How unicorn founder Didier Elzinga and Blackbird’s Nick Crocker make the boardroom work

I sat down with the existing board members and asked what was working, what wasn’t and what could be better? I also looked for opportunities to find quick wins to show the founders and board I believed in them.

When you do due diligence you get to see everyone’s salaries, and here was Culture Amp, a leading global software business in its space and one of the most valuable start-ups in Australia, and the founders were paying themselves the same wage as the most junior engineer.

Culturally we loved that, they were efficient and resourceful and weren’t money or ego-led. but at the same time, they had huge responsibilities.

So the first thing I did was ask if we could run a process to find out what they should be paid based on how the market valued their skill set.

[Our relationship] is not all roses and fairies, you have to have space for the hard, awkward conversations, and Didier doesn’t shy away from those.

Once I’d pushed Didier quite hard on a particular issue in a board meeting, and 10 seconds after it ended, the phone rang, and it was him. He said he didn’t understand the approach I took. He picked up the phone and didn’t let it fester.

When you go on the founder journey, you start off unknown and unheralded and over time that shifts if you become successful.

It helps to have known them before that point because you retain the quality of the early relationship, and you don’t get caught up in the aura of success.

Over time our relationship has expanded from investor and board member, to also co-investing in Dovetail … and our friendship has expanded into art, music, sport and all manner of things outside of business.

After four years on the board, I’ve earned the right to have a view. One thing that’s clear though is on boards, you can say many things, but that doesn’t matter if no one listens to it. You earn the right to be heard.”

Didier Elzinga

“MyFitnesspal was an early customer – number 17 or 18. We had bootstrapped the business to $1 million in annual recurring revenue by 2015 when we did our first funding round, so we didn’t actually have to raise, but we decided it was time to chase the mission and run with it.

I knew Blackbird co-founder Bill Bartee, and I’d been impressed by him. He set the tone of my relationship with Blackbird, and he was patient, thoughtful and not pushy.

Blackbird came into our very first round, and it wasn’t until Nick and I got talking that I asked if he wanted to take the lead in our Series D.

I was a fan of him joining Blackbird because I like people who have been operators, and he’d been an entrepreneur. I remember having a conversation with him and Blackbird generally about if we’d give him a board seat.

I remember saying I was happy for Nick to be on the board, and it would be a great opportunity for him to grow and learn, but that it might not work out given the scale of where we were at.

I went in with the mindset of this being for Nick’s benefit, not ours, but as a human, I trusted him.

It was important for me to give people these opportunities.

Nick is now one of the most valuable people I have on the board. He thinks carefully about not just what we should talk about and do, but where the board fits in the conversation. He also plays an important role for me in board conversations.

We had a situation where I’d proposed that we acquire a company, we had the deal on the table, but we were talking in circles. The board weren’t convinced but said we could do it.

Nick spoke up and said ‘just confirming, we’re all in on this’. He’s done that multiple times. He’s not doing it to protect me, but he’s saying we as a board need to take collective responsibility for this decision.

He also won’t let me forget if I’ve agreed to take two weeks off. It’s the little things like that because there’s no one else to push you on those things.

He’s also a product guy, and he pushes us on that and holds us accountable. Sometimes you need someone to say that something could be better, and there are no excuses.

I’ve spent time on other company’s boards and often people just try and show off how intelligent they are.

I generally meet with all the directors the week before a board meeting. I don’t want to go into any board meeting not knowing people’s minds.

I also know my board well enough to know whom to talk to about something first. Then, if someone surprises me and takes the discussion in a different direction, I also know whom to ask next to balance it out.

Nick is the least experienced VC on the board, but he has a good ability to frame things and said I should send an email with everything we’ve learnt after every board meeting. Put on a platter what we need our investors to know. It was really insightful.

One thing Nick aspires to is to be the first person you call when you get bad news. You’re going to have to talk to the board about it, but it’s helpful to have one or two people there you can call when you have no idea what to do.

He’s played that role for me when a senior executive was moving on, and when COVID-19 hit.

The advice I now always give early stage founders when choosing between investors is to pick them for domain knowledge, yes, but the most important thing is actually how they’re going to show up when something goes wrong.”