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Board Time Commitment
In earlier times, most companies had quarterly board meetings. Today, many early-stage, rapidly growing companies have monthly board meetings -- weekly is not unusual.
Large, and old economy companies, often grow at 5 to 10% per year. An early stage tech company can grow at over 100% per year. This increased growth rate means that the company is also changing faster, quite possibly ten times faster.
If a company growing at 5 to 10% per year can be effectively governed with quarterly meetings, a company growing at 100% per year probably needs weekly board meetings to achieve the same level of governance.
When retreats, travel, reading, meeting prep time, ad-hoc and committee meetings are also factored in, a director's total time commitment can easily be as much as ten times the amount of time spent in formal board meetings.
This can easily become the equivalent of two to three days per month for a good director of a rapidly growing company.
The job of a 'lead director' or 'Chair' can easily be double that depending on the type of Chair and how much work they are doing mentoring and one-on-one with the CEO or other directors. The administration of the board is also a significant time commitment. In different companies the board admin could done by the secretary, CFO, CEO, Chair or a combination.
This time commitment means that an individual who also has a full time job can probably only do justice to one, or possibly two, high growth company boards.
A person whose primarily job it is to sit on boards, like a fund manager, might be able to be effective on four to six early-stage boards (depending on their other responsibilities and how enthusiastic they are about doing their e-mail and expense reports on the weekends.)
If this does not seem intuitively satisfying, ask some greybeard angel investors or venture capitalists how many boards its possible to sit on, or Chair. The answers will be surprisingly consistent. They will tell you that four to six boards is close to be a full time job.
Three or four Chair roles in high growth companies will keep most people extremely busy even if they don't have any other work to do.
This time commitment means it's now much harder to recruit good boards and that companies have to be fair in compensating directors.
