Yousuf Khan
Contributor
Yousuf Khan is a partner at Ridge Ventures. Prior to joining Ridge, he was the first CIO of Automation Anywhere, CIO and vice president of Customer Success at cloud-based AI platform Moveworks, as well as CIO of Pure Storage, Qualys and Hult International Business School.
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Since making the transition to venture capital, I’ve learned first-hand that a critical part of investor involvement and due diligence involves serving on boards of directors.
I quickly realized that the make-up of a board, as well as what’s required of its members, is vastly different at an early-stage startup than what I’d experienced when I was reporting to the board of a public company.
My formative experience with board meetings was as a CIO, when I would present information and strategy for my piece of the business. I began sitting in on meetings when I wasn’t actively involved, curious to see how they were run. Eventually, I joined the board of a small startup before landing at Ridge Ventures. As a VC, I’ve served on six boards and spoken with hundreds of founders.
When they’re run properly, board meetings provide tremendous value to founders. But they can be tedious tasks that members dread, or a disorganized mess during which nothing meaningful is accomplished. They can run too long, lack the right content, …
