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Surfboard Founder and CEO Chuhan Wang on Cultivating Board and Investor Engagement

Author

Howard Lindzon
December 15, 2022

Panic with Friends – Investing for Profit and Joy

My subject and guest today are focused on corporate governance. This slowdown in growth after a long period of easy money and investing are revealing a striking lack of oversight and strong governance.

To improve startup governance we have to create tools and software that makes the process tenable. My guest is Surfboard (Social Leverage Fund IV) founder and CEO Chuhan Wang. Her mission is to help founders, boards, and advisors stay in the loop and on top of the board process with a better system for communication, board deck access and retrieval, and compilation – the overall world of corporate governance. Chuhan’s vision is to empower founders for success by responsibly harnessing the power of their boards and investors. With founders emerging from all corners of the world, and remote work a trend, her modern board and investor experience software will spark innovation in the next generation of founders.

You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify or Apple podcast and now all the episodes are on my YouTube channel as well. You can click subscribe on any of these channels and get the podcast alert each week.

You can also listen right here on the blog:

Surfboard Founder and CEO Chuhan Wang on Cultiv... by Panic with Friends - Howard Lindzon

My subject for today is governance, a pet peeve of mine. The lack of governance this funding cycle hasn’t been a good thing. We’ve got a lot of young people who’ve received capital and don’t know how to structure governance, prepare a board deck, or interact with their advisors and investors. Most of us learned from doing, and this generation will learn too; but when you put a lot of money in people’s hands you need to have governance, something we’re seeing more of with the WeWork breakdown and the FTX fraud. To stem this, we have to create tools and software that makes the process of governance tenable. My guest is Surfboard (Social Leverage Fund IV) founder and CEO Chuhan Wang. Her mission is to help founders, boards, and advisors stay in the loop with a better system for communication, board deck access and retrieval, and compilation – the overall world of corporate governance. Chuhan’s vision is to empower founders for success by responsibly harnessing the power of their boards and investors. With founders emerging from all corners of the world, and remote work being a trend, her modern board and investor experience will spark innovation in the next generation of founders.

https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/STKT8917579627?selected=STKT3191410428

For more details on today’s conversation read on below…

Guest: Chuhan Wang

Profile: Founder and CEO of Surfboard

Where to Find Her: LinkedIn, Twitter

What's Chuhan Panicked About? Boring board meetings.

Related:

Founder in Focus: Chuhan Wang - Founder and CEO of Surfboard — Social Leverage

I had the opportunity to interview Surfboard founder ( Fund IV ) Chuhan Wang before her appearance on Panic with Friends to share her founder story. Chuhan spent the last decade working in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, as a Venture Capitalist, and growing a company from Series B

https://www.socialleverage.com/blog/2022/12/14/founder-in-focus-chuhan-wang-founder-and-ceo-of-surfboard

Show Notes:

  • Introduction (00:42)

  • Welcome Chuhan (08:22)

  • What is Surfboard? (09:21)

  • Weighing in on FTX (13:04)

  • Running a Board (14:11)

  • Empowering founders (17:40)

  • Finding Social Leverage (18:31)

  • Working with Social Leverage (19:48)

  • Valuing at seed (22:43)

  • Starting a board early (24:31)

  • Signing up for Surfboard (25:43)

  • The Surfboard team (28:50)

  • A good time for governance (30:02)

  • Brad Feld (34:14)

  • Now is the time to build (36:36)

  • Wrapping up (37:09)

  • An opportunity to start again (36:31)

  • Closing thoughts (40:56)

© Panic with Friends, 2022. All rights reserved.

Host: Howard Lindzon | Producer: Knut Jensen | Researcher: Pete Weishaupt Disclaimer: All information provided is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal or tax advice, or an offer to buy or sell any security. For full disclosures: https://howardlindzon.com/disclaimer/

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