Greg LaBlanc: "It's Really Hard to be a Good Board Member"

(0:00) Intro.

(1:19) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel.

(2:05) Start of interview.

(2:58) Greg's "origin story." 

(5:31) His teaching focus.

(8:04) Discussion on startups and venture capital and the era of AI. Behavioral finance and bubbles. 

(11:17) Bubbles in private (VC and PE) and public markets.

(15:12) Staying private vs going public fundamentals.

(20:05) The role of governance and advice from directors to CEOs.

(22:43) On growth of private equity.

(28:00) On the rise and importance of AI. Analogy to electricity. *Reference to Paul David's research.

(29:31) On Elon Musk's compensation litigation and the recent Tesla stockholder comp ratification.

(36:13) On the role of directors. "It's really hard to be a good board member." "[Directors] better darn well get comfortable with asking not only tough questions, but dumb questions."

(40:32) On Texas and Delaware's corporate law competition.

(42:04) On the politicization of the boardroom (i.e. ESG) and geopolitics involving China.

(48:11) Books that he recommends reading: The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I  by Pollock and Maitland (1895).

(48:57)  His mentors in the area of law.

(50:47)  Quotes that he thinks of often or lives his life by.

(51:57) An unusual habit or absurd thing that he loves.

(54:16) About his podcast Unsiloed.

Greg LaBlanc is a Lecturer and Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Berkeley, Stanford, HEC Paris and other prestigious institutions. Greg teaches a wide range of subjects, including finance, strategy, law, innovation, data science, and digital transformation. He is also the host of the podcast Unsiloed.

You can follow Evan on social media at:

X: @evanepstein

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ 

Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/

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Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License