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The hosts introduce the special board dinner format and outline the evening’s agenda. They welcome the board members and set up the conversation about building a more engaging board.
so you may have noticed that we have been setting the stage for something special you are going to get a rare glimpse into the Motley Fool's board dinners this is a time and place each quarter where a lotof magic happens at the fool so let's take a look hello capitalist my name is Randi Zuckerberg CEO and founder of Zuckerberg media and welcome to my dinner party tonight well don't just stand there come on in wehave a lot of magic happening at the Motley Fool right now I'm thrilled to be a member of the board and of course I'm very particular about who I invite to my dinner parties this is a group ofpeople who are just so Purpose Driven smart committed to our mission in fact I'm so sorry that I can't be there in person with all of you but as you can see I have a permanent different party guest
with me and I'm excited to join you for future events but why don't we see what we have on the menu tonight like I said there's a lot of magic
first our little amuse-bouche appetizer with our company's journey and how the board has evolved we're gonna go on to the main course we're going to give you a leadership skills tutorial and what we're thinking are some of thebiggest trends and leadership today and finally we're gonna close that with some dessert who doesn't love dessert with some fun team mingling and celebration and of course any dinner party has to end with a champagne toast to ourmission of making the world smarter happier and richer so without further ado let me introduce to you my fabulous yes we have David Gardner Tom Gardner John
cheresa Kirsten and of course myself Randi Zuckerberg thanks so much enjoy a beautiful evening of conversation
The panel explains how the Motley Fool recruited its external directors and why those relationships work. The directors share how they joined, what attracted them, and why the board meetings are unusually fun.
we're really happy to have this 45 minutes together with you our goal in this 45 minutes is to give you as many actionable items for creating a board that is really authentically true for your company that feels reallyintegrated in your organization and that matters that you look forward to spending that time together that you rely on the advice that you get from your board directors that you're looking forward to those meetings rather than dreading themand that's the spirit of everything we'll be talking about here in the next 45 minutes I think we wanted to start just by introducing how we attracted the three external directors first that are here at the table I'mJohn Mackey at Whole Foods Whole Foods Amazon we don't think of it as Amazon Whole Foods we think of it as Whole Foods Amazon and and and Suzanne Frye at Google and Teresa Carson at LinkedIn Microsoft we don't
think of it as Microsoft LinkedIn we think of it as LinkedIn Microsoft and I think the first actionable suggestion that we have for everyone here is to really look at the social network that all of our organizations havelocally and in your industry and to remember that every public company has an investor relations department that you can contact and ask to talk to the chief technology officer at that organization etc companies are much more open onaverage to hearing from you particularly if you're reaching in your industry or you have a real reason to talk to them so in the case of our three directors every single one of them came to the Motley Fool'ssimply because we essentially reached out almost with no prior reason to be able to talk to them and just expressed our interest in the work they're doing and how we might like to have them join us at the
Motley Fool and that originates with a roll a full time rule to Motley Fool of somebody by the way this is gonna be a 42 minute talk by me and then everyone else will get my understanding is thatthis is real food yes it is this is supper so I think I think we should get started and we're saving dessert for last we're looking forward to sharing that with you my understanding is that this is realwine and I think it is past 9:00 a.m.so I think the first question we have for John and Suzanne and Theresa is just a little bit about your your earliest experience joining our board what what caused you to decide to sign up with us and totake on our mission of making the world smarter happier and richer I'll go first so this is the only for-profit board I'm on I'm on for nonprofit boards I'm saying that so nobody will ask me to join their
board this was a couple of days and and I recruited myself on the Molly full board because I so impressed let me just say I'm a Motley Fool groupie just curious how many people here are members of TheMotley Fool raise your hand you guys are really smart and the rest of you you know the Molly fool is like amazing and I met Tom and David and and basically it's like these guys were super cool they'refun to hang out with I love everything about the Motley Fool I'm a member you know it's like I went up to him and said if you guys ever decide you want to add an outside director you're likeone of like three companies in the world I'd want to be an outside director on and a couple years later they took me up on it and I will tell you our board meetings are so much fun they
really are I mean it's just incredible the fun things we do in those board meetings top secret missions we get stock pitches which I think you're gonna hear one today while we're up here we played Jeopardy in termsof questions that you asked we played we had a board dinner last night and we played a game we don't actually talk about our business Tom and David
