YouSaid · the spoken record

Dylan Smith

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47
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2015-09-21
most recent
2015-09-21
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1
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podcast

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  1. “60% to 70% of them came to me after each one of these like, oh, this is like the best four hours of my quarter because I get to actually be out of the operational just craziness that I'm in and see what someone I don't have to live with the consequences of everything I'm talking about. That's why I do my job”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, I think you might say that next. I mean, I would just be up front. I mean, first I'm an advisor. Generally people don't do these things for the money. I mean, I guess it would have been nice to join the advisory board on box. I should have thought about that. But in general, you don't do it for the money. But you should be like, look, here's my relationship with the company. Here's what I think about the company. And the way that you often probably get reference calls and not every reference call you ever get is for...”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And maybe just along these lines, you're on some of these boards. Do you ever find that the company along this ethical sort of boundary, the company is asking you to promote the company too much relative to sort of what's really happening? I mean, do you get into that weird sort of, you know, like young companies, they have a series, an investment round coming up and they're like, hey, Alex, you know, like the investors are going to call you. So we'd be happy for you to give us a great story.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So be very careful. So, now actually the third time round when I did it, when I wanted some of them as advisors, some folks I had as informal advisors, still I sold the deal. Once I sold the deal, then I brought them on as a formal advisor because having gone through that. So those are the two variations.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It can really hurt you because it has happened to me once where I signed on someone as an advisor. And then when the completely separate sale. So the advisor wasn't really in part of the approval chain. But when it went to procurement, they came back and said, you have this person on the advisory board. You cannot do the deal with us.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “For two years, basically for free, yes. The second one is a very interesting one that you brought up, which is someone might sign on as an advisory board member, but let us say you actually want to sign that company on as a customer later.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You have to be careful twofold. So, one is a simple situation where you can, you want someone as an advisor, they may go and ask their company. So my example was I was trying to bring Kumud, who is from Intel on the board. And Intel has a very strict policy that you cannot accept anything. So after a lot of back and forth, she still wanted to be on the board and provide advice, but had to sign an agreement with Intel and we had to sign an agreement with Intel that in no shape or form were we compensating her with any stock. That's one form of, but that was kind of something that we And she ended up serving on the board, yes”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Okay, how I've seen quite often when I've set up customer advisory boards, which may be slightly different, all your advisors work at companies, and often there's an ethical dilemma of like If they're a potential customer and I pay them stock options, And I want them to use my product like it's one hand feeds the other and it's a little bit of a bribe and then you want them to go and recommend the company to investors and blah, blah, blah. I mean, that's what happens. you know how do you sort of deal with that and if a company doesn't allow you know if a company may not allow it how do you get around that or do you just say no you know we're not going to do it I mean kind of maybe just speak to some of the potential ethical pitfalls there”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, you know, we just promoted an engineer to be the VP of engineering, and so they've never done management before. So how do you help with this case? I think just the more it's about real world things that they're struggling with, the more you can actually be useful.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I mean, those are the main things, I think. I think that kind of maybe the flip side of the question you asked him. I think the best arrangements are when companies are just super not too formal about it, just really honest about what they're, instead of, oh, I have a technical advisory board meeting next week, oh, shoot, like I have to think of an agenda, and now it's a to-do item. I think the more it's just around I'm stuck on X today, so I want to go talk to some people I trust about X. And it can be right down the middle of what a technical advisory board is for, or it can be a little... You mentioned product management, or it can be around.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I personally find it interesting you meet smart people that are working on different problems. It's nice to feel like you can occasionally be useful by having people avoid the dumb stuff that you did.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Able to quickly grasp the context of the problem. This 10 minute rule I think is a good one. They're coming in cold. They don't understand the six months of conversations that have gone on in the halls or in front of whiteboards. So you got to give them some context. So the best ones will get the context and pattern recognition and pattern match against a problem that they've seen in the past. And then more importantly, I've had some experience to say Like Alex was saying, hey, you're about to do something really stupid. I've actually done that stupid thing and it worked out this way. And here's how not to repeat that. And so the board members who can actually articulate that in a way that fosters debate but then gives clarity into a direction or down a direction.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “But on the technical side, it is not just for engineering. I found it was very valuable for the product management folks. Because these decisions that you make on architecture should okay, I'm going to put it on a SAS and do multi-tenancy. How should we do that? And should we have separate data structures or should we just do it all pooled has huge implications on the other requirements that you may have? So having product management team, I've always had product management team also drive some of these meetings. The requirements.