Concise Board Materials
Max Levchin (of Paypal and Affirm fame) once gave me an awesome back-handed compliment along the lines of:
Geoff, you have made some great board decks that are less than ten pages. I think the quality of our meetings is inversely correlated to board deck length.
Of course, that day our deck was probably fifty pages. 🤦♂️ I’ve read a lot of start-up board decks since then and can report that 50-100 pages is not uncommon. IMO there is very little upside to these long decks, and plenty of downside (e.g., takes forever to create, means you’re not synthesizing what’s important, board members can’t possibly digest it all, and oh by the way, you’re just asking them to nitpick you on some data point from page 87). As a default, I encourage most start-ups to shoot for board decks of ten pages, or an Amazon-style memo instead if that’s your thing.