Matt Mochary: The Great CEO Within

Founders should not grow beyond a team of six until there is true product market fit. True product market fit means one million dollars in recurring revenue for an enterprise company.

Chaos is expected in a team of six or less - they want if to be hard.

Know that for a B2B company, enterprise customers have budgets just for testing new technology, and they will buy your product just to do that. This does not mean you have achieved PMF

Once you have achieved Product-Market Fit, that is the right time to blitz scale and win the race to market share. To do this, you will need to create massive awareness (Marketing), walk many customers through the sales process (Sales), hold those customers hands as they set up and use your product or service (Customer Success), harden your infrastructure to withstand many users at once (DevOps), get rid of technical debt as well as add all the features promised in your roadmap (Engineering), update the product roadmap to meet the most urgent needs of your customers (Product), and all of the non-technical operations (People [Recruiting, Training and HR]. Finance, Legal, Office). All of this requires hiring talented and experienced people to fulfill those functions. First raise the money needed to hire this team, and then begin hiring.

Once you bring on remote workers, and your team scales beyond 15-20 people, most likely things will begin to fall apart. You will hire very talented people and they simply won't perform in the way that you hope or expect. You will end up doing more and more work yourself, working longer and longer hours, just to keep the company afloat. You will extrapolate this trend, and realize that soon you will break.

It is at that moment that you need to implement a formal management system. It will be painful.

You and your team will likely have to spend one full day per week preparing for and participating in team and one-on-one meetings.

These meetings and this system will feel like pure overhead. They are. And without them, your company will never scale successfully.

The good news is that the same system that allows your company to operate well with 25 people, will also allow it to work well with 25,000. Neither the system nor the amount of overhead will change. It is a one-time hit

The rest of this book walks through the implementation of such a system.

Be on time to every meeting or text as soon as you know you will be late.

When you find yourself saying something again to a second audience, you will have to say it more times. Write it down. Next time you have to share it, share in written form. If appropriate, put it on the company-wide wiki. If a team needs it, email it.

If you want an efficient meeting process. Require that anyone who wants to discuss an issue write it up, along with the desired solution, ahead of time.

Proposed solution should be in bold, directive terms “Do this”, even if you have 10% confidence, it makes the discussion much easier.

Means writing thorough analysis yourself
Writing a draft or question and circulating it to meeting participants for comments and edits.

Bain consulting how to get decisions done when there are too many people.

Whenever you choose to use Method 3 to get full buy-in, know that, as CEO, your voice will be the "loudest in the room". In order to get full buy-in, you will have to elicit people's truest thoughts. Once people hear your perspective, some percentage will naturally alter their own views to more closely match yours. This % is much higher than you might imagine. People assume that as CEO you have more information than they do, and therefore your perspective is probably more correct. Later, these same people will not feel fully bought-in to the outcome, because internally they will know that their true thought was not actually heard.

in order to get full buy-in, be careful not to "tip your hand" before all others have shared theirs. The most effective way to do this is to either have people write down their vote or their thoughts prior to you sharing your perspective.

Make impeccable agreements. “It is 12:04 pm now. We will start the meeting again at 1:00 pm. We all agree to be in our seats and present prior to 1:00pm.”

Do things you enjoy and invite teammates to join you.

Team events:

Team sports like dogeball and soccer

Renting out a local movie theater (they are almost always available for a morning screening)

Politics is lobbying to gain a personal benefit to eelf. When someone successfully lobbies the CEO or manager for some benefit. Others see this, so they in turn lobby. The virus spreads through the organization.

It often begins very innocently: "Excuse me, can I please talk to you about a raise? I have been at this company for a year now, and have shown utter dedication by doing such-and-such, and I believe that I now deserve a raise.

This sounds compelling, and you, of course, want to reward dedication. But if you give a raise based on this conversation, then the whole company will learn that the way to get a raise is to simply ask you for it.

Implement grade level planning between 25-50 employees. Every role and corresponding compensation metrics for goals achieved. People can see how to grow to the next level.

Idea: why doesn’t everyone get a performance improvement plan? It can be a sentence or a lot of paragraphs. Seems like a good idea.

Have a structured folder system such as google drive. Each department should have their own folder and all team members should have viewing access at least. HR folder with comp. Performance reviews. Etc. is private

I think: there should be a lowest level subfolder that is also private. E.g., you work, and then bring things up to the manager level, and after review or after polishing for a major meeting, you put it in your team folder with your name.