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I guess there are in listening to you, I realize there are, I think, even the technical advisory board can have multiple flavors. And so the situation where I talked about where there was a customer advisory board and there was also a technical advisory board within the same company. From a CEO perspective, the customer advisory board, the biggest one, is validation of the problem statement. Especially you're building a company, you have you want to lay out, okay, this is the pain point I'm trying to solve. Is this real? Will it resonate with you? Will you pay if I build this? Will you pay if I build an extra set of features and so on? That is where Direction as well as I would say I would not be shy even presenting marketing materials to them because they are going to be the ultimate consumers.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I found it was interesting how you try some things which at the time seem right and then you learn in retrospect they weren't right and you learn from it and then you oftentimes forget that you once didn't know that so actually sometimes when the meetings that I felt best about I actually feel like you can be very helpful by just sharing like hey here's the stupid thing I did that the time seemed reasonable and I think you're about to do that thing and you can explain it some fraction of time they actually listen to you and it's kind of nice so I think that's productive and I would second the thing about hiring I mean everyone good I know of course I try to hire a Twitter but you know Twitter is a certain size company they're bigger companies smaller companies and it's not the right fit for everyone and so I'll often refer either people I was trying to hire or people that have just left because it's been years and years and they want to go do something else and I'll know they want to go somewhere else. I'm like happy to send people around to other places. So I think it's probably...”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “For me, what was really cool about the board and just the people that I was lucky enough to get on it is not just getting technical advice out of them, but they also became, in their own ways, mentors for me in certain situations. So it wasn't always about technical opinions. These guys had all traveled down the path that I was going down before me. And so things like how do I do orc structures? I've got a group of people that all want the same title, but then I've got another group of people that want to be promoted to principal engineer and architect. And I don't even know if I want an architect role. What did you guys do at Facebook and Google and stuff like that? That's not really the role of a technical advisory board, but super important conversation to have as you're scaling a company, 10x within a short period of time and trying to keep a culture intact.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Many of them ended up giving referrals. To other deals as well as Really helped in some of the hiring decisions. That was not my stated goal at all, but we were looking for some technical experts and they had access to the pool. And we didn't even think of asking the team, but it was just at the end of a meeting we were saying, okay, we have a problem here. And then the advisory board sent us recommendations of people that we were able to hire.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I would say one unexpected outcome on the positive side. You come away with great friendships. You over the course, the advisors become friends of not only the company, but also you make personal friends. The other thing is, on a positive side, unexpected outcome, that was not the stated goal.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I would say almost you have to meet the advisors. That is given and you have to spend some time with them. Many times it is through introductions, so you may not know the person from before. I've also another thing, just I think back to what Alex said, what is it that you want to accomplish? So in one case, we needed expertise around security. And it was from different domains. So in terms of thinking about the composition, it was not just, okay, go and get whichever security expert you can find, but it was how do you get security experts who have worked in different domains, maybe the financial industry, maybe the healthcare industry, and they bring in different perspectives. And so the board then has a balance for what you're trying to go after.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, I think you have to tap your network and your extended network. Brought a couple of people in that I knew personally, and then the rest of them were second degree connections to someone. And the beautiful thing about this valley is you can actually create a board of just amazing experts here that's unlike anywhere else in the world. So within your short notice, you can actually have people assembled that can provide you world class advice. And I think it does have to gel as a group to where it's all personality, sometimes pretty big personalities, and you have to also make sure that one person isn't going to overshadow everyone else's point of view. And so that's where the harmony of the group needs to be adjusted sometimes. And so sometimes when you do the coffee shop thing, you can see if this person is going to be bullying a China shop or someone who's actually going”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “tapping the network of the fits all the a16 companies or other companies you know is the way to meet people and generally i would just go meet the people for a coffee or something maybe even give an example much like interviewing giving you know giving real problems that you're working on is one of the better ways to get real signal from people so i would just talk about where the company is why you're putting it together some of the things you're grappling with and see if you feel like you walk out of the coffee smarter and if you do that's probably a good signal and you get along in some other things if you don't maybe you should keep looking”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “That's a great question. I mean, it's not dissimilar to hiring. I mean, I suppose it is a form of hiring. I think I've only ever sat on ones that I've been introduced to from people that I know, either I know the found or something, or they know someone that introduces me to someone. So I think honestly.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So, Alex, you before related to this had mentioned write down what you want to get out of this thing. How do you choose, how do you think, what's your advice for choosing the right members of an advisory board? How should somebody, maybe we can all jump into that, but like, how do you do it and how do you find the folks? To get enough diversity versus all similar, I mean, what do you think you've said on a number of these?”