Good. So thanks everybody for coming. We're thrilled to have you all here. We're going to have,

Diane and I are going to have a conversation this morning about, so we call it directorships in the

real world. I understand that you all have gotten sort of a lot of the formal view of how

boards are supposed to properly work this morning. We will try to not contradict everything

you've already heard. So loosely what I'm going to do is go through kind of a set of topics,

pose a set of questions, and then I have my answers to the questions pre-prepared, and Diane does

not. Which is going to work out well from...

Like I'm on a game show here. Which is going to work out well for me. So let me start with this.

Let me start with this.

So my experience, there's going to be a long question, but it actually is a question.

So my experience with boards is that there is a spectrum of how directors think about being on boards.

And that spectrum could loosely be defined

kind of to the far left as director on a startup board, a brand new startup board, where basically

there's nothing to the company yet. And it's a process of a team constructing something out

of nothing, right, building a new company where one didn't previously exist. And kind of the platonic

ideal of that kind of board is it's

kind of all hands on deck, everybody in the same team, everybody rowing in the same direction,

everybody contributing as much as they can to try to build something valuable. Then you've got

on the other side, the platonic ideal of a director of a large public company that has been in existence for a long time and, you know, has a kind of a fully developed business model.

And two people I respect tremendously as directors, Reed Hastings, who I serve with on the Facebook board, as well as a very accomplished executive named Ken Thompson, who was on the Hewley Packard Board,

with for years kind of have the same view of the other extreme, which is they would go so far as to say it's a mistake for directors to attempt to contribute to the company.

And the reason they say that is because, especially for large established public companies,

...