against me however it's it's a very conscious board we my co directors are fantastic and they take us deep into their business and it's a closely held firm right so we have no illusions we're not we have agovernance responsibilities but primarily we're there to we're there to help this company flourish at a higher level and they take us in as partners and I'm just having the time of my life on their on their board andabsolutely well I'll just echo how much fun it is but I'll leave that at the end so I think with any great board it takes at least two and I'd say it actually takes more than that needs asomeone who's interested in finding a good board member and it has to take somebody on the other side who's actually expressed interest in being on a board as John just said and certainly I had done that within Google
and I'm very lucky that I work for a company and Teresa works for company that supports individuals going out and serving on boards it actually is a great way to develop I'd say horizontally and really expand her skillsets so very lucky that made connections through Google that way and you had reached out to laszlo Baca if I recall and last night reached out to me and I was so excited because you know I had beensort of and I'd say itinerant an investor since second grade so it was very exciting for me to be able to join The Motley Fool and I've had a blast ever since beyond being able to work with allthe awesome people around this table my very first day I was invited up to stage and I was set against three of the internal fools who cover alphabet / Google as a stock pitch and I had to compete
with them for knowledge over Google and this was in front of the entire company no one told me this was happening I just walked in and it was awesome I won by one point
The discussion shifts to how to find board members who match company values and bring needed skills. The team also explains the decision to add an employee director and why that perspective matters.
well and one of the things that attracted me most to the Motley Fool when it came up as a possibility was the conscious capitalism aspect of the board so I think when you're looking at potential board members whenyou're looking at setting up a board expanding your board revising your board it's really good to look for people who are very similar values to your to your management team but it's also really good I suggest to sitdown and think about what is the particular skillset that you'd like the board to bring to add to the capabilities of the management team so is it that you need more help with marketing do you want someone tohelp you really think through strategy make a list of the things that are most important and most added and then go out and reach out to your network and your community looking for those particular skills and also people
who really match your very dearly held values at this point in our schedule it was set up for me to tell a little bit about our history as a company and how we got here but I actually thinkit'd be great day for you to introduce our employee director and her concept behind that and Mark so we decided we're 26 years old so as a company we've really evolved to try to make our board relevant ateach stage like many of you early on anyway we had finance ears on our board America Online had invested in us kind of over a barrel they forced themselves to invest in us and we welcome that and theywere a great partner for The Motley Fool for the first five or six years but then we started taking in venture capital Silicon Valley some good firms and so we had very much that kind of a board but
Tom and I being brothers and as a family company we never really dreamed of having lots of financier sitting around and giving us advice at our board we we've always been trying to create something beautiful over the longterm and so we started to transition our board toward people that we admired from companies that we did now I realize we're all different companies and maybe by dint of us being the Motley Fool we're by nature westudy other companies and get to meet them and try to talk to the CFO or have somebody on a radio show so probably we index really high toward accessibility toward great people and great companies but I truly believeregardless of what your business is and where you are if you have that sense as John said just a little while ago of fun then for us anyway we began to transition to having this group of people and
in particular Martha who I want to introduce now and Martha how long have you been at the Motley Fool 21 years and what has been your role at the pool right now my title is general counsel but anythingand everything and Tom and I began to talk about how we should have an employee on the board and that conversation started Tom seven or eight years ago and we had our first one kara McDonough and Kerr recentlyrotated off she's our chief financial officer today she didn't start that way on the board but Martha you were voted by our employees you were the most popular selection to represent them so maybe that's another actionable item ina world where a lot of people feel disconnected from their board a lot of you raise your hand if you have a board let's do a quick show of hands a you look forward to your next board meeting
and be you do not look forward to your next board meeting let's see all the A's okay now let's see all the bees okay so a lot of season agree yeah
so so I'm actually really happy to see that if the hands went up the majority are looking forward to their next board meeting but Tom you and I weren't really doing that 10 or 15 years ago but itwas in fact thinking that you know we should have an employee representative join us on the board and represent that viewpoint that critical stakeholder that we love so much the molecule and so Martha what has been your experienceso far and could you describe how you've already changed our company in the first two weeks or three weeks of your
