I think this post has some assumptions behind it that are worth spelling out (and maybe arguing for separately – I think I agree with the implicit worldview here, but I don’t think it’s well established)
As others have noted, people vary in what they want out of a board. Here’s a couple reasons you might want one:
You have to. The IRS rules say you do. (from this perspective, you want a minimal, easy-to-throw-together board).
You want the prestige of high status people being vaguely affiliated with your org, and a board is an effective way to do that.
You (the founder) want to have checks on your power to give yourself a sanity check (because you want to create good incentives for yourself, to help improve your own integrity and rationality)
You (the founder) want to have checks on your power to improve other people’s trust in you, so that you can get more resources. (This is similar to previous point, but instead of trying to improve your decisionmaking for it’s own sake, it’s more that you want resources that accrue to people with trustworthy epistemics/decisionmaking)
You (the founder) are part of a broader nonprofit ecosystem and you care about other nearby orgs having good institution design. Maybe you trust yourself fine without a board, but you don’t trust the other orgs in your ecosystem and you want to move towards a world where everyone is deliberately constraining themselves for the betterment of civilization.
This post seems to basically be arguing that 3, 4 and/or 5 are particularly valuable, and worth prioritizing especially if you’re a larger org. (I think all three points are pretty valuable)
I think this post has some assumptions behind it that are worth spelling out (and maybe arguing for separately – I think I agree with the implicit worldview here, but I don’t think it’s well established)
As others have noted, people vary in what they want out of a board. Here’s a couple reasons you might want one:
You have to. The IRS rules say you do. (from this perspective, you want a minimal, easy-to-throw-together board).
You want the prestige of high status people being vaguely affiliated with your org, and a board is an effective way to do that.
You (the founder) want to have checks on your power to give yourself a sanity check (because you want to create good incentives for yourself, to help improve your own integrity and rationality)
You (the founder) want to have checks on your power to improve other people’s trust in you, so that you can get more resources. (This is similar to previous point, but instead of trying to improve your decisionmaking for it’s own sake, it’s more that you want resources that accrue to people with trustworthy epistemics/decisionmaking)
You (the founder) are part of a broader nonprofit ecosystem and you care about other nearby orgs having good institution design. Maybe you trust yourself fine without a board, but you don’t trust the other orgs in your ecosystem and you want to move towards a world where everyone is deliberately constraining themselves for the betterment of civilization.
This post seems to basically be arguing that 3, 4 and/or 5 are particularly valuable, and worth prioritizing especially if you’re a larger org. (I think all three points are pretty valuable)