Make Boards Work

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level. Alejandra has been an independent board director for almost two decades now. Across large banks, fintechs, family businesses in Mexico and Latin America. And if there's one thing she has learned, it's this: your conviction is your reputation. A chairman of a larg...

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level. When Jan started Everphone ten years ago, he didn't think he'd still be the CEO. But here he is. Eight funding rounds. North of 100 million in revenues. And a board that's changed so completely from year one to year ten that it barely resembles the same insti...

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level. Manuel has been running a PE-backed roll-up in education. Capital was the easy part. He scaled from around 50 people to nearly 250 in two years. The deals weren't the bottleneck. The money wasn't either.  The people were.

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level. We got into something Joanna does not usually talk about publicly. What it's actually like running a family business where the board is your cousins, your siblings, your parents, your uncles, and your in-laws. In a family board, the most important thing isn't the...

Make Boards Work aspires to be the number one business podcast for all those who aim to take their board work to the next level. Ritesh Doshi served on someone else's board for 7 years before he built his own. 7 years in someone else's room, noticing what worked and what didn't. When he eventually resigned from that seat to focus on his business, he asked the person he'd been advis...

We covered a lot of ground - what the Navy taught Chuck about running a company, why he builds his advisory boards specifically around his blind spots, and the difference between healthy ego and toxic ego in the boardroom. One thing we kept coming back to: the worst place to be as a CEO isn't uncertainty. It's being absolutely certain and absolutely wrong.  That's where a good board ea...

We got into something I don't think gets discussed enough, how governance actually works (and often doesn't) in family businesses . The unwritten rules. The baggage. The sibling who was bad at math now running finance. We also talked about what Stefan has come to believe is the crowning moment of entrepreneurship: knowing when to let go. When you're no longer the best owner. And a line Stefan emph...

We talked about what actually happens inside boardrooms when things go wrong. The ego games. The power imbalances. The moments where trust breaks and nobody recovers. Henri shared a line he has been saying for years: there are only two ways to have a real voice on a board. As chairperson. Or as the one board member closest to the founder. Everything else is decoration. We also got into the prisone...