Wiki like Adam. When you do something and learn it you write it down.

Tragedy of the commons. To prevent this from happening, create a document listing every possible function in the company.

Next to each function, list the directly responsible individual (DRI). This is the AOR list. It serves as a routing layer for any questions and ensures that no functions fall through the cracks. Make sure everybody in the company knows how to access the list. If you have to find someone for a question off the list, encourage them to update the list.

A single point of failure is a function that one person performs, when no one else has full knowledge of how that function works. If that person becomes sick or leaves the company, functionality suffers. A well-run company has no single point of failure. To create a team with no single points of failure, 1) down all processes, or 2) cross-train a second person under the role.

Don’t make them game-able like that HR one.

I like this feedback framework:

A. Like

i. “These are the specific actions that I like that you are doing.

B. Wish That.

i. These are the specific actions that I wish that you would do differently.

CEO office hour

Probably have people calendly in 10 mins

Let different people call and lead meetings. Like at I did at RAI.

Each manager should set aside one hour each week for an open office hour, during which anyone can come introduce an issue. This ensures that all employees feel that they can be heard, but limits the amount of time required to a predictable level for the manager.

Each company unit should have objective + key results. Tie to main co. objective to not have fiefs

I like these

Profits: Massively grow revenues while minimizing expense

$500,000 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
Hire 10 additional SDRs.
Hire Sales Ops person to project manage the sales team.

Product: Delight our customers
People; Greate a positive and transparent environment where we are all inspired to do our best work

“It is much better to have people create their own OKRs than hand it down”. E.g., compile from leadership in offsite, discuss, set. Have leadership discuss with their team first.

Create an OK tracking system. Create a traffic-lighted (Green, Yellow, Red) Sheet. The system should show, week-by-week, which OKs are on track (Green), slightly off-track (Yellow) and far off-track (Red).

For all OKRs that are far off-track, require that the DRI (directly responsible individual) create a written Issue/Solution to get back on track.

Send out email like “Good news” with update. Peter closed $400k. Short and sweet. Huge carrot.

Fundraising.

The introduction is a key part of the fundraising process, and you only get one chance at it. I recommend using the Triangulation Method

When you want to be introduced to an investor, first find three to five people in your network who know that person. Then ask each to send an email to the target investor, letting her know how great they think you are, and highly recommending that she meet with you. After receiving several such emails, the investor will proactively reach out to you. Three is truly great.

You can build relationships with appreciation notes like this:

Here is an example of a message of appreciation which comes from a Managing Partner at one of the most successful investment firms in the world:

Hey Matt,

Just wanted to drop a note of thanks. I really enjoyed our talk on Tuesday and brief ones since. Also greatly appreciate you treating me to lunch. Talk soon!

Bill

I feel honored that he took the time to appreciate me.

Definitely do not like how this sounds written…

JTyler Weitzman, CEO of BlackSMS, likes to research social situations. As an undergrad at Stanford, he researched a method for conveying one's achievements (or bragging, if you prefer!) while remaining humble and relatable. Through countless interviews of master storytellers, Tyler determined the ultimate structure for telling one's story in a humble way:

- Credit: "It could not have happened without [name the others involved!."

Hard Work: "We had to put in so much to make it happen, for example, [describe the hard work]."

- Vulnerability: "It was most difficult for me when.

Duty: "We were driven by our dream to [noble motivel."

Gratitude: "I am so proud and thankful that.

I encourage you to tell your story to a friend using this exact structure. See what comes out. Ask your friend for her reaction. I think you will be amazed.

There are milestones in a startup's life that, once achieved, make it significantly more likely that the company will eventually succeed. Each of these milestones, or inflection points, greatly reduces the company's risk, and makes it much easier to raise money. Your company's value, then, does not rise in a linear fashion, but in a stair-step pattern

Examples of inflection points include:

Hiring a capable engineering team
Signing up your first 3 paying customers
Exceeding $1M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), which demonstrates Product-Market
Fit
Hiring a capable sales team
Exceeding $5M in ARR, which demonstrates the effectiveness of your sales team
Hiring senior managers for all departments

Best time to raise money is right after an inflection point. This is because your company has just increased in value, but it will not increase further until it hits the next milestone, which could be months away.