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And I think that's why you want to have diversity of experience and personality on the board as well, because that conversation is where the magic happens. And so what happens if you have vocal advisors? And so this is also where it goes back to the point about refreshing the board every couple of years because I got advisors on that seemed great on paper but didn't contribute. And so I would have loved to refresh, but I didn't realize that I should probably put something in my closet to do a refresh so they stayed. But where you You really have to think about is just quickly and as deeply as possible set the context and then let them let them add it. And so delt pressure test each other and eventually what comes out of that is something that hopefully is quite insightful for the problem.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It's very hard to react. If someone wants to do something and they just design a presentation designed to convince you that they're doing the right thing with no, I mean, basically you have almost no context, even as an advisor that's coming up frequently. It's very hard to have anything intelligent to say about that. It's much better to get.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Give them a heads up on the problem statement so that they can prepare. I have had some fantastic meetings, albeit not one example I have is it's not necessarily a technical problem, it was around how do we justify the ROI of the product to an IT shop. And this we sent an agenda item, in fact I call it homework almost like, okay, this is what we are going to discuss. And some of the advisors, customer advisors, had actually done a survey in their organization and found out what were the metrics. And it was a fabulous discussion because the peer group also exchanged a lot of notes. So they got value out of the meeting, which was nice. And we got an answer to that specific problem. So when we do presentations, we don't get that discussion. So my rule has been if you are spending More than 10 minutes presenting.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “That's an interesting one, and I think something that I have learned over the course of a few boards, which is initially the tendencies you want to present and you want to kind of get validation. They're nodding, yes, this is good and is this the right path and this is the right architecture, but then you realize you're not utilizing the advisor's time well. Most of the people who get on advisory board get on because they want to help, they are passionate about the problem, they want to help shape the future of your company. And so the best is to pick a problem statement whatever you want to solve.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “How maybe along the lines of setting up the meeting, how do you decide what gets presented to a tech advisory board versus not? I mean, is it everything? Is it one thing? Does a VP of engineering decide who creates the less and how does that come about?”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And the way I tried to structure mine, and I sit on other advisory boards now, so it's interesting to see how they're structured differently. But what I really needed was Advice, not just for me, but for my technical leaders to hear in a decision. In a lot of cases why you actually put this meeting together, it's not to present something and get approval, but it's to debate a point and debate something that is worthwhile enough to get all these people, high-powered people from across the valley or whatever into a room together and make it worth their while, but also worth the while of the people who are actually within the team to feel like we're moving forward as a company in some direction. And so we would get together quarterly and we would put our agendas together a month or so ahead of time. And if we didn't have it, we would delay until we had something. And eventually, Box got big enough to where we didn't need it anymore. We actually got to a size where we had enough smart people.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “I'm around and the other people are around. That's why they do these sorts of things. But otherwise, make sure it's not a tax. It's like, oh, it's a presentation I have to give to a bunch of people to get approval for my thing, and I'm just wasting time.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “People in be really sure that they know why they're there. And I mean, I said on these things to help. There's really no other reason. Like it's fun and interesting and you meet smart people and you're there to help. So when people have questions.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Some people they never met, all of whom have fancy titles somewhere else that they don't care about. And then come in and give this presentation. And I felt before I'm just wasting a bunch of people's time. They actually don't have questions for me. Someone with good intentions sort of invited them to give a talk, but there's not a clear reason that I'm there to add value. So we're all just older, basically, at the end of this meeting”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I think it goes back to the first thing I said, which is figure out what you're trying to solve and then do the thing that sounds stupid when you say it that way. It's a tautology. But if one-on-one is helpful, go do that. If having presentations is helpful, go do that. I have a story of something I think not to do, which is you assemble these things and make sure that you're setting the right context. If it's just you going in as the CEO or founder or head of engineering or whatever it is, you probably know why you're there and what you're trying to get out of it. I've been on certain ones where they've invited engineers in the company to present something. And in one case that I'm thinking of, I really get the feeling that there were a bunch of people who were actually being productive that day. And at some point on short notice, we're probably asked to stop being productive and make a presentation.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “David's informational learn all I've done like twice a year Done a lot of just one off things where the whole group actually never meets. Maybe hop on the phone or maybe otherwise do 101s. I mean, I think honestly as someone that sits on these but hasn't ever created one, Twitter is far enough along that it probably I don't know if it's the case, but I think probably don't need an external one at this point. Yeah, Twitter. Of course, yeah, we get it all figured out. It's fine.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And if it becomes too large, because one of the thought is, okay, if you have these advisors, you can also go talk to them one-on-one and state the problem and get advice. But having a board helps because you have a lot of discussion. And sometimes if you can state your problem simply and clearly, you'll have some debate, you'll have counter-opinions. So that is the big advantage of having a board. So if it's six to eight, then you have good discussion. More than that, it just tapers off.