Six months after Valley tech veteran Sukhinder Singh Cassidy announced a database to help place qualified women on startup boards, the Boardlist is stepping out of beta with a European launch, a freemium business model, a new boot camp for would-be board members, and its first official placement. “We want to use diversity to drive business performance,” says Cassidy.
The Boardlist is a marketplace for female board talent. Designated endorsers, who are mostly tech investors and executives, recommend women who are qualified to serve on corporate boards; startups can cull the database to find candidates. “Most startups have independent board seats, and too often those board seats go empty because founders don’t get around to filling them,” says Cassidy, who also is CEO of video-shopping startup Joyus. She wants to make it easy for founders to fill those seats by selecting from more than 1,000 qualified female candidates. There are now 200 endorsers drawn from companies like Airbnb, Lyft and eBay as well as venture outfits like Greylock Partners and Accel Partners.
So far, the Boardlist has made one official placement: In September, Karla Martin, the former director of global business strategy at Google, was appointed to the board of Challenged, a startup that publishes an app for friends to participate in challenges together. However, other more informal connections have led to some positive outcomes. Mauria Finley, founder and CEO of Citrus Lane, joined The Fossil Group’s board of directors through Cassidy’s endorsement as The Boardlist was launching. Currently, there are 40 active board searches going on.
The database is set up as a benefit corporation, meaning it prioritizes creating social value alongside return to its shareholders, and it has launched a freemium business model: candidates and endorsers can use the service for free. Venture capitalists pay for access to the database. And a newly announced corporate membership program provides tech companies the ability to endorse their own female leaders for board consideration, as well as offer customized educational and networking opportunities within their companies.
Later this spring, the Boardlist will launch a training workshop for would-be board directors. “So many women wonder if they’re qualified,” says Cassidy. “Often they need to be asked.” The training workshop will be for women, and should help possible candidates feel confident they are ready to assume a seat at the board table. But Cassidy also hopes to launch the first board boot camp for founders of both genders. “What I really want is to have male founders in the room learning how to build a great board and include diversity in that conversation,” says Cassidy.
The idea for The Boardlist began last spring when Cassidy and 59 other women published an open letter criticizing what she called the domination of “negative signals” in press coverage of women in tech. “Looking at the press, one might think women are not only hard to find, but struggling to succeed,” Cassidy wrote. She asked women CEOs and founders to take a survey, and published her results on Medium in a post that introduced the vision for database.
It was something she’d been mulling for awhile. A year earlier, she’d pitched the idea to venture capitalists. They turned her down, saying they preferred to do their own recruiting. “Everybody iterates in Silicon Valley,” says Cassidy. “Some fail and some succeed, but everybody iterates. So on the topic of gender diversity, how can it be that there’s no iterating?" Board placements, she feels, are a great place to start.
