At TechStars, we talk often about “mentor whiplash” – the thing that happens when you get seemingly conflicting advice from multiple mentors. Talk to five mentors; get seven different opinions! This is normal, as there is no right or absolute answer in many cases, people have different perspectives and experiences, and they are responding to different inputs (based on their own context), even if the data they are presented with looks the same on the surface.

Yesterday, Steve Blank and I both put up articles on the WSJ Accelerators site. The question for the week was “When should you have a board of directors or a board of advisors?” My answer was Start Building Your Board Early. Steve’s was Don’t Give Away Your Board Seats. I just went back and read each of them. On the surface they seem to be opposite views. But upon reading them carefully, I think they are both right, and a great example of mentor whiplash.

For context, I have enormous respect for Steve and I learn a lot from him. We are on the UP Global board together but have never served on a for-profit board together. We both started out as entrepreneurs and have spent a lot of time participating in, learning about, and teaching how to create and scale startups. I’ve been on lots of boards – ranging from great to shitty; I expect Steve has as well. While we haven’t spent a lot of physical time together, all of our virtual time has been stimulating to me, even when we disagree (which is possibly unsettling but hopefully entertaining to those observing.) And while we are both very busy in our separate universes, my sense is they overlap nicely and probably converge in some galaxy far far away.

So – when you read Steve’s article and hear “Steve says don’t add a board member until after you raise a VC round” and then read my article and conclude “Brad says add a board member before you raise a VC round” it’s easy to say “wow – ok – that sort of – well – doesn’t really help – I guess I have to pick sides.” You can line up paragraphs and have an amusing “but Brad said, but Steve said” kind of thing. I considered making a Madlib out of this, but had too many other things to do this morning.

But if you go one level deeper, we are both saying “be careful with who you add to your board.” I’m taking a positive view – assuming that you are doing this – and adding someone you trust and has a philosophy of helping support the entrepreneur. From my perspective:

“… Early stage board of directors should be focused on being an extension of the team, helping the entrepreneurs get out of the gate, and get the business up and running. Often, entrepreneurs don’t build a board until they are forced to by their VCs when they raise their first financing round. This is dumb, as you are missing the opportunity to add at least one person to the team who — as a board member — can help you navigate the early process of building your company and raising that first round. In some cases, this can be transformative.”

Steve takes the opposite view – concerned that anyone who wants to be on an early stage board is resume padding, potentially a control freak, or the enemy of the founders.

“At the end of the day, your board is not your friend. You may like them and they might like you, but they have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, not the founders. And they have a fiduciary responsibility to their own limited partners. That means the board is your boss, and they have an obligation to optimize results for the company. You may be the ex-employees one day if they think you’re holding the company back.”

Totally valid. And it reinforces the point we both are making, which Maynard Webb makes more clearly in his Accelerator post ‘Date’ Advisers, ‘Marry’ Board Members. When I reflect on my post, I didn’t state this very well. Anytime you add an outside board member, you should be reaching high and adding someone you think will really be helpful. You are not looking for a “boss” or someone who is going to hide behind their abstract fiduciary responsibilities to all shareholders (which they probably don’t actually understand) – you are looking for an early teammate who is going to help you win. Sure – there will be cases where they have to consider their fiduciary responsibilities, but their perspective should be that of helping support the entrepreneurs in whatever way the entrepreneurs need.

The power of a great entrepreneur is to collect a lot of data and make a decision based on their own point of view and conviction. You’ve got a lot of info – including some different perspectives from the WSJ Accelerators segment this week. That’s their goal – now I encourage you to read the articles carefully, think about what you want your board to be like, and take action on it.

I’ve been on a lot of boards. I’m still on a lot of boards. And I’ve been thinking about boards a lot as I work on my next book Startup Boards: Recreating the Board of Directors to Be Relevant to Entrepreneurial Companies.

I used to think every board needed a chairman and early in my investing career I was often this chairman (or co-chairman). At some point I began feeling like the chairman role in a private company both undermined the CEO and sent the wrong signal to the employees of the company, and I preferred that the CEO be the chairman. I also started disliking being the chairman, as it seemed to create a view that I had some kind of ultimate power and responsibility for the company that I rarely had, and that almost always belonged to the CEO. So I stopped being chairman and in a number of cases refused to be called it, even when I played the role of it. The one exception I made was non-profits, where chairman seems to have a somewhat different connotation. And since I’ve decided not to be on public company boards, I don’t have to make a decision in that context.

Several years ago I started using, and encountering, the phrase “lead director” more frequently. Recently, I decided it’s the right one and have used it to replace chairman in my vocabulary. And, when asked the question, “does a private company board need a chairman”, I now say “no, but it needs a lead director.”

The lead director is responsible for working with the CEO to manage the board of directors. The lead director is always the most active director and in many cases represents the largest non-founder shareholder in the company when a company is private. The lead director is not the communication conduit to the CEO – every director interacts directly with the CEO – but the lead director gets involved in any conflict between a director and the CEO, any concerns that arise, and any conflicts between directors. And the lead director helps the CEO manage the board meetings.

The lead director should be the CEO’s board confidant, organizer, and conflict resolver. I sort of like the word consigliere, as used in The Godfather, a lot, although it has both obvious negative connotations and a different actual function in real life than the one represented in the film, so I’m searching for a better one.

When I look at the boards I’m currently on, I play this role in many, but not all of them. And the phrase feels correct to me.

Do you have a lead director on your board? How about a chairman? What do they do and how does it feel? And is there a better word than consigliere?