Interesting:

A SAFE, and its cousin the Convertible Note, are investments that are used when it is impractical to create a priced equity round, either because the amount raised is too small or you do not have a institutional investor to lead the round. Priced equity rounds usually incur large legal costs, often over $100,000, which the company invariably ends up paying for. SAFEs and Notes are much less expensive, with legal fees often less than $10,000. You should therefore only do a priced equity round if the total money raised will exceed $2M, and preferably exceeds

$5M. SAFEs usually convert at a discount to the next priced equity round, and can also have a valuation cap. I recommend always having a SAFE open, even after you do a priced round.

Here is an example of what this might look like:

When you start your company, you would raise your initial money of $2-5M in a SAFE.
When you hit product-market fit, you raise an additional $2-10M in a Series A priced round and the SAFE converts into this round
You then immediately make available another SAFE. Continue to leave it available until you have raised another $5-10M.
Once you hit $5M in annual recurring revenue, you raise a Series B priced round of an additional $5-20M and the second SAFE converts into this round.
You then make available a third SAFE round. And so on.

Institutional investors usually only invest in priced equity rounds. But family offices, strategic investors, etc. are more likely to participate in SAFEs

At some point you will need to convert your SAFEs and do a proper priced round. This usually happens at the Series A, but can sometimes happen at the seed. Since this involves a lot of custom terms and negotiation it can be an expensive process both in terms of time and cash.

What often happens is that founders receive a bunch of term sheets with artificial timelines.

Then they rush through the process and end up signing terms without understanding the long-term ramifications.

It is incredibly important to take your time and not make any mistakes here; they will come back to haunt you! Treat this process as irreversible. Take your time to go through every clause in the term sheet with your lawyers to fully understand them.

Investors have a huge informational advantage over you. They sign these term-sheets all the time. They're experts at controlling companies as minority shareholders. Often the tools they use are hidden in the 'special provisions' set of clauses. While you may think these provisions innocuous at the time, they can be activated out of left field when you least expect it (like when you're selling your company)

Don't rely on your lawyers to highlight the 'dodgy terms. What they may consider standard, you may not. Pass your term sheets (scrubbed if necessary) by other founders and investors you trust for feedback.

You will need a named-brand law firm to manage your priced rounds. They will only be too eager to help, this is one of their favorite ways to bill large amounts. But there is a technique to manage costs and time. If you let them bill however they want to, the end result could easily be over $100,000 for a Series A investment. If you manage them aggressively, however, you can get that bill down to $15,000 or less. This is important because the company is often required to pay for both their own counsel, as well as that of the investor if the bill exceeds a certain amount (usually $25,000).

Make the accommodations to pay the legal fees since the VCs pay you out of OPM and not their money. Require only that the investors support you in enforcing rules of behavior on their lawyers.

Those rules are:

Once the basic terms of investment are agreed upon (in a Term Sheet), then a 4- to 8- hour meeting (or call) is scheduled. (This meeting may only last 2-3 hours, but it is very important that enough time be blocked off to allow it to run longer if necessary.) Required attendees are:

a. Decision-maker from the Company

b. Decision-maker from the Lead Investor

c. Lawyer for the Company d.
d. Lawyer for the Lead Investor

If any of these 4 people cannot make the meeting (or call), then the meeting is rescheduled.

The lawyer for one side prepares the first draft of the investment documents. The lawyer for the other side responds with written comments prior to the meeting / call. There is no other contact between the lawyers.
At the meeting, everyone reviews the documents from beginning to end, paragraph by paragraph, and addresses all of the written comments. Lawyers are not allowed to speak except to advise their client on the meaning of the paragraph being reviewed. The negotiation is between Decision-makers at the Company (CEO) and Lead Investor (investor) directly. The Decision-Makers go through every point until they have reached agreement on all of them. As each point is agreed upon, the lawyers then in real-time agree upon the

The lawyer who wrote the base document then writes up the final language. The other lawyer confirms that this language is exactly what they had agreed upon during the call. The documents are then final.

In this process, the Lawyer for the company can bill no more than:

4 hours

1 hour

8 hours

4 hours

17 hours

Write up base documents

Read comments prior to the big meeting

Attend the big meeting

Write up final language

@ $800 per hour = $13,600

In this process, the Lawyer for the investor can bill no more than:

4 hours

8 hours

2 hours

14 hours

Write comments on the base documents

Attend the big meeting

Read the final language

@ $800 per hour = $11,200

Important: founders shares

Mark Zuckerberg retains total control of Facebook even though he only owns a minority of its shares. Why? Because the shares he owns come with extra votes. This structure has been accepted by investors, there is little reason not to set it up in your own company. Ask your lawyers to set up 'Founders Shares' prior to investors being on the cap-table (SAFEs are fine).

