E5: Board meetings shouldn’t be about reporting - with Alysaa Co

Board meetings should not be focused on reporting, as many are, but instead should be focused on companies' key strategic priorities.

What's one piece of advice you give finance leaders that are scaling their team.

Think of an AI copilot or autopilot as a team member you can hire before you actually go hire an FTE.

What's one trend in finance and accounting that you believe will shape the next five years?

What we'll see in the next five years is a lot more autopilot capabilities. We're not just automating collecting data from a PDF, but instead we're automating the ask. I know this person has this. I ask them for it every month. Can we automate that action? And we're really excited about that over the next five years.

You're listening to the 10x Finance podcast. Quick, candid conversations with the people shaping modern finance. Hosted by Albert Ghazi.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 10x Finance Podcast, where we dive into the real challenges and opportunities shaping modern finance teams. I'm Albert Gozi, Co Founder and CEO of Aleph, and I'm joined by Elisa Ko, Partner at VCB. Elisa, great to have you here.

Thanks for having me, Albert.

Right. I'm, of course, very familiar. VCB is an investor in Aleph. Elisa comes to every board meeting. But for those of you in the audience that might not know BCB, can you tell us a little bit about the fund?

Definitely. And it's great to be on here. I feel like we've worked so closely together over the last two or three years. And so a podcast is sort of formalizing that in some ways.

But, yeah, I, I'm Alyssa. As Albert mentioned, I'm a partner here at Bain Capital Ventures. We are a multistage venture firm as part of the broader Bain Capital ecosystem. For those who are less familiar, Bain Capital is a large private equity firm, and we invest as part of that firm in pre seed through pre IPO opportunities.

We mainly invest across four key areas: application software, infrastructure, commerce, and fintech.

All right. So if you've seen the podcast, you know how we start. So what's your hot take?

Definitely. Well, it's relevant given how Albert introduced me, given I go to the Aleph board meetings. But my hot take is that board meetings should not be focused on reporting, as many are, but instead should be focused on companies' key strategic priorities. We shouldn't be focused on reading out financials or things that could be easily shared in a pre read. Let's get down to sort of the core things of the business that really move the needle.

Perfect. So let's dissect that and go deeper into some of those. So you're saying board meetings shouldn't be about reporting. I know, because we talked about this before, that it doesn't mean that reporting shouldn't happen. So like, how should the reporting happen so it's not part of a board meeting, but still the information is there for people to have context?

Yeah, definitely. I think it's an important callout, which is that I'm not saying reporting is not important. I think reporting is something that can be done before a board meeting. You can share a set of financials and key metrics of a business, send it three to five days in advance to your board members, and have them comment async.

It also allows you to centralize the conversation on metrics that do matter in reporting. Board members can comment and say, I'd love to dive more into this number, or I'd love to discuss how we can move the needle on this. Some of those things can be discussed ad hoc or async in those comments. And then you can sort of decide on the two to three things that everyone coalesces on.

Yeah. This is really worth the discussion in the meeting. And it just like elevates the conversation around reporting in the board meeting to not be a readout. I've been part of these board meetings that are like, let's go line by line down the income statement and talk about every dollar and every expense.

And that just doesn't really do anyone justice in that conversation.

I mean, now you go to many boards, so you see a wide variety of how founders approach it. You know, I have an N of one, which is our left for meetings. Still talking about some of that pre read that takes reporting out of the way so we can discuss other topics. What are some of the best things that you've seen founders do that maybe are not widespread? Maybe like founders that you worked are particularly good at either summarize reporting or actually a lot of detail. What what jumps out?

Yeah. I mean, not to call out Aleph as best in class on this dimension, but there's two things. One, when you dog feed your own product and your product is an FP and A AI powered reporting tool, it makes your reporting really high quality. And I frankly think that's like one thing a lot of people don't do.

They don't have the ability to, like, zoom out to, like, the five line items that matter from a reporting perspective, but then drill down into those sort of distinct drivers of those items. So take something like sales and marketing expense. I feel like in our board meetings, because of the power of the left tool, we can actually double click into like, you know, what are we spending on our AEs this quarter and how are we spending them and what drivers and even like what conferences they're going to. And then a lot of times there's just like not that data quality and clarity.

So that's one on the reporting side. I'd say zooming out on like ways to spend the board meeting effectively. Something that I really love on this concept of like, let's focus on strategic priorities and not on reporting is give us the context we need as board members to be able to be a thought partner to you on those subjects. And so a lot of founders just say like, Hey, I'm really struggling with channel partners and write three lines about that.

And it's not enough context for someone who isn't spending twenty fourseven in your business to really opine. And so it's a, if it's a real strategic priority that you want your board members to think through, think of contacts that they can lean on to ask for advice for you and really be a participant of that conversation. You need to write robust context on, you know, what we've tried, what's working, what's not working. That usually looks like one to two pages.

