📖 This article is part 3 of a wider series on "Founder relationships 101 for MENA VCs", you can check out earlier instalments here.
There is, in our reading of the MENA venture industry in particular, a remarkable amount of energy spent avoiding the conversations that actually matter, which is to say the follow-on round about to happen at a valuation everyone privately thinks is too high, the senior hire who isn't working out but is too expensive to quietly let go in the middle of a fundraise, the pivot that probably needs to happen but that the founder is emotionally invested in not making, or the conversation about what the company actually does if the next twelve months go sideways, particularly given the current geopolitical moment.
All of these, in functioning founder-investor relationships, are conversations that get had. In a great many founder-investor relationships, however, they don't get had until the moment they become impossible to avoid, by which point the optionality has invariably collapsed, and the conversation, when it does eventually happen, is significantly more painful than it would have been three months earlier.
What virtually every investor we spoke to for this edition agreed on, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication, is that the willingness to have the difficult conversation early is one of the genuinely scarce resources in venture, and the investors who develop the discipline of doing so are disproportionately useful to the founders they back.
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The dialectic of board work
After the investment is where it gets harder. On the board especially, there's a fine line between being founder-friendly, in the loose sense of that phrase, and actually discharging your fiduciary duty. As a board member, you're responsible not just to your own shareholding, but to everyone's shareholding, and that's a fact people usually miss. Sometimes that means conflict, and conflict can be a good thing. It's a dialectic. You have thesis and antithesis. The thesis is whatever the founder wants, you can sometimes be the antithesis, and the synthesis is what drives the better outcome.
Most VCs operate on an implicit consensus model, in which the goal of any given board meeting is to leave with everyone in cheerful agreement on a course of action.
Khaled's reframe is that the goal of a board meeting isn't agreement, it's the synthesis that emerges from a productive collision between the founder's view and the board's view, and that the synthesis is, by definition, better than either pure starting point would have been on its own.
The board that never disagrees with the founder, in this framing, isn't being founder-friendly, it's being useless.
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