Making the Most of Board Meetings and Investor Check-ins with Melody Koh (NextView), Matt Blumberg (Bolster), and Chris Fenster (Propeller)
Meetings with your current investors can range from incredibly productive and insightful—an indispensable forum to discuss strategy and get feedback—to wastes of time for all involved that meander, repeat and fail to focus on the right things. Join us as we talk with Chris Fenster of Propeller, veteran founder Matt Blumberg of Bolster, and NextView Partner Melody Koh to talk about the tactics for productive and efficient meetings—from quarterly boards to in-between check-ins.
Speakers
Melody Koh is a Partner at NextView Ventures, based in its New York office. She has spent her entire career working with technology and Internet startups as an entrepreneur, operator, and investor. Prior to joining NextView, Melody was Head of Product at Blue Apron (NYSE: APRN). Melody joined Blue Apron as the first product hire when the company was 18 months old with 20 HQ employees. She helped scale the business through hyper-growth (25x in 3.5 years) and to its IPO, building and leading a 35-person team across Product Management, Product Design, and Analytics/Data Science. Previously, Melody was a Product Manager at Fab.com leading marketing & analytics products and the founder/CEO of a seed-funded wine subscription e-commerce service.
Matt Blumberg is the founder and CEO of Bolster, a marketplace for on-demand executive and board talent. Matt has served on numerous boards and chaired many of them, including public company, private company, nonprofit, local community, educational, and trade association boards. Through Bolster, Matt has helped place dozens of directors with private and public companies, as well as advised many CEOs on building and running their boards. He is currently the board chair of Bolster as well as Path Forward, a nonprofit he co-founded in 2016, whose mission is to empower women to restart their careers after time spent focused on caregiving and is a director of Tech:NYC and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
Chris Fenster founded Propeller Industries in 2008 after realizing he could be a better early-stage CFO if he built a team specifically to deliver finance and accounting services to multiple companies, with a technology platform to manage and scale the work. Since then, Chris has served as consulting CFO to over 50 early-stage businesses in a wide range of industries. Chris spent the 13 years prior to Propeller as a full-time CFO for four early-stage companies – an apparel manufacturer (Swobo Clothing), an ecommerce/wine club operator (Signature Wines), a beverage company (Bevology) and a non-profit that ran finance and accounting for 300+ other non-profits (Tides Center).