And then your board members need to commit to pre reading that so that when you come to the conversation, you're really having sort of a real deep conversation instead of a shallow one.

Yeah. And I think that's great. You know, like, as I was saying earlier, of like getting reporting out of the way, it's and I like what you're saying of it's not just reporting, it's really like building context. Part of that might be numbers, but part of that might be a narrative around and what I remember, you know, been doing board meetings for a while now, but, like, some of the early feedback was that of, like, sometimes, yeah, like, I had the idea of getting all the numbers out and, you know, I love numbers and I will always do it, but I feel like giving that extra context and in the end, like, well, you asked to be able to give the more member time to do pre work and come with like a formed opinion as opposed to having to think on their feet on what's the more, most rigid priority. I wonder where that resonates.

It resonates a ton. I also think most people have a diverse board of people that really resonate and have perspectives on different parts of the business. And even as you think about reporting different areas of spend, different ways that you report revenue, types of revenue, you know, people might pick up on different details. And so I think having folks really pre read and understand what's going on in the business and then having that sort of like three member conversation, which is like, why aren't we focused on this?

And someone else might say, well, I think that we should actually be focused on this based on how I interpreted the data. And as a founder, I think it's sort of you're a conductor of that conversation as well. You're taking feedback from different people and you're consolidating that into like one, what you should do with the business based on this feedback, but two, you're sort of like clarifying and bringing together different people with different backgrounds and perspectives. You might have someone who's a product leader on your board versus someone who's been a CFO in the past.

And so how they think about reporting looks really differently too. And so as you think about, to your point, it's not just about the numbers, but about the commentary. The commentary is really important as you think about who's on your board and how they interpret and digest information.

Nice. And as you think about like the strategic priorities, how much, what do think is the right balance of, you know, the team, the CEO being the one that say these are the most important things to talk about versus the other part is also true that is, you know, the board investors are closer to the market and might also add value with topics that might be a blind spot for the actual management team. So how much do you think it's, you know, it's just like the role of the CEO versus it's good to do a bit of a mix and match there?

Yeah, totally. I mean, this is a very, I feel like common opinion, but I can't imagine spending ten hours, a month with a portfolio company and feeling like I have a better sense of what their sort of like big questions on operating are better than they do. And so my personal perspective is like founders live their businesses day in and day out. They know the things that are moving the needle and where they need the most help.

And we should try to jump in, especially as early stage investors in supporting them on those things. I think where, to your point, investors have a lot of impact though, is we see data points across categories, both in the specific category that you play in, but horizontally. And I think where that matters is in two key areas. One is around financing.

Investors just have better benchmarking on how companies are raising capital, what the benchmarks and comps in the market are. And so as you think about raising capital, that's somewhere where investors can really drive the conversation versus be more reactive. And then I think the other area, and we think about this a lot at BCB, is key hires and key customers and how to move the needle on corporate development and marketing. And we can be more proactive there because we've hired a bench of operators internally to help our portfolio companies drive faster on those areas.

So we might be more proactive because we have an operating bench there. But generally, I'd say we're, we're pretty receptive to where founders want to drive the conversation. The other thing I was going to mention is you bring up like CEO versus team that I think is pretty interesting in board meetings is I think board meetings are an incredible tool to bring, you know, either budding talent on your team or key executives into a really important conversation.

And I think a lot of founders miss the mark on, you know, activating those folks who are real experts in their domain area within the company and bringing them into a board conversation. And I think it really empowers those people. And it gives them context at the board level and like the discussion you're having and the strategic priorities. Of course, not everyone can join every time. Not everyone can do a readout on their department every single time you have a board meeting, but I think being selective around bringing people in is a tool that's really worked for my companies as well.

When you talk about, you know, you're, you're now in the board meeting, you get the right context. How do you think about time management within board meetings? And I think it's something that, like, you know, we've been iterating with and going back and forth. Is it, like, there to let the conversations develop and we should spend as much time as we need to before moving on to a new topic? Are you more of a fan of, Hey, let's time box conversations. We can speak about any topic for like three hours. Where do you stand on that spectrum?

Yeah, it's a great question. And it sort of goes back to this reporting conversation, which is like, if you're getting rid of this sort of like pre read relevant topics, then hopefully you're able to focus on the strategic priorities. Obviously strategic priorities have varying level of importance. And one thing I don't see founders do enough is order the topics of conversation in order of importance.

Let's start with the biggest, biggest, most important subjects. That way, if we have five things we want to talk about and we don't have time for the last two, hopefully they weren't as needle moving, but also we could maybe find thirty to forty five minutes, two weeks from now to finish those conversations. If you feel like they're very necessary. Hopefully we've prioritized the flow of conversation in such a way that we've tackled the first three.

To your point on flow and whether you let conversations happen organically versus time box things, I think you have to time box these conversations. It's like any meeting. You set an agenda, you set times that you're going to talk about things, and you cut sort of the conversation where it is. I think there's a lot of, we talked about it earlier, this like back and forth discourse between board members.

