I've served on three boards.
One was a prominent private university. One was an exceptionally fast growing company about to go public. One was a small private company that owned their niche.
Every board meeting was about money. We barely talked product, customer (or student) experience, brand, or anything remotely close to the thing the company did. It was fundraising and financials, and, for me, frustration.
It was mystifying. We don't have a board at 37signals, so I didn't have my own experience to fall back on, but wow, I just didn't get it.
If you're going to have a board, make it an advantage, not an obligation.
Find the best damn product people you can, and take advantage of a half-dozen incredible improvement-focused minds you could never hire to work for you, but are there for you.
A product board. A service board. A board in service of the product, or a product for the service.
"Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something."
@naval
"'All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.' If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there."
@naval
colleges prioritized making people feel perfectly safe over everything else and produced a generation afraid to fail, and thus afraid to take risk, and thus on pace to accomplish extremely little