Brad Feld

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Technical advisory board meeting

May 14, 2004

I’m sitting in a technical advisory board meeting for one of my companies (Rally Software Development). I’m moblonging from my Danger – pretty cool (at least to me).

We’re having a great meeting. I’ve sat in on a bunch of these over the last 10 years since I started investing in (vs. running) software
companies. Often, these meetings are a complete waste of time because of some disconnect between the goal of the meeting, the group of people in the room, the facilitated process – or worse – the complete dominance of one or two people.

We’ve got 15 people in the room – 5 from Rally and 10 advisors. The
chemistry is awesome – Rally is about to go GA with the first version of their product so we’re dealing with tangibles (instead of the abstract of “what should we do, where should we go”). Management is facilitating well – leting people talk, but keeping them on topic. The richness of the discussion is noticeable to everyone involved – which causes the discussion / debate to feed on itself.

This is one of the funnest parts of this job – seeing / being involved with a group of people passionate about trying to create something new and revolutionary where six months ago there was nothing.