On Advisors and Accountability
As a founder, you'll wish to surround yourself with people to help you and your company grow that won't necessarily be full time employees. I caught up with a friend last week who has started working with a handful of startups as he plots his next move. We got to talking about the different types of non-full time help that founders can leverage.
Advisors: Tend to be functional or domain experts providing their knowledge and network. Can be ad-hoc or structured, up to a few hours/month. Useful for social proof. Comp should be purely equity.
Coaches: If the top athletes and tech CEOs in the world benefit from coaches, you can too. You may already have advisors that have been helpful sounding boards. While an advisor may be useful for certain connections or domain experience, a coach will focus on helping you (and your exec team) be the best version of yourselves. Compared to an advisor, a coach goes deeper and has more continuity, say, sitting in on your management team meetings, helping with your 360-performance review, and having a regular 1:1 with you and even your execs. We had a great coach at Videoplaza who started out working with Sorosh and ended up working with me and others on the exec team. Coach comp should be a mix of cash and equity for early stage startups.
Independent Board members: These seats tend to be filled after a Seed or Series A round. You'll want someone that you and your investors will respect and trust, who has the bandwidth to do the role. While they can be a sounding board and will give you advice, they're a fiduciary and must represent the interests of your various stakeholders. Hopefully these will be aligned most of the time but there are times when they won't and it's important that they're able to navigate these with the right judgment. Independent board member comp is equity although there can be moments where a board member leans in further to serve as a coach to the team or play the role of executive chairman, in which case cash comp would be justified.
Fractional executive: As they sound, fractional execs are part of your team with objectives, responsibilities and deliverables. They just happen to not be full time.
Determine your needs and how they could be filled by the buckets above. Also, consider who is holding you accountable especially with regard to the multiple hats you may be wearing. For instance, you're CEO and are also wearing the VP of Sales and VP of Marketing hat as you have yet to hire into those roles. You might have an advisor holding you accountable as CEO but are they doing the same vis a vis the VP of Sales hat you're wearing? It can be tough to hold yourself accountable as the VP of Sales while simultaneously being CEO. I once did a pipe crawl with the CEO of an advisee company who was also playing the VP of Sales role to do just this. I asked him questions as if I were the CRO.
It helped. Being held accountable will only make you better.