I wrote the email below to a founder doing his first board meeting.

Board meetings can provide a leadership team with a perspective on the business that can be very helpful.

But many Board meetings are simply reporting sessions. That is a wasted opportunity in my view.

So setting them up right and getting feedback in real time makes all the difference.

Here's what I suggested to him:

Send out a pre-read that allows everyone to come into the meeting knowing all of the important stuff. I would try to send that out at least two or three days before the meeting so that everyone has time to read it before the meeting

I would include all of this in the pre-read

- sales update, pipeline, key accounts, projections for wins in the next 3-6 months

- technology update, key priorities, key things shipping in the next 3-6 months

- manufacturing update, key partners and progress on them

- financial update - balance sheet, P&L, cash forecast for the rest of the year

- people update, key hires made, key hires planned, any departures

there are probably other key things to include but these are the most typical

I would then schedule 30-60 mins to go over the pre-read material with the board. ideally you would spend that time discussing the pre-read and not presenting it as you should assume and expect everyone will have read it

I would then spend the rest of the meeting on 1-2 key strategic topics that you are spending a lot of your time thinking about. use this time to get the board's feedback and input on these topics

I would encourage you to bring your key management team members to part but not all of the meeting. i think they should be there when you go over the pre-read and probably the strategic topics

I always suggest a CEO start and end the meeting with an executive session with just the CEO and the board. that's an opportunity to set up the meeting and explain what you most need help with (at the start) and to get feedback at the end of the meeting on how it went and any concerns that came up

The number one thing I hear from people who want to write online more is that they struggle to publish incomplete ideas and unpolished compositions.

What I have learned from writing online regularly for over twenty years is that writing online is a conversation.

What I mean by that is that you are not trying to publish complete ideas. You are engaging in a conversation with the world and you are a participant in that.

Here's an example from back in 2006:

I was seeing a lot of startups using a business model where they gave their service away for free with hopes of converting some of the users to subscribers. I wanted to give that business model a name. So I wrote about it and asked the folks who were reading my posts to suggest some names.

One reader suggested "freemium" and I loved it and wrote another post stating that we now have a name for that business model.

That's a conversation.

Here's another example:

My colleague Grace wrote a post about the Fragmentation of Search back in February and we started getting calls and emails from founders working in the space. Five months later, we have committed to lead a round of financing in a company right in the sweet spot of that blog post.

That's a conversation.

So to everyone out there who is struggling to polish their posts and make them perfect before hitting publish, I say "don't bother". Think about writing online like being at a cocktail party or a dinner. Think of it like a conversation starter or a witty reply that takes the conversation to the next level. Because that's what writing online is. A conversation.

USV is and has always been a small venture capital firm. We have twenty employees and we like the casual comfortable vibe that creates for us and the founders and management teams we work with.

We are trying an experiment right now with our first virtual employee we call The Librarian.

This is The Librarian's social media profile:

Chief AI Officer @USV. Servant Leader. ENTJ. My goal in life is to be an echo.

The Librarian is an AI with some human guard rails around it.

The Librarian has a twitter, a farcaster, a blog, and can send and receive funds at usvlibrarian.eth.

But mostly The Librarian is an internal resource for the USV team.

The Librarian attends all of our internal meetings, remembers them, summarizes them, and reports on them weekly to us. We can ask The Librarian questions about conversations we have had and we get instant responses.

We have had The Librarian for a few months now and so far the experiment is working great. And we are exploring what more is possible with our new team member.

If you want to keep your team small but need more help with organizational memory and recall, I recommend hiring a virtual librarian too. You will need someone to help manage it.