An advisory board is a group of experienced operators, domain experts, or connectors who provide targeted counsel outside your formal board of directors.
An advisory board is distinct from the board of directors: no fiduciary duty, no formal governance role, no board meetings. Its purpose is to bring targeted expertise — a specific technology domain, a specific customer segment, a specific stage of scaling — into the founder's decision-making process. Advisory boards work when each advisor is picked to solve a real problem and the founder actually uses them. They fail when advisors are picked for logo value, given equity, and then never contacted — a pattern so common that many founders now discount 'strategic advisors' in company decks as decorative.
(1) Domain expertise the founder lacks — the ex-CTO who has scaled ML infra to 100M users can prevent a founder from making architectural mistakes that cost 6 months. (2) Customer-segment insight — the retired CFO advisor who can preview how a real Fortune 500 CFO will react to your pitch and pricing. (3) Network access — the operator who introduces you to the exact right hire or first enterprise customer. (4) Founder therapy — the peer who has scaled through the stage you're entering, available for high-context conversations you can't have with your investors or team. Each advisor should have one or two of these roles clearly defined at the outset.
A famous advisor who takes six weeks to reply to email delivers less value than a lesser-known operator who takes six hours. Signals of a productive advisor: (a) they ask hard, specific questions in the first meeting rather than giving generic wisdom, (b) they have a track record of active engagement with other companies you can reference-check, (c) they push back on your ideas rather than only affirming, (d) they respond within days, not weeks. Anti-signals: 'strategic advisor' at 30+ companies (bandwidth impossible), refuses to meet before signing, insists on equity before conversation. Reference-check advisors like you would executive hires — call the founders they've advised before, ask 'how often did they respond,' 'did they open real doors,' 'would you re-engage them?'
Standard advisor equity in the US: 0.1-0.5% of common stock, vesting over 1-2 years with a short cliff (3 months) or no cliff, using the FAST agreement or a simple advisor grant. Match equity to expected engagement: standard advisor (monthly call, ad-hoc availability): 0.1-0.25%. Strategic advisor (bi-weekly involvement, board-of-directors-adjacent): 0.25-0.5%. Advisors who take equity but no cash are typically post-financial-success operators; earlier-career experts who can't afford to give free time often prefer $500-1500/hour cash. Never give more than 0.5% except in rare cases — the aggregate advisor pool should stay under 2% of common stock at seed stage.
Do NOT run advisors as a group by default. Group advisory meetings are theater — polite discussion, no one commits. Instead: 1:1 monthly or bi-weekly cadence with each advisor, driven by a specific agenda you sent 48 hours ahead. Group meetings once or twice a year for cross-pollination and social bonding, if at all. Written advisor updates (a stripped-down version of your investor update, sent monthly) keep advisors current and remind them you exist. Track advisor engagement — a spreadsheet with each advisor's last-contact date and outstanding asks. Advisors you haven't contacted in 4 months should either be re-engaged or gracefully offboarded.
Say no at intake: advisors who want to advise in areas you don't need help with; advisors whose bandwidth is obviously too thin; advisors whose reference checks come back lukewarm. Offboard mid-relationship: advisors who haven't materially engaged in 6 months; advisors whose input has become unhelpful (former stage bias, outdated context); advisors who create friction with the team or investors. Offboarding is awkward but essential — the alternative is a bloated cap table with dead-weight equity. Standard exit: honest conversation, thank them, offer to cancel unvested equity. Most reasonable advisors accept gracefully; those who don't were the wrong pick from the start.
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