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Episode Description

Joe Hurd is a public and non-profit board director and early-stage investor. As an operating executive, Joe is the Operating Partner at SOSV, LLC, a $1B early-stage venture fund, where he leads strategy and business development efforts for the fund’s life sciences, deep tech hardware and mobile portfolio companies. In this episode, we talk about how technology is impacting every business and differences between US and UK boards

Quotes 

My role as an operating partner of SOSV is to work on an ongoing basis with six or eight of our top portfolio CEOs. I tend to focus building on my 20 years of experience in digital media, on strategy, corporate development, business development, sales, and helping them penetrate the market. We want entrepreneurs that will make the world better.

“Deep tech” is a phrase that's come into vogue over the last three or four years, and the focus is on technology companies that combine three things. The first is, for our purposes, hardware manufacturing, something tangible, something that you make, something that requires engineering and engineering skills, and then there is software. And, most importantly, mission and purpose -these are companies that are solving problems where it may not be clear for another 3, 5, 7, 10 years, whether you're actually on the right path.

  

UK PUBLIC COMPANY BOARD vs US

When you're a director of a UK public company, you need to think about all of the stakeholders of that company, not just the investors, but the employees, the suppliers, society as a whole. I had to really take a step back and put my legal hat on for a minute and really understand what the fiduciary duties of a director are and work the interests of all the stakeholders into my decision process when I was in boardroom conversations.

The first and the biggest difference between the US and UK is when you look at how governance is approached in the United States, it tends to be, as I alluded to earlier, shareholder first. You have fiduciary duty as a director to the corporation, the shareholders, sometimes the creditors.

In the UK, it's much broader. It's more of a stakeholder-first approach where you're looking at, not just the investors in the company, the shareholders, but also the employees, the suppliers, the customers and society as a whole.  The UK corporate governance code actually enshrines this in law and regulation where it is a very broad principles-based approach to governance as opposed to a very specific rules-based approach that you get in the United States.

It's hard to say whether the UK is better or not better, but it seems to me if the law has codified the need to take into account all stakeholders. If the law has mandated certain kinds of diversity, gender and/or racial, I would say that is better. I don't think it is just reflecting what your cultural background is. It would seem to me that that is better because it forces those companies to move in a direction that is likely to make them stronger, is likely to make them more responsive to their stakeholders - and that is a very good thing from a capital point of view at the end of the day

Employees Voice in UK

In the UK,  they have said that directors and boards of directors have an affirmative obligation to reach out to the employees and bring the employees' voice into the boardroom, whether they nominate a director to be the workforce net designate or even bring employees on the board in some cases. The code says that either one of your directors needs to be explicitly designated as the director that interfaces with the workforce or, if you want to take another model, you can bring employees onto the board and bring the employee voice in in that way.

Compensation for UK companies

 Part of the corporate governance code required that directors of UK companies are paid a salary. There is no equity component to the compensation and that is in keeping with the independent maximum, that you're not running the company for the benefit of the shareholders only.  There's nothing stopping me as a director from purchasing shares, provided that you adhere to the relevant purchase windows. So, that's a pretty big difference between US and UK boards. 

Big Ideas/Thoughts

When I say: “every company's a technology company,” what I mean is that over the last 20 years technology has become so pervasive as to how companies operate that even if you're involved in a non-tech sector, you still need to integrate, rely on and be mindful of companies that have more of a tech-focused approach than your company.

 

Whether it's brick or mortar retail, travel or leisure, or oil and gas, companies are now realizing that technology is integral to all parts of their business: how they measure the business, how they measure productivity, how their competitors are able to scale and acquire customers, how they are using HR to bring benefits to the companies - technology is a factor in virtually every facet of their business.