The Advisory Board
Seven seats. Each one has a job.
We are assembling an advisory board of seven, and we are being slow about it on purpose. A board assembled for the logos is a board that says yes. We are building one that can stop us.
Every seat exists because there is a specific way this company can fail that the two of us cannot see from inside it. Names are published as each is confirmed, with the terms of the engagement.
The seats
01 · The Builder. Somebody who has taken a network business from nothing to real scale, and who remembers the month it nearly ended. Networks fail in a small number of ways and almost all of them are invisible until you have lived through one. This seat names the failure before it arrives.
02 · The Scholar. Somebody who has studied reciprocity as a subject rather than as a slogan. Mutual help is one of the oldest structures human societies have, it has been designed and redesigned for centuries, and most of the ways it collapses are already documented. This seat tells us when we are about to rebuild something that has already failed.
03 · The Engineer. Somebody working on the systems that make matching, ranking and valuation possible, who can tell the difference between a hard problem and an impossible one. This seat keeps our ambition honest about what the machines can actually do this year.
04 · The Steward. Somebody who has run governance, standards or trust and safety at scale, and who has enforced a rule that cost money. The invariants we published are worth exactly as much as our willingness to hold them on the day they become expensive. This seat is here for that day.
05 · The Advocate. Somebody with a profound record in impact, entitled to hold a company whose product is generosity to an unusually high standard. A company can hold itself to anything. Being held to it by somebody who has earned the right is different.
06 · The Opener. Somebody with genuine depth in a market this reaches next, across Europe, the Gulf, Asia, Africa and North America. A network business is global only when somebody real is already there. This seat makes the second country as considered as the first.
07 · The Backer. Somebody who has put their own money into consumer networks and understands that this one gets harder before it gets easier. This seat keeps the capital conversation honest in both directions.
What we ask
Four hours a quarter, and the uncomfortable sentence when it is warranted. An adviser who has never disagreed with us in writing is not doing the job.
The Protocols bind advisers exactly as they bind founders.
What we offer
Everything we see. Advisers get the same numbers the founders do, at the same time, including the ones going the wrong way.
A seat at the decisions that are still reversible, rather than a briefing after they are not.
Written terms, including compensation, before anything begins.
How this is run
Every adviser is engaged on written terms and every relationship is disclosed. Nobody advises this company who cannot say the uncomfortable thing, and nobody holds a seat for the showcase.
Composition matters as much as the seats. Seven people, and a real spread of gender, nationality and discipline. A board that has lived one life sees one set of risks.
If a seat is yours
Write to [email protected]. Tell us which seat, and the one thing about this company you would change first.