The statement that he is the first employee at a US venture-backed software company to sit on the board is comically wrong. Venture-backed companies have had employee board members as regular practice for at least as long as the 20+ years I have been in the industry. While not necessarily the norm, it is certainly not uncommon for an employee other than the CEO to have a seat (often a co-founder). The seat is usually designated as elected by the holders of Common Stock (which usually is the founders and employees with stock). The only thing I see unique here is that he was elected by the employees with one vote per employee, rather by common shareholders with one vote per share.
In particular: it's clear from the context they're talking about non-founder employees; simply by the principle of charity you should assume the author --- who sat on the board of a pretty successful VC-funded company --- knows that founder employees are often on boards.
Mostly though, this "who was first" discussion is an attractive nuisance for us to bicker on about, and we're asked by the guidelines not to take the bait on that stuff.
Added a clarification: first non-founder/executive employee to sit on a board. If there's another venture-backed software company in North America who's put a rank and file employee on their board, I'd love to hear about it!
That's a pretty massive statement to make that is almost impossible to prove correct and needs only one counterexample to be proven incorrect (which has already been provided in this thread).
I mentioned in another comment but at O(1) Labs (which is VC-backed) we've had a board composed of employees for about a year. I'm not sure about the timing of your situation, but also I'm sure we're not the first company to do so.
This is probably worth an application of a much more general principle: if you have experienced something directly it's quite likely to be fairly common, however if you haven't experienced something it's not good evidence that it isn't fairly common.
Path dependence means personal experience is rarely very generalizable.
Of course if you've made a systematic study of corporate governance and have data on thousands of companies, things are different.
Your reasoning in this discussion is unbecoming of a board member. In your activity on that board you’re involved in a lot of open-ended conversations with a lot of ambiguity and high cost of failure. I hope you express yourself in that setting with a bit more humility and introspection.
I find your tone dismissive, condescending and snarky. I made a (hedged) statement that turned out to be incorrect, updated the blog post, and moved on. I didn't think it was a statement of great consequence, certainly nothing to fixate on.
Please review the HN Guidelines and ask yourself if posting your comment added to or detracted from the value of this discussion:
Do you share that link with everyone who disagrees with you? It comes across as an overreaction. Another way to deal with critical feedback would be to understand it at a deeper level instead of being reactive.
I’ll help you out. A bunch of us here deal with board members on a daily basis. Some board members are great, others not so much. To hear that there is a board out there that gave voting rights to an employee makes us experience two simultaneous sensations: 1. Hell yeah!, and 2. I wonder if they picked the right employee.
Oh shut up you sanctimonious prick. You're confirming all of the negative stereotypes about this website.
Do you think I, in 20 years of working in the industry, haven't dealt with bad board members? How about a little curiosity instead of whatever the hell you're dishing in this thread.
Let me help you out: you're a stupid little troll and your contributions to this discussion are like little turd droppings that just stink up the room. Please kindly contribute constructively or fuck the hell off.