Founder Friendly shares

In addition, Founder Friendly (FF) shares allow founders to get liquidity at each priced round without raising the fair-market valuation of the options granted to other team members. This allows founders to continue to pay themselves low salaries (excellent optics within the company, such as 100k with 100k being the max) but still get enough liquidity to not worry about committing themselves to the company for the long-term. Again, these should be created prior to having equity investors.

Use carts or a spreadsheet to manage stock certificates. Investors will have questions about ownership and you don’t want to have to go through a paralegal.

409a

You will need to do a valuation of your common stock to determine the correct exercise price of any options that you issue. This is a 409a (the IRS code) valuation, and must be done PRIOR to issuing the options. You will need to update this 409a valuation yearly or when you experience a change in company value (new financing, major customer addition, etc.).

Interesting - option pool

When fundraising for a priced equity round, know that investors will want to see enough unissued options (Option Pool) remaining that there will be a 10-20% unallocated option pool AFTER the equity investment. This fact often catches founders by surprise. When the venture firm offers $4M on a post-money valuation of $20M. the founders think that they have been diluted by 20%. But this same offer will almost always require that a large Option Pool be created prior to the equity coming in. This post-money Option Pool plus the new equity therefore represents a 40% dilution to the existing shareholders. There isn't much that you can do about this. Just be aware of it

Recruiting can take all your time if you let it. Make it as efficient as possible.

Sourcing

Here is our Process for Sourcing:

Referrals from our professional and personal network. Create a list of the 10 most talented people you know and commit to speaking to at least one of them each week for the next 10 weeks, asking them "Who are the 3 most talented people that you know?" Continue to build your list and continue to talk with at least one person per week. Document everything in RelatelQ.
Referrals from Bolters. Sourcing is an outcome on every Bolters list of Outcomes. (Quarterly review, 0/1)
Deputizing friends of Bolt. We offer a referral bonus, and regularly ask friends of Bolt for referrals.

Have the hiring manager write out a ninety-day roadmap for the position you need to fill. This roadmap includes all the goals that the new team member will be expected to hit within the first ninety days of joining. This is critical for successful onboarding. During the interview process, share this roadmap with the candidate to make sure that she is excited about these goals.

Interview type 1, I like this

The goal is to understand the candidate's story and patterns. They are predictive of their future performance. Start from the beginning and move forward chronologically. Create chapters of a job or group of jobs that last 3-5 years. This interview should take about 2 hours (3 hours for a CEO, 1 hour for entry-level). It is worth the time. For every hour we spend Topgrading a candidate, we'll save 100s of hours not dealing with B or C players.

The Hiring Manager should conduct the Topgrading Interview, along with a colleague who wants to learn the method by observing.

In the interview, set expectations:

"Thank you for visiting us today. We are going to do a chronological interview and walk through each job you've had. For each job, I am going to ask you 5 core questions. What were you hired to do? What accomplishments are you most proud of? What were some low points during that job? Who were the people you worked with? Why did you leave that job?

At the end of the interview we will discuss your career goals and aspirations, and you can ask me questions about us.

80 percent of the process will take place in this room, but if we mutually decide to move forward, we will conduct reference calls to complete the process.

Finally, while this sounds lengthy, it will go remarkably fast. It is my job to guide the pace of the discussion. Sometimes I will ask you to go into more depth, other times I will ask that we move on to the next topic. I'lI try to make sure that we leave plenty of time to cover your most recent and therefore most relevant jobs.

Any questions before we begin?"

There is another key variable to making the recruit want to accept your offer: speed! A recruit wants to feel loved. The easiest way to accomplish that is to have a fast process from start to finish.

If you doubt whether this really exists, just recall when you raised money. Which investors were the most compelling for you? The ones that responded and decided quickly.

The offer is always pending due diligence, so there is plenty of time after-the-fact to discover critical information. In recruiting, you would make an offer to the candidate "pending reference interviews".

Type 2 can be deep dive on a skill with specific person

Type 3 can be odd questions, e.g., what’s the worst decision you made in the past year, how did you recover?,

After interviews with needed decision makers, reach out to the candidate and say “we love you. We want you to join our team and would like to make you an offer pending reference interviews.”

