A simple format for board decks
Gil Dibner

I recently found myself trying to help an early-stage CEO come up with a board deck for a year-end offsite. This company has been operating in “friends and family” mode since our pre-seed investment, and now seems like the right time to try to structure things. I wanted to share my ideal board deck outline here:

• Title slide. Never miss an opportunity to show off your logo. ;)

• Mission statement. I think it’s actually surprisingly useful to remind everyone present how you are defining the company’s mission. No more than three sentences in paragraph form.

• Overview. One slide with key issues that you will touch on later in the conversation. I’m not a huge fan of the “highlights/lowlights” framing because they tend to obscure the real status of the company. I’d prefer an honest listing of the most important issues and their status.

• Org chart. Everything starts with people, so I’d start there. Show an org chart with the CEO, founders, and two levels of direct reports to the CEO. Ideally the org chart should be the org chart as you want it to look like 24 months ahead of where are now. If one person is playing multple roles (i.e. the CEO is also the VP Sales and VP Product), put their name in all three boxes. Next color code each box (green/yellow/red) to indicate the health of the function. Finally — highlight where your recruitment efforts are. This is a great way of highlighting problems.

• Market update. It’s good to bring people up to speed on any key competitive developments, funding announcements, product developments, regulatory changes, etc.

• Departmental reports. At last one slide per “department,” and not much more. Each slide should contain some key messages in text and key metrics in numbers:

• Engineering. This is a good place to talk about the pace of engineering and changes to the roadmap.

• Product. This is where I’d expect to see some KPIs on customer behavior in the product or some reporting on some product experimentation — especially if it has strategic implications. Try to avoid long lists of features.

• Marketing. This is where I’d hope to see some KPIs and metrics on inputs (blog posts, advertising) and outputs (MQLs, traffic) from marketing efforts. Any changes to branding and product messaging can go here as well.

• Sales. Obviously the most important section in the minds of many investors — this is hard to do in one slide. If your company is small, you may want to list the whole pipeline and key metrics on the sales process, conversion rates, deal sizes/types, etc. If your company is a bit larger, you’ll want to summarize this more succinctly. Whatever your size, do not get bogged down in customer-by-customer stories. Try to draw broader conclusions from what you are seeing on the sales side. The key question is: what are you learning about your product and market from your interactions with customers? How are you improving your sales process and methodology based on what you are experiencing?

• Forecasts. Future sales depend on product, marketing, and sales, so now that you have covered all of those, it’s time to show your forecasts. Deviations from prior forecasts should go here as well. Make sure to include forecasts until at least two calendar year ends ahead — ideally monthly.

• Financials. Forecasted expenses and cashflow — for at least two calendar year ends. If helpful, you can show more that one scenario. It’s helpful to show a down-case scenario where no additional sales are assumed, as well as your base-case scenario. It’s usually unhelpful to show any overly rosy scenarios. This is also a chance to revisit burn rate and fundraising plans.

• Strategic discussion. Boards are a good opportunity to have strategic discussions — ideally on topics that you choose in advance. Some slides to facilitate that can be very helpful — especially if distributed in advance.

• Approvals/Closed session. Save some slides until the end for things like ESOP grants etc.

That’s it basically. Done efficiently, this can be covered in 12–15 slides. And if those slides are solid enough, honest enough, and distributed in advance — you can make sure that everyone attending the board meeting has a very good sense of where things are, what is working, what is not working, and what you want to talk about. With focus, you can cover those 12–15 slides in 30–60 minutes, leaving another hour for open discussion of the strategic topics you wanted to cover and any other issues that come up.

Board meetings are a great opportunity to align your most passionate supporters, extract value from them, and gain some outside perspective on what you are doing. Preparing the board deck is not an exercise in reporting for reporting’s sake but, rather, a chance to crystalize your own understanding of your company and align your team.

I’d be very curious to hear your feedback on this template or if there are slides I’ve left out that you have found to be helpful.

Thanks!

Gil

EVENTS

Feb 8 / Lessons Learned From Investing Early in Over a Dozen SaaS Unicorns Including Salesforce, SuccessFactors, Box, Gusto, SalesLoft, ServiceMax, Veeva, Bill.com, Doximity, Yammer and Zoom Among Others
Jason Green, Founder & General Partner, Emergence Capital

Feb 15 / The Evolution of Collibra’s Product Positioning & How They Created a Category
Stan Christiaens, Co-Founder & Chief Data Citizen, Collibra

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Acid test. DARPA, the research arm of the United States Department of Defense, is researching the impact that a rogue state could have if it began to geoengineer the climate on its own. For perhaps the first time, game theorists and climate scientists are joining forces to “war game” different scenarios. DARPA assumes that any attempt at unilateral geoengineering would use a tactic called stratospheric aerosol injection (employing an aircraft to disperse sulphuric acid into the upper atmosphere which would reflect sunlight back into space). This would probably work, sort of, but also have also sorts of knock-on effects that are important to model and plan for. Read more from The Economist here.

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HOW TO VENTURE

Complete failure of corporate controls. “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” wrote John Ray III, the new CEO and Chief Restructuring Officer of FTX. Ouch. Bill Gurley has some advice for those who don’t want to find themselves in a similar situation to the plethora of investors who backed FTX despite the “red flags” that are seemingly so obvious in retrospect. Worth a read.

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