Hello and welcome to the A16Z podcast. In this episode, CEO of PagerDuty Jennifer Tejada talks with A16Z's operating partner, Margaret Benmockers, about sitting on both sides of the table as board member and CEO, from how to consider your first board position to board composition to managing a board. This episode was recorded as part of our annual Directors College that took place in April 2017,

organized in collaboration with Stanford University Rock Center for corporate governance.

At what point in your trajectory did the word board member enter into the equation?

Is that something you were actively looking for?

When and how did that happen? Earlier than I planned, to be honest. My father passed away when I was young when I was

24 and we started an endowment for him. And so I chaired the endowment and had to learn very quickly

how to run a nonprofit board at the right age of 25. Probably my great learning there was that you gain a lot of insight by not being in the

middle of everything.

And so being sort of on the fray of how something operates and supporting the operating team,

exercise is very different muscle than being in a central operating role. And also having

control, right? Exactly. There's not, there's only so much control you have. No. And if you've got

kind of OCD and are used to having control and having a say and sometimes having the final say,

it can be a big transition. Fortunately, my first experience, I was pretty early in my career.

So it also gave me a lot of insight into what my management was going through, when they would say,

oh, we've got to prepare for the board or we need to run this past the board. I actually had a

very strong picture of what that probably meant. My first company board role or corporate board

role came along sort of opportunistically. I had moved to Australia in the middle of, you know,

the internet bubble bursting and realized, it was great. My timing was excellent and frankly

lucky. But it was, it was interesting because I got to Sydney and I thought,

Metropolitan Town. Surely there's going to be tons of tech here. Nope. So, hey, what am I

going to do with my life? And so I started just talking to a lot of people, networking with people.

I even, you know, stoop solo is to network with my husband's friends, try and get to know people

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