Posts from best practices

Feature Friday: Friendly Failing

Mobile is a less reliable environment than the fixed web. Things don't always work exactly right. And so failing in a friendly way is really important. I particularly like the way Instagram handles this.

I went on a bike ride this morning out to Lazy Point. I saw a sign that I thought was great. I took a photo of it and shared it to Instagram and Foursquare.

Except, of course, there isn't good cell service out at Lazy Point. Which is a feature not a bug.

So after sharing the photo into Instagram, geolocating it on Foursquare, sharing it out, the upload failed. In many cases, all the work I had put into getting to that point would have been wasted. The app would have just said something like "upload failed" and I'd be back to the starting point.

But in Instagram, you get something that looks like this:

Instagram fail

The first time I got this fail message on Instagram and saw that reload icon, I thought "brilliant." That is friendly failing right there.

So I finished my bike ride this morning and when I got home, I took a photo of my phone, then using my home wifi, hit the reload icon, and the photo got posted, shared, and all was good.

There's a lot to learn from the way Instagram handles this experience. They save the action you wanted to do in its entirety, and they keep the app in that state until you choose to try it again, or choose to exit out on your own. All mobile apps should work this way. Many don't.

#mobile

The Executive Session

Every board meeting should end with an executive session. The term executive session is an oxymoron because it is a meeting of all the board members other than the executives of the company.

The first time most CEOs hear of this idea, they hate it. The words "we want to meet without you" strike fear in the hearts of most CEOs. And understandably so.

But it is a critically important part of the Board's job to manage the CEO and to some extent the CEO's senior management team. The Board is required to regularly discuss the performance of the CEO and the senior team, to address their compensation, and to work to make sure the CEO and senior team are working together as well as they can.

You can't do that job with the executives of the company sitting in the meeting. And yet, you want the executives of the company in the Board meeting. The more the better in my opinion, at least for most of the meeting.

So "best practices" says that you should end every Board meeting with an executive session. Some executive sessions last 5 minutes or less. There is simply very little to discuss. Some executive sessions last hours. That's generally not a good thing. Most last 20 to 30 minutes.

I've been sitting on Boards since 1990 and have probably participated in over a thousand Board meetings. To be honest most of them did not end with an executive session. In addition to the CEO's discomfort, there is also the issue of timing. Most Board meetings end in a rush. It is seldom that the CEO's agenda fits into the set time slot. And Board members have schedules to keep. So it is the executive session that often gets skipped.

So I don't totally practice what I preach. But after having participated in a particularly excellent executive session recently, I am recommitting myself to executive sessions. I will need all of your help. Entrepreneurs and CEOs should embrace them and make sure they happen. And fellow VCs should do the same. They are incredibly important and we have a fiduciary duty to do them.

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#VC & Technology