Reinventing the Board Meeting – Part 2 of 2

by Steve Blank for Business Insider, June 2nd, 2011.

When The Boardroom is Bits
A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. It’s time to ask why startup board governance has failed to keep pace with innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

It’s time for a change.

Reinventing the board meeting may allow venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model.

Reinventing the board meeting may offer angel-funded startups that don’t have formal boards or directors (because of geography or size of investment) to attract experienced advice and investment outside of technology clusters (i.e. Silicon Valley, New York).

Here’s how.

A Hypothesis – The Boardroom As Bits
Startups now understand what they should be doing in their early formative days is search for a business model. The process they use to guide their search is customer development. And to track their progress startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas.

Yet even with all these tools, early stage startups still need to physically meet with advisors and investors. That’s great if you can get it.  But what if you can’t?

What’s missing is a way to communicate all this complex information and get feedback and guidance for startups who cannot get advice in a formal board meeting.

We propose that early stage startups communicate in a way that didn’t exist in the 20th century – online – collaboratively through blogs.

We suggest that the founders/CEO invest 1 hour a week providing advisors and investors with “Continuous Information Access” by blogging and discussing their progress online in their startup’s search for a business model. They would:

• Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative
• Keep score of the strategy changes with the Business Model Canvas
• Comment/Dialog with advisors and investors on a near-realtime basis (continue reading… )