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “CIO advisory board, and you meet once a quarter and then once a quarter. A year you have a retreat. So it's a very different structure But with startups and smaller companies, Things move very fast, and so you need constant feedback. And so you have this from a structure perspective, six to eight members actually works out well. The other thing is your needs change, so instead of having a four year term, usually we have done a two-year term for the advisors. And then you can always renew if the advisor is still relevant and is providing a lot of input. For another two years.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “While in my role as VP of Engineering for Box trying to scale the company, I had a co founding CTO that didn't want to manage anymore. That's basically how I got into box at the very beginning. We had a good relationship, but he was very much a Shiny object type of person, so wanted to explore new technologies, but was pragmatic enough to actually listen to other people. And so I knew I wouldn't be able to get to an answer internally without maybe some external people that he respected forming or helping him form his opinion. So that's how I use them.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “For people from the outside that would come in, give them context as quickly as possible around the problem, and they had a lot of seniority and experience in actually going down the path of some of these choices. Quickly, we realized we need to go down a more tried and true path versus another path. And so for me, those were seminal choices and forks in the road where it could have been pretty disastrous if we went down some more experimental choices as the company was scaling really, really quickly.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Cloud storage. But what's interesting underneath that is the permissioning is a waterfall permissioning. And so to actually model that, you could go down a path of saying there's a graph. And that graph is actually represented in something like Neo4j. So a persistence model could be Neo4J. But it was built on LAMP. So six months went by and this debate raged within our engineering team. And even as we hired more senior people to come in and the debate wouldn't go away, all it took was one formal conversation with some of the, as I created this architecture board, this”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I did So I joined Box at the end of 2009 where 10 engineers and Subsequent rounds of funding over the next 18 months shit got serious really, really quickly And so Needed some help. Arbitrating some pretty Technical choices and architectural choices One good example would be, so without giving too much away about Box, obviously it's about.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Cases, it's really much more one off things, and there's in a board, but it's more you're just being an advisor. Some earlier stage companies, if the founders themselves aren't technical, done a lot of things around Try to They're trying to hire their first engineer, but they have no idea how to do that. mammalian GitHub profile. Person the clown or not? Does this even make any sense? I don't know how to rec”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “So Alex, maybe just on that, like what was asked of you when you joined the technical advisory board, and then how did expectation versus reality actually pan out? Yeah, that's a great question. Is a lot”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, so I have had primarily customer advisory board, but what I found was once you formed an advisory board, and by the way, when you're starting out, even though you call it a customer advisory board, none of them are your customers and actually turns out to be great because you're getting a lot of feedback from the customers, as you said, on the use case, on the pain points. Does the solution even make sense? But then I found the same advisory board, customer advisory board, would nominate some technical folks from their teams to actually participate in, let us say, a beta or an alpha or even early feedback. So some of the best requirements I've gotten detailed technical requirements like multi-factor authentication, how do you want to build it in your product from customers who nominated technical folks?”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Was I needed smart people from the outside that didn't have a lot of vested interest in the solution or weren't going to be there necessarily to To deal with the consequences, to just bring some informed opinions from their experience into some tough technical choices. So to me, pretty distinct difference.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So a box, we had both, and they're very, very different. So the audience or the population of your customer advisory board are really what you would expect to sell to. So in Box's case, it would be the CIOs of big companies across different verticals that would be interesting to penetrate into. And they really should inform your roadmap for a product point of view. At least that's the way we looked at them, and that's how they served us. So they could be customers or existing customers or potential customers, but that was really the point. Then on the technical advisory board, it's very clear, at least for me, what I wanted out of that board, it's important to understand why you actually wanted technology. And that influences if you get on there. I needed technical problems to get solved and not that I couldn't solve them within the teams that I had, but a lot of it.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I often talk with entrepreneurs that I serve with about a customer advisory board. And here we're now talking about a technical advisory board. So maybe, I don't know if you guys have some views on kind of the differences between one of those and the other. I know we're here to talk about a technical advisory board, but then I talk about customer and do we have two of those and like what's the difference? Should we think about one maybe just we can start? Go ahead”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Former CEO of Cavern, Alex Roder from Twitter, Arnie Goldberg from PayPal, and A sixteen Z general partner Peter Levine. Peter Levine starts us off. I was talking earlier with a couple of folks, and one of the things this notion of technical advisory board, I first want to clarify that there's a difference between a technical advisory board and a board advisor. Okay, so for those of you just so we're clear here, a board advisor is somebody who serves with the board of directors. Typically you'd have venture capitalists on the board and then some third party, another person who might be a board advisor come and be on the board of the company. So we're not talking about that. Now the other I'm on the board of lots of different companies here at A16Z and I often talk and maybe I'll start open up the sort of panel here.”

    2015-09-21 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source