Robbie Kellman Baxter

A few weeks back, I watched Maggie Hott, GTM leader at OpenAI, confidently navigate her first board meeting at Unify. Having worked with her through Emergence Capital's Operator in Residence (OIR) program, seeing her immediately contribute valuable insights made me think about how most board members receive virtually no training for this critical role. At Emergence, we've built our firm around developing board excellence. We grow all our partners from within and have established a culture of mentorship focused on board service. Junior investors aren't thrown into the deep end—we pair them with senior GPs to observe effective board dynamics firsthand. My initial experience was at DroneDeploy alongside my partner Kevin Spain, where I got great mentorship before taking on independent board responsibilities. We extend this methodology to our OIR program, where operators learn how to be effective board members. Based on my experience mentoring directors, here are the fundamental principles I share with first-timers for how board members can best support founders: 1. Reframe the purpose: Problem-solving, not reporting If your board meeting is primarily reporting, you're wasting your management team's time. Information sharing should happen asynchronously, with board members engaging with materials before the meeting. This enables the live session to leverage collective intelligence on critical challenges. This rarely happens because many directors overextend themselves across too many boards—another reason we maintain a disciplined investment pace. 2. Master the Socratic approach The most valuable contribution often comes through thoughtful questions rather than declarative statements. Your objective is to enhance the decision-making capability of management. I enter each meeting with 1-3 specific areas where I know I can add value, focusing questions on these topics. 3. Follow-through separates professionals from amateurs Diligently document your commitments, establish clear action items, and execute them. It's crazy how just doing this proactively makes a board member stand out. 4. Understand your unique contribution to the board ecosystem A high-functioning board resembles a great basketball team—you need complementary skills, not redundant ones. In every meeting, I stay conscious of my distinct value relative to others in the room, whether that's SaaS expertise, AI knowledge, or a particular relationship dynamic with the CEO. I calibrate my role based on needs—sometimes assertively addressing areas where others have less experience, other times asking probing questions where fellow members have deeper expertise. -- To my knowledge, Emergence is the only VC firm with a formalized program dedicated to board excellence. It's an investment that yields returns where they matter most—in bending the odds of success for our founders. Founders, I'm curious: What board member behaviors have you found most valuable?

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AI is completely transforming how we work, but one of the biggest challenges I hear from other CMOs and business leaders is connecting different tools and solutions. I’m super excited about the launch of Gemini Enterprise, which brings all your company's data, tools, and people together in one secure place. Gemini Enterprise is bringing the full power of Google AI to everyone at work. Especially at big companies like ours, AI has incredible power to help us find information across internal documents, unlock new insights from our data, and deploy helpful agents that understand the context of our work and can help us get things done more efficiently. These tools are already saving thousands of hours on our team, and the boost to productivity and collaboration is helping unlock epic new ideas, move at the speed of culture, and drive real results. This is just the beginning, and I’m so excited to see what new campaigns are born with these new tools! 🪄 Congrats to Thomas Kurian, Alison Wagonfeld and the team on the amazing launch. Read more about what we announced → https://lnkd.in/gqiY-USZ

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Guild serves working adults balancing jobs, caregiving, and education. Their support team achieves 4.8/5 CSAT — and their Sierra AI agent matches it. COO Jonathan Marek shares how they're scaling across 20+ languages https://lnkd.in/ghytVvca

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“When it comes to GTM, it’s not that you aren’t working hard enough, it’s that you’re not giving yourself the space to develop the breakthrough insight you need.” - Varun Anand, cofounder of Clay in conversation with Erica Anderson, Chief Revenue Officer of Notion #NYCTechWeek

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I am amazed at how much time is wasted on boards discussing topics that are not strategic and core to the business. Founders are asked to answer informative questions, which can be addressed during a catch-up call with the founder, rather than at a board meeting. I’d love to learn some best practices to get the most out of board meetings. 💡 From my perspective, preparation is the absolute key. Founders spend hours pulling together materials. The least we can do as board members is read them before walking into the room. It’s an absolute pet peeve of mine to sit in board meetings where half the board hasn’t even reviewed the deck - it’s so disrespectful to founders spending hours on preparing the deck in advance. Some other good practices I’ve seen: 📊 Using a live metrics sheet – that is constantly uploaded, and we (investors) can review at our own time. This helps avoid wasting time reading through financials during the actual board meeting. 🎥 Record a short video – I love what Matthijs Welle from Mews does. He summarises the highlights and lowlights ahead of the session, so everyone arrives aligned and with up-to-date questions. 🧠 Use the time for checking on strategic discussions – the board should be the founders’ sparring partner, not a silent audience. Focus on how the board can help and support the business. Board meetings don’t have to be painful or performative. With the right prep and practice, they can be high-value and high-trust sessions that actually move your business forward. I’d love to hear what other best practices you’ve seen in your board meetings. I am tagging a few founders and investors - I would love to hear what works and what doesn’t for you on boards Chris Tottman, Kamil Mieczakowski, seth m phillips, Dan K., David Sutter, Jeff Handler, Niklas Radner, Maxime Eduardo, Côme Dartiguenave, Tom Le Bras, Harrison Rose, Avinav Nigam, Hugo Fdez.-Mardomingo, Henri Tilloy, Oriol Juncosa #VC #Startup #BoardMeeting #Founder #StartupAdvice #Leadership

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Excited to share a new blog post I co-wrote with Patrick McClanahan on the evolving landscape of #VerticalSaaS! As Vertical SaaS companies navigate limited market sizes, sustainable growth comes down to two key levers: expanding the customer base and deepening monetization. From embedded payments to AI-powered workflow automation, industry leaders like Shopify, Toast, and Clio - Cloud-Based Legal Technology are using AI to enhance user experiences and unlock new revenue streams. The future of Vertical SaaS is intelligent, adaptive, and built on deep domain expertise—and AI is accelerating that shift. A few of our takeaways: 📈Vertical SaaS Growth: SAM/SOM growth comes from serving new customers and deepening monetization 🤝Proven Strategies: In the past, leading companies grew their addressable market with strategies like integrated payments and ecosystem integrations 💡AI Opportunity: AI enables Vertical SaaS to reach previously unreachable workflows and solve new pain points, growing SAM and share of wallet 🏆Moving Beyond Service Providers: In the future, the most successful Vertical SaaS companies will leverage intelligence and automation to move from service providers to AI-enabled advisors and co-pilots Check out the full post and let us know what you think!  https://lnkd.in/g3vipcKq #VerticalSaaS #AI #GrowthStrategies #SaaS Fika Ventures

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Grateful to join Shripati Acharya and the Prime Ventures Podcast to discuss Uniphore’s journey and what it really takes to bring agentic AI into production at the world’s largest businesses. We covered a few themes that keep coming up with CIOs and business leaders I speak with: what industrializing AI looks like beyond pilots, why a horizontal enterprise platform (data, models, security, agents) is essential for scaling responsibly, and the challenge of making AI agents more deterministic through architecture, guardrails, and workflow design. I also shared why small, fine-tuned models can be the right approach for many business use cases, balancing accuracy, control, and cost at scale. At the center of this is the Uniphore Business AI Cloud: an end-to-end platform that helps businesses bring their data together, fine-tune models, and build and deploy AI agents with the security and sovereignty large organizations require. And, it’s increasingly enabled by a strong ecosystem of strategic partners across compute, data, and cloud, working together to help customers move from experimentation to measurable outcomes. I’m confident the next chapter of Business AI will be defined by disciplined execution and real impact at scale. Thank you Shripati for a thoughtful conversation. Let’s do it again soon. #BusinessAI

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