Then have a verbal discussion about what a successful offer would look like. You ask them to complete this phrase: "I would join your company as long as_________”. Address each request / negotiate. End call with next steps.

You conduct reference interviews, then if all is well, call “the reference interviews were great. We’d like you to join our team. If we make you the following offer (explain every detail of benefits), do you accept?” Great. I’m emailing it.

Can do an offer ceremony in person instead of email based.

Ref. Calls - recommends asking “what were their weaknesses back then”. Back then gives them license to be more honest. Some weaknesses are indicative if future performance

Comp.

Pay market. Market is what FB google pays for the role. Comp is how much they need to live comfortably in cash, the rest eq.

Here is an example to show how the equity portion is calculated. Let's say the position is a Level 3 Engineer who is paid $300,000 in total compensation at Google. The team member requires $120,000 in cash to live comfortably, and wants to invest the remainder in startup equity. The amount of equity is calculated by taking the difference between market and cash ($300,000-$120,000=$180,000), and multiplying it by 4 years ($180,000 × 4 = $720,000. This amount is then divided a factor somewhere between 1 and 2, which represents a very conservative estimate of the increase in value of the equity over 4 years. A 1 represents no expected increase in value. A 2 represents a 2x expected increase in value. If 1.5 were used

(which is the most common factor used), the final amount would be $720,000 / 1.5 = $480,000.

So grant this amount in options, however much equity it purchases at the company's current valuation. The options vest over four years.

Too complicated for my liking to present options. But I like the idea of thinking of equity as a tradeoff for cash, but invested pretax therefore doubling (or 1.8xing after cap gains tax) its purchasing power.

Onboarding

On their first day at the office, have them come in two hours after the normal start of the day, so that there are plenty of people there to greet the new team member. Assign each new team member a buddy with whom they'll check in each day for fifteen minutes for the first two weeks.

This fifteen minutes is for the new team member to ask questions that arise, and for the buddy to ensure that the new team member is actually going through the checklist.

Fire fast. Minimize lawsuits with written documentation for why you are firing. Ideally documented over time. Best strategy:

Create a written PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) that states objective milestones and dates over a 7, 30, 60 and 90 day period.
Meet weekly to check progress against the written milestones.
At 30 days, if he hasn't hit one of the milestones, then you let him go.
At 60 days, the same.
And at 90 days, the same.

Give 1-3 months severance and help them find a new job.

You will want to save those resources for the team that remains that is performing.

Feel this anger, and then let it pass. Recognize that you have responsibility here. Your recruiting, training and managing (or lack thereof) helped create this situation. It is your responsibility to help the person find a job and a company that is a better fit. If you want to save your company's resources, then help them find that job more quickly. And then turn to your recruiting, training and managing processes, and ask yourself: "What can I do to make sure this doesn't happen again?"

If you do this, not only will you be doing the right thing and taking responsibility for your actions, but you will also create a culture of safety in your company. It will put your existing team at ease (allowing them to perform better at their job), and news of this culture will spread quickly

Interesting:

I call the process above "Firing Well". If you learn how to do it, then you also get the benefit of being able to let people go sooner, once you realize that they are not a fit, because doing so will not create trauma for the person, the company or you. You can also take more chances on hiring people with high potential but less proven experience, since you now have a safe mechanism for ending the relationship if the potential doesn't materialize. These two actions will further strengthen your team and your company.

Interesting take on sales

Gain Trust

Understand problems

Tie to results

On gain trust lever

Set multiple meetings where you only ask the potential customer about them, listen actively, reflect back what they say, and at the next meeting show that you remember what they said in the previous one.

Here’s how to make it work:

Be explicit about not talking about your company.
Before we talk about what we do, I'd like to start by getting to know your situation, to know if we're even the right solution for you.'
Ask for a very limited amount of time, so that the burden is low.

"Let's have a short introductory call for 10 minutes."
"Let's get together for a quick coffee."

Invite them to a purely social event:

"We're hosting drinks at__ on___. Please join us."
"We've got seats at the US Open. Please join us.

If you find that you are simply not completing the goals you set for yourself each week, or you do so but some or many of the tasks are energy-draining, then it is time to hire a Chief of Staff (COS). The best COS that I have seen are highly-organized, excellent communicators (both written and oral). and have broad strategic business knowledge. A background that almost always ensures these skills is 4-8 years at a top management consulting firm (Bain, BCG and McKinsey). I am partial to Bain, as I find x-Bain consultants also have excellent financial modeling skills (akin to those they would have learned had they worked as an associate at an investment bank)

Training. The key is to give your COS unfettered access to all the information that you receive.

