« Connecting The Dots Have You Discovered Your Passion? »

Board Management
May 22 2009

On May 20, 2009, we held a board management Lunch & Learn at the Austin Technology Incubator.   We hold these monthly or bi-monthly.  Our next one is going to be on Building A Great Corporate Culture.  It was a very productive meeting and our companies learned a lot.   I served as moderator and the people on the panel (with the exception of Janice because she got struck by swine flu sick) were:

Richard C. Benkendorf, Co-founder/Managing Principal, Technology Impact Partners (TIP)

Dick, through his role at TIP, serves on the Board of Directors or Advisory Board of both private and public firms as well as investment partnerships including Wave Max, Open Scan, Care Data Systems, Revelation, Concentric Equity Partners, AllianceTech, Adtron, State Street, Murphree Ventures, Facilities Technology Group and CMIT Solutions as well as not for profit entities such hospital charitable or civic organizations.  Other current or very recent investees of TIP include @security, Globalscape (now public), Voxpath Networks, Pointserve, Tobin, Dwight’s Energy Data, Advent Networks, Liberty Fitness, Facilities Technology Group, American Telesource (now public), Reunion Ventures, and Affinegy.

Previously, Dick was a Senior VP of Ameritech and prior to that spent 16 years at IBM.  He founded The American Software Company (TASC) and was President of Telemed and Chairman of Execucom.  He founded T/D Technology, a private equity firm that acquired and operated software and information technology firms.  He also founded ISSS Ventures, a $155M venture capital fund.

Bob Bridge, Entrepreneur In Residence, Office of Technology Commercialization

Bob has been in management, marketing, and engineering roles at semiconductor and system companies for 33 years, including serving as founding CEO at three technology companies. One of those companies, Zilker Labs was sold to Intersil in December 2008. Bob has also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Austin Ventures, vice president of marketing at Agere (a network processor IC startup), and vice president and general manager for communications ICs at Crystal Semiconductor/Cirrus Logic. Additionally, Bob has held engineering and management positions at Motorola, AT&T corporate headquarters and AT&T Bell Labs. Bob holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree in Mathematical Sciences from Rice University.

Janice Ryan, CEO and Chairman of Social Dynamix

Janice Ryan has a 27 year track record of growing profitable sales organizations and venture-backed startups.  She is currently CEO and Chairman of Social Dynamix, an early stage venture focused on tools for social media performance measurement.  Prior to this, she was CEO of Sigma Dynamics, a predictive analytics software company in San Mateo, which under her leadership was sold to Oracle (ORCL) in August of ’06.  Prior to Sigma Dynamics, Ryan was the founding President/COO, of ROME Corporation, headquartered in Austin, Texas.  She was also a member of the founding executive team that launched Vignette Corporation (VIGN), an early internet enterprise software company which experienced one of the most successful IPOs of 1999.  As Vice President of Sales at Vignette, Ryan established the company’s sales infrastructure and management team, and was responsible for driving Vignette’s revenue through all channels worldwide, including direct sales, telesales and a network of systems integrators and resellers.

Ryan has served on several high tech Boards and Advisory Boards, and as an Interim Executive for multiple venture-backed companies in Texas and California.  Early in her career she held a variety of senior sales and leadership positions at IBM, Lotus Development, Filenet Corporation and ViewStar.  Active in philanthropic causes, Ryan has also served on various non-profit Boards, currently serving with the Center for Child Protection.  She earned her BBA degree from Baylor University with distinction in the fall of 1977.

Brian P. Wong, Director, Intersil Corp.

Brian was the President and CEO of D2Audio Corporation, a leading audio semiconductor and software company, which he recently sold to Intersil, a public company in August 2008.  He is currently running the D2Audio-Intersil business as part of Intersil Corp. Mr. Wong has more than 26 years experience as an executive and general manager in the sales, marketing and the development of semiconductors, firmware and software.  Market sector experience includes digital media, consumer, IT and computing, telecom, and storage.  His technology experience includes power management; digital audio, optical and wired datacom; data converters; semiconductors; optical, firmware/software.

Brian has closed over $130M from Venture Capital funds and corporate strategic partners.  He has formed Strategic Partnerships involving investment and/or licensing with AMD, Intel, Intersil, Delta Electronics, MediaTek, and Form Factor. Previously, Mr. Wong was CEO at Primarion Inc, a company focused on I/O and Power Management ICs, which was acquired by Infineon.  Prior to that, he was a senior manager at TRW and ran the Mixed Signal IC business, which included data converter, Clock/Data Recovery, PLL, and high speed digital ICs. Mr. Wong holds a BSEE from University of California, Los Angeles, a MSEE from University of Southern California, has taken graduate management classes at UCLA Anderson School of Management. He is the Chairman of The Austin Technology Council, sits on the Advisory Board for the UC Davis ECE Department, and served on the board of Integral Wave Technologies, a power management company.

The key takeaways were:

  • Pick and interview your board members carefully.  Pick people with skills that complement yours.
  • Make sure there are no surprises on the day of the board meeting, unless of course they are good surprises!
  • Equity compensation for board members ranges from .25% to 1.00% and is granted up front or vests over time depending on the board and the company
  • Sizes of the board ranges from 3 to 5 people at the very early stage.  Any more it becomes unweildy and unproductive.
  • Boards in small, start-up companies usually meet at least once per month.
  • After a successful board meeting, everyone should know the financial state of the company, people/equity grants, milestones achieved, and milestones to be achieved.

It was great to hear the war stories and I contributed some of my own.   They are truly battle scars.

Author: | Filed under: entrepreneurship, venture capital | Tags: , | Comments Off on Board Management

Comments are closed.