You give Boards a bad name
How OpenAI’s Board Dynamics will mess up Boardrooms across the globe.
Shot through the heart
And you’re to blame
You give boards a bad name
I play my part and you play your game
You give boards a bad name(Bon Jovi knew it all along)
The recent drama at OpenAI certainly is a story well suited for a television mini series, airing 2024. It is the newest chapter of a book about founders ousted from their companies. From Steve Jobs to Travis Kalanick or Adam Neumann, it features a cast of boardroom protagonists playing out a tale of power, conflict and tough decisions.
It seems like history is just repeating itself over and over, and god-like founders or leaders are replaced in a coup-like fashion by a board that has little insight, little empathy for the “soul of the company” and in most cases even less success with their move, as WeWork or Apple show. I think it is time that we change the narrative.
This corporate fairy tale of a “clueless board” that boasts the ultimate power move and kicks the founder out is a narrative with an inverse relation between the actual occurence and the mindspace it occupies with founders. Let’s face it: it is unlikely that the board will fire you, even though technically they could and, yes, sometimes it happens.
It is one of these events that point to a much bigger discord that must have brewing for months, sometimes years, as boards rarely decide in a split second to remove the most important asset a fragile, young company has. You’ll hear VCs and investors alike on record saying the number one thing they look for is “Team, Team, Team” and they’ll not be referring to your customer support team (sorry). So taking a decision as impactful and difficult as this one, points to something much bigger than a disagreement over a single decision.
Despite it’s prevalence in the startup world and highly idealized by VCs, the art of curating and managing a good board is seldomly talked about. It’s certainly not rocket science, definitely work and likely never perfect, but rarely a waste of time or effort. In a company where everything can change any minute (like when OpenAI announces custom GPTs and kills hundreds of companies in an instant) the relation to the shareholders is key.
Unfortunately this weekend produced one more example that will prompt founders to build companies with as little board involvement as possible, when the takeaway of what happened should be the opposite. If you disagree and want to upgrade your board, let me know.
