Venture Capital, The Board, and Everything That Goes With It: An Entrepreneur’s Guide

This course provides insight into how a board should – but often doesn’t – operate in managing a growing company. We focus most heavily on private start-up companies and their entrepreneurs/founders, as these companies traditionally experience the most clear-cut examples of growing pains related to the board’s role in helping a company achieve a successful launch, commercialization and entry to the mainstream market.

In this course we:

• Examine the 10 most important things any start-up or entrepreneur needs to know about venture capital before meeting with a potential capital partner
• Summarize various types of investors and stages of capital (and board development) that accompany a growing company
• Explore several commonly overlooked risk factors to be aware of when considering how to fund a business
• Discuss the misalignment of various investment partners at all stages of capital (founders, seed-stage, institutional capital) that contribute to fundamental discrepancies in deciding on exiting an opportunity
• Discuss the power-and-politics dynamic encountered by many early-stage CEOs, board members and venture partners as they collectively try to steer a rapidly-changing start-up business
• Define the expectations and roles of each board member and what leads to ineffective board member involvement–and both the positive and negative results of these behaviors