Posts from August 2023

I’ve written about this topic before. It is an important topic and I want to raise it again.

Boards often discuss CEO performance without really knowing how things work inside the company. And CEOs often have very little visibility to how they are doing and what the board thinks about their performance. When you work for one person, your boss, it is typical that you will have regular catchups and at least an annual review of your performance (ideally more frequent). But when you work for a group, i.e. a Board, things can get very “squishy” leaving for a lot of guesswork and worse.

Enter the CEO 360.

This is a process whereby the CEO is reviewed by their direct reports and by the Board members and often a few more people (a few skip levels, some investors who aren’t on the board, etc). It is frequently done annually but it could be done more often if the CEO would like that.

This process can be run by the CEO’s coach, an outside facilitator, or someone else. Our portfolio company Bolster offers an excellent CEO 360 at a very reasonable price.

I am often amazed by what I learn from a CEO 360. I frequently see CEOs who are excellent at managing down and run a very solid leadership team but struggle with managing their Board. These CEOs are often seen as weak when in fact they are strong. The opposite is also true. I have seen CEOs who are excellent at managing up but terrible at leading their team and their Boards love them but their team hates them.

What is even more important for everyone is the insights that come from a CEO 360. Like all 360s, they tell the CEO where they are strong and what they need to work on. Armed with that information and a supportive Board and others (coach, mentor, CEO support group, etc), CEOs can take action to get better at their job. Without this information, it is hard to “level up.”

If you are a CEO and don’t do a CEO 360 annually, you should start doing one. And make it a regular occurrence. It will help you do your job better and it will help everyone around you too.

For many years, there were three ways to subscribe to AVC:

1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox

2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader

3/ X – Follow AVC on X

X revoked the API access that I was using to autopost three or four months ago. I have not been active on that service for almost a year now and have no interest in dealing with it.

So if you are one of the 25.5k followers on X and want to keep getting alerted when I post, I suggest you go with option 1 or option 2 going forward. There is also a new third option that I will talk about at the end of this post.

If you subscribe to AVC via RSS, you are likely using the old Feedburner feed. That has become unreliable and I would suggest moving to the Feedblitz feed which also powers the AVC email delivery.

I finally moved the email delivery off the old Feedburner feed this week when last week’s post did not go out via email. I suspect most of you missed it as a result.

All of this is a perfect example of the fragility of relying on centralized services like X and Feedburner (owned by Google). USV was an early investor in both services and I was a big user of them.

But all things come to an end in the world of centralized services and the challenges of getting AVC delivered to the ~100,000 subscribers reminded me of that last week.

There is a world where services just keep running because they are open source and decentralized. I wrote about that back in June and I am excited about that world to emerge.

AVC is available in the decentralized world and you can subscribe there if you’d like.

So now there are three ways to subscribe to AVC:

1/ Email – Get new posts delivered to your inbox

2/ RSS – Get new posts delivered to your RSS reader

3/ Web3 – Subscribe to AVC on Mirror

If you are using the email delivery method, you are all good. If you are using the old RSS feed or X, I would suggest moving to something else. Or you could just stop getting AVC if that suits you. Many of you already have thanks to X and Google (and me).

I got a new Pixel 7 last week and have started the tedious process of moving over to a new phone.

One of the more painful chores in moving from one phone to another is moving the Google Authenticator app and all of the two factor codes to the new phone.

My partner Nick told me about Yubikey Authenticator and I converted to it while moving phones since I was going to have to get all new codes anyway.

If you use a Yubikey for anything else, switching to Yubikey Authenticator is a breeze.

You download the Yubikey Authenticator app onto your phone, insert your Yubikey and start scanning QR codes (just like Google Authenticator).

Then any time you need a code, you simply insert your Yubikey into your phone and your codes appear in the app.

You can also put the Yubikey Authenticator app on a laptop or a desktop and get the codes that way which is a great backup solution in case you misplace or lose your phone.

And, when it is time to switch phones, you simply put the Yubikey Authenticator app on your new phone and insert the Yubikey and your codes are there.

Even with all of this goodness, I still keep physical copies of my backup codes in a safe. I am also considering setting up a second Yubikey for the two factor codes I use the most just in case I lose my main one.

When it comes to two factor codes, I think you have to have a plan B and a plan C.

If you use a Yubikey already, consider using the Yubikey Authenticator for your two factor codes.