The Foundry Group Manifesto on Board Meetings

(Boulder): Today, Foundry Group, a venture capital firm focused on making early-stage technology investments, participating in select growth rounds, and identifying and supporting the next generation of venture fund managers, released a video manifesto on board meetings.

After years of painstaking research, the firm discovered that nearly 13,729 hours of time are wasted per day by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and board members attending meetings that, while well intentioned, usually contain multiple inefficiencies that are needlessly present.

“Over the past 25 years of being a professional board member, I’ve kept a diary of every single annoyance that I’ve experienced in board meetings. When I realized that each of my partners had done the same, it occurred to us that there was a real problem,” said Brad Feld, Managing Director.

Managing Director Seth Levine added “I’ve been to a board meeting before.”

Jason Mendelson, Managing Director and Chief Video Officer explained why, once again, Foundry Group was resorting to a visual medium in dealing with such an important subject. “I think video is the only real way to show how bad the situation is. It’s a topic that people don’t want to talk about and it’s time to set the record straight.”

Please see below for the full content:

So Seriously? A third video?

Yep. It’s been four years since our last video, Worst of Times was released. In that one we poked fun of current technology not always being as helpful as it could be. Two years before that we released I’m a VC which made fun of venture capitalists (which, to be fair, are very easy targets). In total, the videos had nearly 400,000 views before we accidentally erased the counter which, apparently, is an unrecoverable event. (Thanks YouTube).

We figured it was time to do a new one, but we were having trouble deciding who/what to make fun of. One day, Jason, who leads the creation of our videos, found himself listening to an unprepared venture capitalist berate a CEO to triple her burn and move her well-performing company to the Silicon Valley for no apparent reason. Immediately after this meeting, he started working on Bored Meeting. (True Story).

We had a lot of fun spending time with our entire little company, and a bunch of our friends, making this. Some companies have offsites. I guess that we have “make video day.” Either way, it’s a good bonding experience between all of us and we hope that you find some enjoyment in our lunacy.