And I think it's helpful, but there's diminishing returns when that happens for twenty to thirty minutes. And so as a founder, I think you have to reflect while you're in that conversation and say, have I gotten enough feedback on this topic? And have I heard both sides to then go back and think about the right path forward? I think rarely in board meetings do I see people actually like get to the answer and say, Hey, we're going to move in this direction now.

I think really the board meeting is like, Here's three different perspectives on this topic. And you go back, talk to your team, have way more context and data, and make a decision after the fact. And I think that's another big failure of board meetings that you try to get to like the answer instead of just like hearing different points of view, and empower you to make the right decision.

Makes a lot of sense. Maybe one final question on the topic of board meetings before we move on to the rapid fire. Are there any specific, you know, slides or any specific material that you particularly like or any slide that you see often that you actually dislike in terms of, like, format content?

Not to throw hate on any of my companies. I mean, obviously, this varies based on what's important to your business. And so I don't want to use this specific example as as sort of like a broad statement. But one thing I see, for example, on on marketing callouts is like and I think this happens in particular with marketing because there's so much detail you can go into on like funnel, for example, and like MQLs to SQLs and where you're doing all the spend.

I find marketing slides as part of board meetings tend to be like very data dense and often like in a way that's not productive to like having conversation, especially as someone who's not in the business. I don't know how many conferences you should go to every year, and I don't know how much you should spend on your booth. And if I don't have any feedback to provide on that, maybe it shouldn't be in the board materials. So I think that is a helpful framework of is the level of detail so granular that the person who's not in the business can't really add any helpful commentary to that conversation?

And if so, let's not include that. Let's, let's sort of like elevate it to the level that's helpful enough for someone to opine. The slides I love in it, and we were talking about this before on the strategic priorities is like, let's empower people with the details they do need on the three strategic priorities and pretty lengthy to be able to have those conversations. And so those are my favorite topics.

It's the three sort of one pagers I get before a board meeting that's encapsulating all of the thoughts that the business has had and the leaders have had on this topic and all of the internal wrestling we've done. And I think that back and forth, Hey, we've tried this. We've tried that. These two people disagree on the approach here.

I think all of that is really valuable and not a lot of people capture all of it when they're preparing board materials.

All right. I think there's a lot more to go in-depth here, but we're getting to the end of the episode. Maybe we should do a follow-up, Alisa, where we do some of our template marketing slide for a board meeting, your seal of approval.

We should. I just want to say the overarching comment to these questions is if you use Aleph, your board meetings will be seamless. That's sort of the main takeaway.

Perfect. And I will go and take some notes and learnings for our internal board meetings as well.

All right. So as we go, we typically do a rapid fire wrap up. Are you ready to go?

I'm ready.

All right. What's one mistake you see finance teams make over and over again?

We talked about this a little bit already.

This sort of reporting at too granular detail for anyone to understand what's actually important in the business. If you show thirty line items in your P and L, it's hard to know what five matter.

Every time I need more clarity, I start from a blank page and I call it like a napkin math. And like, you know, if your math doesn't fit in a napkin, maybe it's like you're starting to detail.

I love that.

What's one piece of advice you would give finance leaders that are scaling their team?

This is very sort of twenty twenty five, but, think of an AI, copilot or autopilot as a team member you can hire before you actually go hire an FTE.

I feel like that opinion people either love you or hate you for it, but that's what we're here for.

I'm excited for the hate in the comments section.

And the last one is what's one trend in finance and accounting that you believe will shape the next five years?

It's sort of related to the last comment, but finance has been slow to adopt AI tools relative to other industries. Part of it is sort of the need for one hundred percent accuracy. But I think what we'll see in the next five years is a lot more autopilot capabilities. And one area that I'm like really excited about here is I spent a lot of time in accounting technology. And at the end of every month or quarter, you do some reconciliation. And a lot of this is like collaborating with other team members in different business units to get things like expenses and receipts and etcetera, that aren't stored in a centralized place.

I'm really excited for a world in which we're not just automating collecting data from a PDF, but instead we're automating the ask. I know this person has this. I ask them for it every month. Can we automate that action? And really a lot of that is the admin work that's owned by accounting and finance teams, and I think it'll really help elevate them. Today, the thing that's missing is context and being able to actually take action. And we're really excited about that over the next five years.

So my agent talking to your agent to figure out the numbers out.

Exactly. Maybe one day we'll have agent to agent board meetings. That'll be a crazy world.

You know, like, some time back to do other stuff. Alright. Alisa, thanks so much for coming to the podcast. It's been a pleasure to have you.

Thanks for having me.

That's it for this episode of the 10x Finance Podcast, bringing you sharp, real world finance conversations powered by Aleph. Learn more at get aleph dot com. That's g e t a l e p h dot com.

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