I think it is a good habit to avoid the 'because the board says ...' prompt for decisions. It is a very seductive short cut but it also keeps the other folks out of touch with the trade-offs. In an early startup I was in, I got to see how it affected people (it makes them feel like they are robots or serfs).
The truth is, if you know that the board said to do something, you were also there at the conversation about it, and in that conversation are important bits about tradeoffs and how things were considered. Telling someone "After considering X, Y, and Z, the board and I decided that Q was going to be our best course of action."
I have also seen it used as a shield, as in "the board said we have to do this" which the implication that the person making the request (typically the CEO) didn't agree with the request but was overridden. But the truth is that in a start-up, and even in a larger company, the board is often unwilling to override a CEO's solution to a problem, in favor of one of their own. Good board members respect that the CEO's day to day vision of what is going on carries a lot of weight.
I've never been the one passing down board decisions- how often is it used as a shield purely as strategy? What I mean is, the CEO (or whomever) secretly agrees with the board but wants/needs to appear to the employees like they fought the board and disagree?
Sadly, in my experience it has been a common technique used by poor managers to enact a distasteful policy by blaming it on some higher authority. And that it can be a culture thing, which is their manager does it, and their manager's manager does it, and the CEO does it.
Wow. That means Mattermark has 25 employees at the absolute minimum.
From what I can tell [1] Mattermark is a private angelist with better metrics for VC's and Super Angels. That's not really that hard of a problem. In other words, they probably aren't doing/implementing basic research towards a product solution. That's not to say it's easy to build the business, it just means they don't need to build or prove new technology - which would seem to drive costs/employees.
I am fairly new to the Startup world (only ~3 years) so I still don't really understand why fairly simple problems, using off the shelf pieces, need so many people working on them. Someone please help me understand this. Is it all customer service? Is it having redundancy so that people can work 30 hour weeks?
I used to think like you, before I experienced the inner machinations of tech m&a.
Somewhere out there are a handful of big companies who sell billions of dollars worth of collective research data. I don't know the market but maybe these are companies like Bloomberg, Gartner, etc. one day an exec at one of these companies will want to add startup research (or whatever MM's product is) to their product suite. They will evaluate the cost of building it internally versus buying someone like MM. Keeping in mind that if you build internally, it takes time (maybe a year to replicate), and has significant failure risks. So they do the math and all of a sudden $100m to acquire MM makes sense. Keeping in mind it isn't the exec's $100m and that spending $15m and failing looks a lot worse than spending $100m and doing OK.
MM's job is to keep growing/pivoting until one of these big fish bite. If no one bites, they have to hope they end up with a lot of independent value.
The truth is, if you know that the board said to do something, you were also there at the conversation about it, and in that conversation are important bits about tradeoffs and how things were considered. Telling someone "After considering X, Y, and Z, the board and I decided that Q was going to be our best course of action."
I have also seen it used as a shield, as in "the board said we have to do this" which the implication that the person making the request (typically the CEO) didn't agree with the request but was overridden. But the truth is that in a start-up, and even in a larger company, the board is often unwilling to override a CEO's solution to a problem, in favor of one of their own. Good board members respect that the CEO's day to day vision of what is going on carries a lot of weight.