Ask your investor directors how they would measure a software development team.
Watch what happens.
Most cannot answer. They are smart people. They are also wrong about your business, and they don't know it yet.
Most VC and PE-backed boards are full of investors. Numbers people. They will help you build a budget, manage burn, run a refinancing, read a model, and ask the right questions when revenue slips. That work matters. But it is not the work that decides whether the company wins.
Channels to market. Positioning. Use cases. Where to sell first. How to sequence the wins that unlock the next ones. None of that lives in the model. All of it lives in the day-to-day of running a software business. On the boards I have sat on or watched closely, this is where investor directors go quiet.
If you are lucky, your investors at least know your market. They have looked at twenty companies in your sector. They know the buyer and the budget cycle. That helps. But knowing the market is not the same as knowing how to run a software business inside it. From the outside, those skills look similar. In the boardroom, they are not.
The worst case is the investor who fills the silence. They have spoken to their colleagues. None of them could quite get the proposition straight either. So they decide the answer is to tell the CEO how to position the company. Where to focus. Which customers to chase. The advice is delivered with confidence. It lands in the business like a wrench in the gearbox. Two quarters later the plan is off and the board cannot say why.
Apertio is the case where this did not happen.
Our investors were not just numbers people. They were software people. Some had built and exited their own companies. One was strategic. They could see why what we were building would matter to them in a few years.
They argued with the CEO about things that actually moved the company. Use case. Pricing. Channels. Geography. Which customer wins to chase first to unlock the next ones. The audit committee did its job. The model got read. The budget got tightened when it needed to be. But the operating debate happened on operating ground, in the same language the management team were already thinking in.
The Motorola part of that story is a complication. That is for another post. A strategic investor on the cap table can scare other buyers off. The cost has to be weighed against what they bring while you are still building. On the Apertio board, the operating instinct was the part that mattered most while we were still building.
Lumeon got there eventually. The board went through several mixes before it found the right balance of investor discipline and software operating sense. That cost time. Time on a board is expensive.
Paragon was different again. The CEO held fifty-one percent. He could push the agenda through without friction. The board became a governance and reporting sounding board. Useful for what it was. It was not a board that pushed back. There is a version of that company that exits earlier and for more, with a different cap table and a board that argues.
The hire that makes the biggest difference is the operator NED with both market and software experience, in the geographies you are trying to win.
Not market alone. Not software alone. Not someone who has read about your sector. Someone who has run a software business inside it, in the place you are trying to win it.
That is the hire that changes how a board reads the papers. They notice what is not on the slide. They argue with the CEO in the language the CEO is already thinking in. They give the investors something to push against that is not just a louder version of what the investors already think.
Most boards do not have that hire. Most chairs have not asked the question that would tell them they need it.
Ask your investor directors how they would measure a software development team.
If the answer is a long pause, the seat is unfilled.