This week I had two meetings with CEOs of companies we’ve recently invested in where the question of “what is an ideal board meeting” came up. I’m writing an entire book on it called Startup Boards: Reinventing the Board of Directors to Better Support the Entrepreneur so it’s easy for me to define my ideal board meeting at this point since my head is pretty deep into it intellectually.

One of the things I always suggest to CEOs is that they be an outside director for one company that is not their own. I don’t care how big or small the company is, whether or not I have an involvement in the company, or if the CEO knows the entrepreneurs involved. I’m much more interested in the CEO having the experience of being a board member for someone else’s company.

Being CEO of a fast growing startup is a tough job. There are awesome days, dismal days, and lots of in-between days. I’ve never been in a startup that was a straight line of progress over time and I’ve never worked with a CEO who didn’t regularly learn new things, have stuff not work, and go through stretches of huge uncertainty and struggle.

Given that I am no longer a CEO (although I was once – for seven years) I don’t feel the pressure of being CEO. As a result I’ve spent a lot of the past 17 years being able to provide perspective for the CEOs I work with. Even when I’m deeply invested in the company, I can be emotionally and functionally detached from the pressure and dynamics of what the CEO is going through on a daily basis while still understanding the issues since I’ve had the experience.

Now, imagine you are a CEO of a fast growing startup. Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to spend a small amount of your time in that same emotional and functional detachment for someone else’s company? Not only would it stretch some new muscles for you, it’d give you a much broader perspective on how “the job of a CEO” works. You might have new empathy for a CEO, which could include self-empathy (since you are also a CEO) – which is a tough concept for some, but is fundamentally about understanding yourself better, especially when you are under emotional distress of some sort. You’d have empathy for other board members and would either appreciate your own board members more, or learn tools and approaches to develop a more effective relationship with them, or decide you need different ones.

There are lots of other subtle benefits. You’ll extend your network. You’ll view a company from a different vantage point. You’ll be on the other side of the financing discussions (a board member, rather than the CEO). You’ll understand “fiduciary responsibility” more deeply. You’ll have a peer relationship with another CEO that you have a vested interest in that crosses over to a board – CEO relationship. You’ll get exposed to new management styles. You’ll experience different conflicts that you won’t have the same type of pressure from. The list goes on and on.

I usually recommend only one outside board. Not two, not three – just one. Any more than one is too many – as an active CEO you just won’t have time to be serious and deliberate about it. While you might feel like you have capacity for more, your company needs your attention first. There are exceptions, especially with serial entrepreneurs who have a unique relationship with an investor where it’s a deeper, collaborative relationship across multiple companies (I have a few of these), but generally one is plenty.

I don’t count non-profit boards in this mix. Do as much non-profit stuff as you want. The dynamics, incentives, motivations, and things you’ll learn and experience are totally different. That’s not what this is about.

If you are a CEO of a startup company and you aren’t on one other board as an outside director, think hard about doing it. And, if you are in my world and aren’t on an outside board, holler if you want my help getting you connected up with some folks.

Over the past year, I’ve been systematically trying to change the way the board meetings work for the companies that I’m on the boards of. I’ve done a bunch of experiments and continue to learn what works and what doesn’t work.

Ever since I started investing in the mid-1990′s I’ve been exposed to a concept called “board observer rights.” When we did investments at Mobius Venture Capital, in addition to a board seat, we always got board observer rights. This was a way for us to bring another person to the board meeting other than the board member (usually an associate or a principal but sometimes another partner), or have someone sit in for the board member if the board member wasn’t available.

Early in the life of a company, this often seems manageable. But after several rounds of financings with new investors, I’ve often found myself in board meetings with ten or more people. I think the most I’ve ever seen was about 25 people in the room for a board that had five board members. As you’d expect, there was very little critical thinking or real discussion in these board meetings; instead, the management team just presented to the mass of people in the room. And, in this context, the board members rarely formed a tight and effective working relationship.

Over the last few years, I’ve become very anti-board observer. I’ve been on several boards where the CEO didn’t allow board observers in the meeting. I’ve been on several boards where there were observers in the room, but they weren’t allowed to sit at the board table and could only “observe”. In both cases, the quality and level of discussion in the board meeting was dramatically higher.

I’ve come to believe that formal board observer rights shouldn’t exist. Instead, they should be voluntary and controlled by the CEO. In some cases, the CEO will want observers at the meeting; in other cases he won’t. But it should be up to him.

The best board meetings I’ve been at have been ones that only have the board members and select participants from the management team in the room. Casual discussion, either through dinner the night before or lunch after the board meeting, with an extended group including people from the management team and any other investors, is an effective way to engage everyone else. But the 25 person board meeting is rarely effective.

I spend all of my working time in the domain of software, Internet, and entrepreneurship. Over the past few years I’ve gotten increasingly involved in a handful of political situations – local, state, and national – that directly impact companies either in the ecosystem I’m part of or that I’ve invested in. Many of these political situations stifle entrepreneurship, innovation, or opportunities for these companies.

I’ve come to appreciate the importance of organizations of like-minded individuals working together to advocate clear positions and help acceleration entrepreneurship and innovation. Historically I’ve been very reticent to formally join anything, preferring to help as much as I can as an individual contributor. Recently, I’ve stepped up my involvement in some non-profits, adding Startup Weekend and Startup Colorado to the list of non-profits I’m working with in addition to my longstanding role as chair of the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

When my long time friend Don Dodge reached out and asked me to join the board of the Application Developers Alliance, I said yes. Developers are at the heart of the universe I work in and central to many of the things I do. Making sure they have a voice in the rapidly evolving software / Internet ecosystem on a global scale is important to me. Hopefully I can be helpful.

In the mean time, if you are a company that develops applications or provides ecosystems for application developers, take a look at the current member list and consider joining our effort.