This means having her sit beside you from morning till night, with full access to your emails, calls, meetings, etc. By seeing what decisions you make, based on what information you receive, she will soon be able to think like you, and then she can truly be an extension of you.

Give CEO best practices from this book or from First Round Reviewhttps://review.firstround.com › why...Why You Need Two Chiefs in the Executive Office | First Round Review so they know CoS,

Earlier on, we had a management team that wasn't gelling very well. My CoS at the time, David Axler, did a phenomenal job of helping me build a cohesive senior leadership team. He initiated daily lunches and coffees with every employee in the company to gain insights on how the team was performing. He organized team-building offsites where the senior leadership team was coached on how to be more open, vulnerable and direct with each other. Then he followed through to see that the changes that were initiated were sticking. The impact of gelling a new senior team like this is impossible to overstate, and I couldn't have done it on my own."

CoS creates availability in the CEOs schedule. Take off all the meetings you can by going to them instead (or taking them off)

Know at all times whats important to them. Health etc. is going above and beyond huge value I can add.

Biz ops

In Silicon Valley, major tech companies such as Google and LinkedIn built up functions called Business Operations. The functions were staffed mainly by top-tier consultants from Bain, McKinsey and BCG. I first encountered Biz Ops at Coinbase, where Emilie Choi scaled the group out as the company was going through hypergrowth. The team was viewed as mini-CEOS who could:

Parachute into any problem area and dig in and fix it.
Generally help build and drive processes that help the company scale, including running quarterly business reviews, OKs, etc.
When a manager was not succeeding, they could join that team and take over the project and people management duties, while keeping the former manager as the architect (ie- the subject matter expert who determined the roadmap: "These are the things that we need to get done, and this is how to do them.") The Biz Ops person then managed the team to ensure that they completed the roadmap.
Effectively run any meeting, and train managers how to do so.

Use a PEO (professional employer organization) like Sequoia One (or TriNet). If you use a PEO, members of your team become employees of the PEO firm.

I recommend using a PEO from the beginning until the company reaches 100-150 people in size.

Alternative: use gusto or ‘ to hire and pay and don’t worry about legal

A PEO firm has thousands of "employees" and therefore can get far better pricing on benefits (insurance) than a small company with less than 100 employees. Additionally, a PEO firm takes on all of the employee liability risk. If an employee is let go, and sues his employer, he sues the PEO.

Your company is not involved at all. The PEO ensures that they will not lose such a lawsuit by adhering 100% to HR law. The PEO is expert in this compliance

He also recommends to outsource finance

My choose an outsourced CFO or accounting firm that is willing to send a person to your office (once per month, or week) to do the accounting work.

In addition, a company should be creating a projection of both its finances and its operations (# and type of employees, amount of office space), as well as tracking the metrics of the team. This is considered CFO-level work. And any good CFO can also do the accounting work. So, we recommend hiring an outsourced CFO firm, rather than an outsourced accounting firm.

Potential investors take great comfort in seeing that a company has created real projections,

Lawyer advice

find a solo practitioner to be your outsourced General Counsel early on in the company's life cycle. I prefer to find a lawyer who lives and works close to the company and then require that they come into the office to do their work (and only bill for their time physically at the company). If there is a need to do work outside of the company, I recommend that you only pay for it if the lawyer has gotten specific written permission (email) in advance for both the work and the hours to be billed

If you don't follow this strict procedure, then the lawyer can bill for whatever amount of hours they claim the work took. You will have no way of successfully disputing their claim. And you will be on the hook for the bill even if it is outrageous (which it almost certainly will be).

Board

After the board presentation, where there are hopefully few to no questions, give the board members homework. Give each one a very specific assignment. Don't worry, none of them will actually do the homework. But they also are then not likely to give you unsolicited advice. This is the true goal of the homework.

If a board member does give you advice, take notes. Summarize what the board member said, and ask if you got it right. Once they say "Yes, that's right", thank them for their advice and let them know that you will seriously consider it in formulating your go-forward plan. This will make the board member feel that you at least heard them, which is primarily what they are after.

At 500+ stockowners you have to go public. Zuck wanted to be private forever but they got close to 500 so they had to IPO.

Palantir learned from this and partnered with a secondary fund to offer liquidity to it’s employees so that they would never trip the 500+ barrier.