to actually have a voice and be heard that to hopefully help all our stakeholders not just the employees because as everyone if you're at this conference you know you helped one it benefits everybody else and I think ithelps the board and that you it's a direct link to to the organization so so it's it's as John likes to say it's a win-win throughout and also I it's been such it's only been a few months butit's already such a bit of learning opportunity for me to sit in a room with Theresa Suzanne and John and hear their thoughts on business on our business it's just been incredible it's been really helpful I think forthe whole board anytime there's a question about how does this affect our employees how do people think about it Martha always has a perspective that's going to be different necessarily than Tom and David so it's really good to
have the richness of that having which want to reflect on one or two things we heard before we go to the next topic I want to remind us of what Suzanne shared that our connection to Suzanne at Googlewas through Laszlo Bock who's the head of the people team at Google I highly recommend his book how many people have read the book work rules great for those of you aren't raising your hand you have a realtreat ahead of you a really data-driven view of how to build a performance cold with a lot of support across an enormous franchise at Google with you know 90,000 plus employees now but so we got to know Laszlopretty much anyone we get to know we immediately start wondering how can we get them involved in what we're doing how can we take advantage of their network how can we learn from them and how can we create
an experience that helps them to get smarter happier and richer because of their time with us and so we just I would recommend to you to reach out to organizations particularly through the head of HR if you canget in touch with the head of the people team or the culture team of that organization invariably I think at all of our organizations I think should be open to lean towards and maybe be very excited about asmany of our employees serving on boards as possible it gives you a different perspective and so Laszlo went into the network and found somebody who loves investing someone who has deep tech experience somebody whose privacy and data security
The speakers connect the board’s work to the company purpose of making the world smarter, happier, and richer. They describe board missions and introduce the stock-pitch tradition that brings employees and directors together.
expertise and other things that we were looking for so I just I really recommend that to everyone here in terms of building out your board deep what about missions yeah so for us at the Motley Fool our purposeis Randi let off with which by the way is I think our third purpose statement in our 26 years so it's we don't do that very often I don't think most of us should change our purpose very oftenbut we did about six months ago it's to make the world smarter happier and richer and so as we thought about that consciously and trying to do a conscious board as best we could we thought you know Iguess it makes sense that we should be trying to make our board smarter happier and richer and I've always said with our purpose statement the most important word in that purpose statement is and because a lot of companies
might make the world smarter in fact Google makes the world smarter and a lot of coming to make the world happier there are a lot of them here today and I think of Disney is a great example ofa company that makes the world happier and then there's richer and that's a lot of Wall Street which in some ways the Motley Fool was invented to turn the tables on but when we're doing our Foolish best it'ssmarter happier and richer all three never one without the other two and so we thought Tom as we designed our board meetings how do we do that and especially how to make it make it fun in fact Iknow you were kicking around with your director Thoms our CEO about a year ago you were having a conversation what was that conversation you were having with them we were sitting there I think there are a number of
projects that were coming to a deadline moment for us and we were we were pretty tired as a leadership team and we had a board meeting and I think four or five days and we were sitting in theroom and I just sort of read the energy of where we all are and rely and I just asked how much how many of us are actually looking forward to this meeting and and no one was and andwhat a sad state that is to get to very understandable with so many different things that our team is working on but we love our directors if it were a dinner party we would all want to attend thatdinner party but there was something about it being a board meeting the responsibilities of a board meeting that was causing us to say I'm really excited to get through that one that's gonna be great to get on the
other side of it and get back to work and so we we pushed everything to the side of what we were planning for that meeting and we created something new and maybe will highlight two things that we createdI think the first is connecting you with our purpose and with our vision of providing outstanding business and investing advice at scale and we brought some stock pitches into the mix so maybe a little bit from the fourof you about that or any one of you about John John would you describe a mission that you've been on to the Motley Fool well they're top secret Tom know when you come into money full board meeting thefirst thing you do is they hand you a an envelope that's got your top secret mission for the day and I the missions are always very interesting because they're deeper dives with different parts of the business like one
