Why I love our advisory board.

I keep saying how great our team is... Mike, Minaz, David and Ann are all just wicked-smart and a joy to work with. Mike, Minaz and David are the engineering/product team, and so are really the heart of what we do here at Ambient.

I'm a big fan of learning... always getting smarter, better, etc. So how do we drive this on the engineering side? Buying great books, brainstorming and chatting about things that may not be only what we're working on today, and doing things like TechTalks, where we get to bring in the best and brightest scientists, researchers and practitioners, and get them to hang out with our crew.

So what about me? Well, I'm a first-time CEO, trying to build a great company. I'll be the first to admit that the challenges of building and running a company are all new to me. This isn't something I've been doing for the last decade or two.

That's where our advisory board comes in. We've got some super smart people who've been here before, and have helped us through what we're doing. Let me introduce you to a few of them.

- Leila Boujnane. She's the CEO at Ideé Inc. They're a visual search company. They've got some amazing, tier-1 customers, awesome technology, and they've bootstrapped the business to get there. Leila's also one of my closest friends... I can talk to her about anything from how to recruit people, to getting yelled at by her for avoiding my daily running schedule.

- Andrea LaFayette. Andrea was the VP Marketing at DWL, a company she was a co-founder of, and that was sold to IBM recently. Andrea's one of those wicked-smart, super-quiet, thoughtful people... and I'm thrilled to have her on our side. Being very-much a software guy, the insights she's able to provide on marketing, positioning, PR, etc. have really helped us understand things that we didn't when we started this.

- Michael Stumm. Michael's the CEO at Oanada. They're a massively profitable currency trading company. They got where they are without needing to raise a lot of money, and only recently decided to do a large venture capital round. Michael's also a prof at the University of Toronto, and used to run the Computer Engineering department there. Michael's got a super-clear bias towards execution. Just build it, ship it, see what happens. Don't over-design, over-complicate, or do things just because it looks good to an outsider: do what actually needs to be done to grow the company.

- Mark Fox. Mark's the CEO over at Novator. They're one of Canada's biggest e-commerce success stories, and power all sorts of sites you use every day, including FTD.com. Mark's also a computer scientist, and a professor at the University of Toronto. Besides business and strategy advice, we've had our team hang out with Mark more than once to talk about systems design and architecture: Novator builds web systems that scale to handle massive loads, so they've dealt with a lot of the technology challenges that we do. Mark's more than once smiled thinking about the days "when we had the same challenges."

We've got a couple more, but the post is already getting a bit long :-)

Okay, so we've got a great team of people ... how'd we get them? We asked. Really. That's it. We called them up, told them what we were doing, and asked if they'd have a coffee with us. After some cajoling, they even agreed to join our advisory board. Nothing special, no magic... we just asked nicely... and believe me, you'd be surprised the kind of help people are willing to give you, if you just ask.

Touchy subject: How do we compensate them? We gave them a few options in the company. Some of them even argued with us, "I'm not helping you just for shares you know," or "I haven't done anything to deserve these shares." That's a good sign. When someone says something like, "give me 2% of your company and I'll help you," it's a sign to run as fast and far away as you can. Find great people who want to help you, and give them enough equity to also be able to win if your company's a success... but don't deal with people who want big chunks of your company to "open some doors."

So you've got you advisory board. What do you do with them? Meet them. Every month. In person. Around a table. 2 hours. Make this clear up front. If someone doesn't have the time to commit to do this, you don't want them on your board. You want someone who can commit to giving you this time. It doesn't mean it's going to be easy. All of our board members have crazy schedules, so we try to book meetings months in advance, and even then it's hard to juggle so many calendars (our next meeting is in September, and I realized that I'm going to be in Los Angeles... so I'm going to be on the phone for this one, as it turns out)... but that's what we do.

Treat the advisory board as a real board of directors. You need to present to them every month. What've you done? What're you going to do? What problems/questions/etc. are you facing. Be accountable to them, and have them push you. If you don't leave at least the occasional board meeting feeling like you've been beaten up, then you didn't get all you could out of it. Get your board to push you harder, to help you, and your company grow and succeed. That's why you're all sitting around the same table, right? Use their time and yours effectively to learn and grow.

So that's it. That's my advice. Build an advisory board. Get people with business, sales, marketing, technical experience. Ask them to have a coffee with you, and if it's a good fit, ask them if you can spend even MORE time with them. At the end of the day, it's (in my mind) the single biggest investment you can make in your company and yourself.