If You Don't Take the Wheel, Your Board Will

“I don’t know, Rob. You’re the f*cking CEO. You tell me.”

The first deal I ever did as a venture investor was to back Rob May, the founder of Backupify, an idea he pulled off a tweet of mine and turned it into a $100+ million exit to a company that then sold for over $1 billion. Rob was constantly checking with his board on where they thought he should go on different decisions. While I'd like to say I was concerned about the direction a bunch of investors who weren't in the day-to-day as much as Rob was would take the company, I was actually just trying to get him to be less of a time suck.

You run the company. The buck stops with you, and everyone else in that room, me included, is just along for the ride. I'm not telling you that to make you feel good. It's how the job actually works, and most founders behave like it isn't true.

There are a hundred decisions to make every quarter, and if you're not the one making them, your board will exert a lot of pressure for you to execute its own ideas for how things should be done. That's not a coup. Somebody has to steer, and whatever space you leave open, somebody fills. Deferring feels like the safe, humble move. It isn't. Every call you punt becomes a call somebody else makes for you, and before long you're running a company that's being shaped by people who show up four times a year.

Now, some boards can legally replace the CEO. They can set your pay. I'm not going to pretend that power isn't real. There's just a wide gap between the power that's written into your docs and the power that ever actually gets used in the room. Think about prorata rights. Your investors technically have them, but if the only term sheet on the table has the Series A taking the whole round, nobody is throwing themselves on the tracks to enforce prorata. They don't have the leverage, and they're not going to blow up the deal to make a point, so they fall in line. Boards are the same. They will not fire a founder who's doing the job over a fight about one hire or one marketing plan, because doing that torches the very thing they're invested in. They need you to win. So the leverage is mostly yours, whether you're using it or not.

None of this means you get to do whatever you want and tell the board to go pound sand. You make the calls, and you owe them clarity, thoughtfulness, and a real explanation of how you got there. You lead, they understand, and you never leave them guessing. Everything else is just working that out across the three decisions that actually run a company: people, product, and how fast you spend money.

People

Most people conversations go sideways because there's no future org chart. Not the org chart you have today, the one you're building toward. When that picture is missing, board members fill the gap with "I think you need a VP of Marketing," and suddenly you're arguing opinions about product led growth.

You shut that down by showing up informed. "I talked to two later-stage founders who do something close to what we do. One builds this team one way, the other does it completely differently. His team skews way more technical than ours, so I'm going with the sales-led version, and here's why." That's an org chart built forward, out of how companies that already made it actually operate. Compare it to the founder who invented one from a low-information seat, or the one who's just duct-taping hires onto whatever problem flared up last month. A board can feel the difference instantly.

Then instrument the thing. "I think you need a product person" doesn't survive five minutes with a founder who can rattle off the top features customers asked for, the promised delivery dates, and the fact that the team is beating every single one. Now you're having an actual conversation about whether the org is performing, instead of trading anecdotes.

Boards also pay attention to who you drag through the door. They get quietly nervous when the company hasn't built a machine that keeps surfacing genuinely impressive people, the kind the board figures it can learn something from, not the kind the board suspects it knows more than. Hiring the best risk-taker in your existing network is a different thing from going out and landing someone so good you're a little surprised they said yes. If you're going to bet on a weird resume, own it, but then come back with "left-field background, and three weeks in they've already blown past everyone who ever held the seat." You don't get the free pass that comes stapled to the Harvard grad. You buy it with results.

That's really the whole game with a board: anything you're doing that they wouldn't expect, you over-explain. Here's the unconventional move, here's exactly how I'm tracking it, here's the early signal that'll tell us if the risk went bad. Do that and the weird decision stops scaring them. It starts reading as proof you're on top of your business.

You can hear it break in real time when it turns into "I don't think Bob's that strong" against "I think Bob's great." Nobody wins that. So move the fight to different ground. Picture this as a 500-person company. Where does Bob sit on that org chart, and is there really nobody more qualified to run that function at that size? If you can't honestly argue Bob belongs on the team you're trying to build, you've got your answer today, and it's grounded in something real instead of a vibe.

Product

Every product conversation should run off a strong North Star, and not because it looks good on a slide. A clear philosophy does your filtering for you. If the whole bet is that this social app should never feel like dating, then any idea that even smells like dating is dead on arrival, and every board member can see that for themselves without you having to knock it down. The question stops being "here's my idea" and becomes "does this fit," which is a much shorter meeting.

The other half is a real product process with a real owner. Plenty of business-minded CEOs will tell you they own product when what they actually do is generate ideas, and the ideas come from whatever they heard on the last enterprise sales call rather than any deliberate product work. Run it that way and you've announced, without meaning to, that anybody's idea counts, board members included, because you've got no system for telling a good idea from a loud one.

Velocity

Velocity is just a word for how fast you spend money, and it's where a board's anxiety is usually legitimate. These are growth investors. They know that if you don't hit escape velocity, there's no next round to raise, and the second you took venture money you signed up for a certain pace. Real thing. The unease when it's not happening fast enough isn't the board being difficult.

You earn room here with early wins. If you're a first-timer, or just not the kind of founder who can wave a hand and summon another round, you need to prove early that your spend turns into growth, before anybody starts murmuring about your burn. It works like a political honeymoon. You build up the popularity first, then spend that mandate on the big, risky proposal, because if you load up the truck on the big bet before you've banked any trust and it doesn't pay off by the midterms, you lose the ability to govern. Show that growth arrives roughly when you said it would, without betting the company to get there, and you've bought yourself room to take bigger swings later.

Get everyone honest about the bar, too. This is knowable. Talk to next-round investors about the deals they actually did and what made it to a partner meeting. Maybe 2x annual growth is a non-starter for your Series A and 5x makes you a lock. Now the whole table is staring at one number everybody already agreed to, and the meeting quietly turns from "go faster" into "okay, how do we clear a bar we've all accepted without doing anything stupid."

Posture matters even when the numbers aren't where you want them. The founders who stay in blocker-removal mode, always digging into why they can't go faster, keep their board's respect. The gun-shy ones lose it in a hurry. Hiring is where you see it most. Ask a founder why sales still isn't working and you'll hear, "we tried to hire someone to run it and it didn't work out." Ask what they learned from the bad hire and how they went about replacing them, and half the time the honest answer is they didn't. They quietly had the founder pour in time they don't have, or they gutted it out with the team they already had. One miss and they stopped hiring for the whole function.

Which is the real tell, and the question I'd leave every founder with: after a mistake, do you move faster or slower? A mistake is supposed to sharpen you. One less thing you'll ever get wrong again. The founders who come out of one accelerating are the ones I want to write checks to. The ones who come out flinching are the ones I start losing sleep over.

You've got more room to drive this than you think you do and nobody's coming to take the wheel…

…Unless you let go of it.