time I met with the VC team the venture they have a venture capital arm I met with the VC team another time I've met with the Jeremy and back then when it was the sort of us operations totalk and to talk about customer how do they customer retention how do they hold on to customers and we did a deep dive around that business and so one of the things if you're going to serve on anyboard every director wants to feel like they're making a contribution and and the last and oftentimes management is rather patronizing towards the directors because they have to come once a quarter and they don't really couldn't can't possibly understandthe business as well as management does and so there's just sort of you sort of tolerate your board and if the Motley Fool they really are so eager to learn and fulfill their higher purpose that they want the
deeper engagement of the board with with the team with the staff with the team members with all the stakeholders and that's what every director wants so I always feel like they really want me there they want my wisdomthey want my experience and they'll really listen to it so that makes you know and and I'm always I'm always stimulated and challenged and engaged and so I I truthfully that higher purpose really works for me because theyare making me smarter I've learned a lot of they the Molly fool is like the top-rated Glassdoor business of their scale and one of the top in the whole United States and the top for sure in the DCarea and a lot of things they do I've been going to school on I've learned a lot for wholefoods from just seeing what the motley fool is doing that's made it's helped make whole foods better and they've they've
definitely made me happier because I just laugh my head off every time I come to one of the gatherings and honestly it made me richer - I mean I've mean massive amount of money investing in Molly for recommendationsI mean that's like it's like I've got this little test going on where I got some of my assets into ETFs and index funds and the other the other half and Motley Fool and the molly fools cleaning theclock of the index funds so there's awesome they're making me richer and you know I don't object to that thank you so jealous John's just reflected on how he's gotten smarter happy mature but I hope you picked upthat by having our talented board members on missions they're really getting to meet our employees our employees are getting to meet these people there's a real connection every single quarterly meeting I think you could almost have every single
one of our roughly 350 employees raise their hand say they've gotten to meet one or more of our directors on board beating day so while John you're kind to say that we've done that for you and we're definitelypurposing that you're doing that through missions as one example with all our employees now another thing we want to do and I think we've got a quick video we'll put up is we do do stock pizzas we areThe Motley Fool so instead of just sitting there and having lunch we have our analysts come in and just pitch 90 seconds or so a few different stocks and then our board members at the end vote which onethey find most favorable they would buy and then we even track statistics on that so let's just if we could roll it let's take a quick look at what stock pitches look like I usually buy at least one
of the pitches before lunch is over
Three analysts present stock ideas for 2U, Etsy, and Interface, each framed through conscious capitalism and long-term investing. The audience is then asked to vote on which company they think will perform best.
what if I told you you can get exposure to augmented reality 5g cell networks electric vehicles an autonomous driving all from one small company well you can that company is to six a vertically integrated worldwide leader and engineeredmaterials and optoelectronic components for the uninitiated we're talking about lasers today to Six's products are enabling the future in which we'll all seen live it's pixel 3d sensing chips are a key component of the augmented reality applications ofthe future and for the lidar systems that make autonomous driving possible its photonics products for the data center helped supply the bandwidth that makes about computing possible helping democratize access to computing down to six is radio frequency electronicsproducts are enabling the next generation of communication systems as countries around the world and invest in five years and in silicon carbide based power electronics products are helping electric cars to charge faster improving efficiency for solar and wind
power generation making the world a cleaner to live bringing these offerings together to six should be able to grow revenue in a double-digit Hagar over the next five years bolstered by these huge technological Tillman's further to six hasa demonstrated ability to grow in spite of broader economic conditions during revenue through every industrial downturn of the past fifteen years with the exception of the Great Recession of 2009 and reporting an annual profit every year since 1973while there may be near-term cut the turbulence as the company digests its recent recent acquisition of competitor finis r26 management has positioned the business to deliver investor returns by combining a compelling product portfolio with unstoppable technology mega trendsthat are shaping I'm here to tell you that I see as proof that being a good corporate citizen and being a profitable business do not need to be mutually exclusive in fact last year their gross merchandise now stuck
