Divya Agarwalla

Boards are supposed to help founders. Over the past 19 years, I've watched many trap them instead. As companies scale, many boards turn from insight to oversight and stop doing what founders actually need: Help making big, hard decisions. Early boards tend to be small, the board members are close to the business and highly invested in it. They argue from first principles. They help founders think. Later-stage boards often look more impressive on paper - they have more independent directors, committees and process. Somewhere along the way, collective problem solving gets replaced with oversight. The board shifts from helping the CEO make better decisions to monitoring decisions that have already been made. Strategy discussions get safer, real debate gets rarer and meetings become more about risk management than judgment. This usually coincides with the introduction of more professional board members. For better or worse, they often optimize for governance, optics, and liability management. That’s their job. But it’s not always what the company needs in moments of real uncertainty. Then, CEOs stop using them as thought partners. That’s a problem. So what should founders do? A few principles that help: • Keep the board as small as you can for as long as you can • Add directors for new insight they bring, not what boxes they check • Treat board seats like senior hires, not trophies • Design meetings for debate rather than reporting • Be explicit about when you want input vs approval Good boards should improve decision-making. If your board isn’t making you think harder, it’s probably not doing its job.

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I've looked at a lot of YC batches. The bio and health lineup in P26 is STACKED. https://lnkd.in/gQKxpe9t Adialante - Compact, mobile whole-body MRI to make cancer screening accessible at hundreds per scan FinalDose - A programmable drug that reads DNA inside the cell and destroys it if it's diseased, starting with previously undruggable cancer targets Voquill (YC P26) - An AI coworker for pathologists that learns your reporting style and produces sign-out ready reports in real time Clara - An AI primary care doctor with a licensed clinician reviewing every medical decision Lumius (YC P26) - Affordable, real-time 3D ultrasound, starting with vascular access

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🤯 VC performance comes in small packages. Data from 1,500 VC funds shows two very strong correlations: Fund size matters. It is much easier to have fund-returning exits in smaller funds Access matters. If you aren't accessing the best performing funds, the asset class isn't worth the risk Yes. Survivorship bias exists in VC. The lack of a complete data set fundamentally affects the performance data of every fund size. It doesn't change the facts. Survivorship bias does not affect the best performers. There's a linear correlation between fund performance and fund size. Smaller managers are the needles in a haystack. Yes, there are lots of them. Yes, there's strong arguments why we don't need another firm out there. But find and back the right ones, and they are worthy allocations that fit the risk/reward profile of the asset class. Underlying data from PitchBook as of Q2-25 for vintages between 1998 - 2023. #VC #venturecapital

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