husband stepping up and taking a more active role at home and with the family, re-enforcing our view that significant others are often enabling co-founders of a business.

We review some recent news topics including:

• Continued reports that tech talent is flooding onto the market, and the importance of having frameworks to help hire for cultural fit over experience.
• The challenges of start-ups doing deals with the big 4 accounting firms, following an example reported where PwC would retain non-dilutive equity and a retainer fee of $5 Million for general promotion. And in rather tenuous fashion, we manage to connect Taylor Swift’s own journey to global stardom to this situation.
• We discuss the amazing rise of Nvidia in terms of earnings and share price growth on the back of the AI boom, and what founders can take away in terms of building their own high performing culture.
• There are calls for more regulation of AI in Australia, to ensure safe and responsible practises are developed.
• And finally Bardee is back in the news, a company which raised $5 Million in 2021 following reports of its continued financial struggles, with one report implying that Blackbird stepping off the board darkens Blackbird’s reputation as founder friendly. We don’t see this as fair and share our thoughts on this implication in the context of our deep dive subject around the functioning of boards.

As always we’d love to hear from you, and we’d really appreciate if you could leave a quick rating on the podcast.