3.9 billion dollars which was a 20% year-over-year increase and with the total addressable market of 1.7 trillion dollars that's he's just getting started but more than that profitability of their business idea embodies all of the tenants of consciouscapitalism one a higher purpose Axius platform gives the opportunity for small businesses have a scale and a reach that they normally wouldn't have been able to achieve on their own in fact 87% of Etsy sellers are women and49% of them started their small business in a response to a financial challenge to stakeholder orientation investors want to believe and the company they invested that it helps them their employees at Seijas committed to 100% renewable electricity by2020 and it's the first global e-commerce place to offset all carbon emissions three conscious leadership we're going to increase prices last year as these leadership decided against increasing the initial input prices so sellers were only impacted by this
price increase if they were actually selling items for a conscious culture Etsy has few more representation on over 50% of their board and their exact executives as well as having double the industry standard of people engineers so Ithink Etsy is primed to continue to dominate their new market and as their CEO puts it no one says I wanted to get you something really special so that's
my expertise are socially responsible investing and ESG investing I truly believe that care for stakeholders build stronger companies and yields better investments my stock pick today is interface conscious capitalist may be aware of this company it is actuallya carpet company and its founder Ray Anderson in 1994 had an epiphany about his company's environmental impact he didn't want to be just another sustainable carpet company instead he came up with something called mission zero which was acommitment to eliminate any negative impact the company has on the planet by 2020 as I recall in his memoir he said that when he went to his employees with his idea he was worried that they would dismiss itoutright and I think there were people who said it couldn't be done but instead the employees were galvanized
and in fact the company is very close to achieving mission zero it also does some innovative things which uses principles of nature to solve problems this is a very profitable company that's been around obviously for a long timeand we've now seen seven consecutive quarters of net sales growth and last quarter its sales growth grew by 27 percent it's also trading at nine times forward earnings which I believe makes it a good purchase at this timeand it also has a one point five percent of the tend yield so I'm hoping that conscious capitalists will take a look at this company that was such a model for stakeholder centric business thank you alright so wewant you to play the game with us so there are three companies just to summarize two six Etsy and interface now one of those companies has gotten some play here had our conference so but think about it if
you were putting down a thousand dollars buying one of those three stocks want you to think about which one do you think is gonna perform best over the next five plus years which is kind of our minimum incrementat the Motley Fool we don't really think anything less than five years is a good holding period when you're really approaching the stock market to win the game so with that said I want you to have in mind2/6 Etsy and interphase and I'm curious show of hands if you think that two-six will be the best performing next 5 years great show of hands if you think Etsy will be the next best performer next five yearsand show of hands for interface winning next five years Wow that's incredibly dollars you know we love all three of them which is why we wanted to just share those pitches but what we're obviously wanting to do with
The panel explains why giving employees direct access to directors builds pride, learning, and engagement. They also describe how the board uses specialized missions and deeper dives to make meetings more useful.
this 45 minutes we're spending together it's just show off and share kind of how we roll in what we're doing when it comes to the Motley Fool's board meetings and I'd like to emphasize there just the importance ofgiving your employees an opportunity and your team members an opportunity to sit with your directors and to share the work that they're doing to share their passion for what they're creating for the world what ends up happening ofcourse and I'd like to hear a little bit from Theresa and Suzanne about this but what ends up happening for I'll say for the employees first is a real sense of pride in the work they're doing and weunderrate the the extent to which somebody who has an opportunity to pitch a stock or to be on a mission with with each of you returns home and tells their family about it it gets them more excited about
the work and the opportunity to do that again but I'd love to hear Theresa and there's a lot of different ways to do that so the stock pick is great first of all that really connects the board tothe mission of the Motley Fool extreme minds that's what it's all about and I think there's just a lot of different ways you can make sure to do that with your own board of directors whether it's having themhear from customers whether there's there's stories that you can tell them that really connect them to why it really why your company really matters and then I think also they've there's been a number of different ways that lunchhas been used so we've had summer interns come in and report on their projects that helps the summer intern shine but it also helps us better understand some of the challenges the Motley Fool is going through we've had
board dinners where employees were invited we've had we've had Q&A sessions so there's a lot of different ways you can set up to make sure that the board gets connected and really feels something with the employees and theemployees get that same exposure where they can ask questions or um present their work and I'll add that a lot of like public company board structures you have formal audit committees and compensation committees and others and we don'twe don't do that on the Motley Fool board but what we do do is we do align with areas of expertise so for example I you know my domain that my other job is on data privacy and complianceand data security and every company these days is a data company every single one and you may not think of that first at the Motley Fool but obviously there's a lot of data in motion both from you know
members and the protection of their information as well as all the information that's that's brought in from the outside so you know I am connected directly with the legal team and with the IT team and we connect throughoutthe quarter as well and work on you know deeper dive projects and I'm able to give them some advice also listening what's what's happening and we don't have to bring the whole board into that discussion but we lightlytouch upon everything then at the next board meeting it's a good way to keep the entire board you know in touch with these topics but not necessarily frankly bring the whole board meeting down and just like the realmof compliance when maybe that's not the best use of everyone's time Suzanne
from legal and tech to discuss gdpr and I guess it was maybe 3045 minutes and afterwards one of the techies there said this was more helpful than all the stuff I've been reading online and all the things you'vebeen sending me it it's at first it just there's the knowledge there that that we we get 45 minutes with somebody from Google who does who's been I remember you told us you had been working on this fortwo years and we just started about two weeks before that and and it's just and it's just you get first-hand knowledge and the fools that were there just just we're just thankful that they got that opportunity one ofthe UM that was that was kind of a discovery for when we realized we weren't looking forward to the board meeting we realized that we were having meetings with kind of general conversations with our directors when we had
really specialized knowledge from each of our directors and we weren't really capitalizing on that and so we broke the mornings out typically and sent each director on a mission as John said you arrive in the morning you getyour top secret mission you open the envelope our directors are excited about that you find you're gonna go help our team that's trying to do a better job in really connecting our marketing to our prospects and really standingbehind our values and all of the marketing that we do which is an area that we've been working on and have a lot more work to do as a company and we've got Teresa who has a real specialtyin that ran an agency a marketing advertising agency for 15 years and I think what's really good about that is in the board meeting you might say hey you should streamline your product line which is like super helpful
we so general but then when you go on the mission you actually sit with the team for an hour and a half you go through exactly what the product line looks like you can give some perspective on thatfirst of all it kate's you on how hard it is to do but it also gives much more specific advice than something really generic like oh streamline it and so instead of all of our directors going to thattogether right we're splitting them out into different challenges that our team and our company is facing that each of our directors can really help us with one thing I want to say before we roll to the final challengeor toward the final challenge of our our conversation today is we're really excited about where we are as a company it has been 26 years we're in our 26th year this took 26 years for us to figure out
we had board meetings that should be spelled differently than boa Rd we had a lot of board meetings Bo re D we learned slowly and gradually we had venture capitalists as David said they were very supportive of ourcompany in the early years of those investments in the business but as they began to wind towards the end of the term and realized that we probably did not want to go public and did not want to sellour business we went through the process of repurchasing our shares from our venture capitalists which was quite expensive difficult Martha on our board will tell me make sure you say only a few things about this but one ofour venture capitalists sued to try and force us to go public so those board meetings required we were all sitting there very awkwardly working our way through I think that what's happened at the Motley Fool somewhat consciously and
intentionally somewhat pure luck and a lot of just being there persisting and loving what we're doing is that we found we won an authentic board that really represents what stand for and what we believe in and is alignedwith our time horizon and I know for many of you in different relationships with bankers and investors and wherever you are in your business maybe you can't achieve the full alignment naturally that I feel we now have withour board 25 years in but we didn't have it throughout this entire quarter century but to really work each meeting to try and get everyone to be on the same page with you as an entrepreneur and where you're
The speakers summarize lessons on making board meetings more meaningful, aligning around purpose, and using directors strategically. They close with dessert, final thanks, and reflections on inclusion, board culture, and the value of conscious leadership.
trying to go not that they won't change your mind that's great but to make sure that they're aligned around the purpose and the time horizon of your of your business so um I'm gonna run out real quick hereso let's just summarize a couple of things and give some takeaways and I'm gonna give a few but I'd love for each of you to share and and add to this so just stirring into the cauldron of sharedmeaning are you looking forward to your next board meeting and even if you are how could you make it more awesome for us we love games so we're in addition to trying to imbue our purpose into everything thatwe do including our board meetings we tend to play games and in fact we played one last night cuz we had our board meeting here in Phoenix last night and we play that basically a made-up version of apples
to apples where we would ask really silly questions like if the Motley Fool were to open a restaurant which by the way would be a great scent a sign of diversification and you should be shorting our stock ifwe ever did that but if we did what would be the name of a restaurant for The Motley Fool and our name does come from Shakespeare and so the winning entries I recall I don't remember which team itwas but it was
so it's very natural for us to try to game things up gamification in every way we can because Tom and I love games you grow up playing games together so so again are you looking forward to your nextboard meeting and how could you make it more awesome than that and then maybe a second one and then I'm opening it up again is you know are you making your purpose shine through and help structure what youdo with your board not just about the meetings of course but that time those times in between the meetings and is there an opportunity for every employee at your company to get to know one or more of theboard members so a couple rhetorical questions then I was gonna add do you have the right skills on your board and if you don't how can you go about getting them and I'll add just you have a tremendous
opportunity right here I think shared ethos on the board is an incredibly important aspect of the board that's around the table here you know we do I think all share high integrity great products a customer focus the goldenrule in life and at work and you know you have an opportunity in this conference really to make some great board connections there if you're interested in being on a board or looking for board members I think whatI'll say is that having run a public company for 25 years the boards that you get in a public company are going to be primarily governance boards they have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders and mostly you knowthere's big corporations that get sued a lot and so there's partly sort of cover-your-ass attitude sometimes on the problem boards but many people in this audience that are running their own companies or our senior officers in it there's
an advantage because you can create a closely held company you can create a more conscious board that will really help catalyze your organization in ways that can make it better and I think that's the way Tom and Davidit's obviously they created the company they own most of the stock it's we can't fire the management in a public company we're very conscious the board can fire management well we can't fire Tom and David because they arethe shareholders and they would fire the boardso the point of it is is that if you have a if you're running a closely held company you should view creating a board as a way to make your company better and to fulfill its higher purpose inthe world it's not just a perfunctory Tory thing it's something that you should create strategically in ways to make take your organization to the next level that's what these guys have done and I'm really proud to be associated
with it what John said once you do have that group of people is use them and listen to them after the board meeting is done we have debriefs we we go back and look at the notes of whatwhat we learn and what we can apply so it's it's nice to have you know hey we've got we've got Google we've got Whole Foods we've got LinkedIn represented but we actually take what what we've learned and andmake it make it our own if we don't make an important change after every board meeting we've we've not used that time as well as we could have I'll just make the suggestion of really we're not a titlebased company at the Motley Fool it's not it's not a very importance to be the CEO of fools I mean it's it's not and and and you see from our stock pitches how brilliant the people are that are
at our company and and and I and that's something I love about conscious capitalism every gathering that I get to spend time with with people who care about this this movement the intelligence and the passion and enthusiasm andthe care and the love that each of us are bringing to our organizations really matters but we do have titles there are titles we may not think about them ourselves at our work and the title of board directoris a big title and it really matters to have your directors out with your employees out in the community out in their worlds expressing your your purpose demonstrating your values and and really to showcase that in meetings withemployees as much as possible so um that would be my last suggestion but I think we've got a yeah final yeah well I just to close then thank you all for suffering fools gladly we really appreciate this time
with you I hope we said something that was helpful it was in a way it's kind of self-indulgent for us to just share our board with you and eat in front of you sorry I never did have asip of wine
but we did we did want to share dessert with you so I think in the center of each table if you haven't already reached over why don't you and uh let's uh pop these babies open and see what'sfor dessert
please do please
all right so in closing Tom and I love this movement we love John Mackey John came to our company invited to speak for free he did ten years ago he said hey you guys should come to my conferenceafter that we've been to almost everyone since my email addresses David G of fool comm Tom yours is Tom G of fool comm if you have any questions about how to do a board better or if we canhelp you as fellow entrepreneurs with your business we're here Tom this may sound like a celebration in some way but actually I think we're only a few years away hopefully from this being a non-factor that we shouldn't evenhave to celebrate but the Motley Fool board with Randy who brought us into this has more women than men on our board
and in a way I think that's awesome and in a way that's the way it should always have been and that's the way the business is gonna get stronger if everyone feels like they have a stake and anopportunity to be anywhere in any organization to grow their career and change the world that really matters so I think we do really show something to the world by the photographs and of our board up on our sitesand what we're showing to the world and and and how inclusive we are and how much we care about everyone fulfilling their potentials so just wanted to add that in in the end and I love our board andthank you all for guide you than me thank you and full on the lawn thank you you