William Allen

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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🚨 New GroWrk Visionaries Episode 🚨 Eddie Borrero on AI, Cyber Resilience & the Future of IT Lifecycle Management We sat down with Eddie Borrero, SVP & CIO at Stellarus and former CISO at Blue Shield of California — a $23B nonprofit healthcare plan with 7,500+ employees — to unpack what it takes to secure complex global enterprises in the AI era. In this candid interview, Eddie shares hard-earned lessons on: 🔐 Why IT asset lifecycle management is critical to enterprise security 🤖 How leading orgs are embracing AI without compromising compliance 🏥 What healthcare teaches us about risk, control, and transformation 📊 And why IT ops is shifting from a cost center to strategic core At GroWrk, we help enterprises do just that — managing IT assets across 150+ countries with automation, security, and scale in mind. Huge thanks to Eddie for keeping it real and dropping knowledge. This one’s a must-watch for CIOs, CISOs, and anyone building secure IT at scale. 🎥 Watch the full interview here → https://lnkd.in/gNYyA--F #CIO #CISO #AI #Cybersecurity #ITAssetManagement #EnterpriseIT #GroWrkVisionaries #HealthcareTech #GroWrk

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Container security has reached a critical inflection point. Engineering teams face an impossible choice between adopting minimalist proprietary systems that sacrifice compatibility or accepting endless vulnerability backlogs. Which is why I'm excited to share that N47 is leading Echo's Series A! Echo delivers true zero-CVE images for enterprises without any operational disruption. What makes this architecturally significant is their AI-native automation, operating at the speed and scale required to counter attackers who are already weaponizing AI to exploit vulnerabilities faster than human defenders can respond. I have been incredibly impressed by co-founders Eilon Elhadad and Eylam Milner, and am excited about what’s to come. We're confident they're building something generational. Welcome to the zero-CVE future! Learn more about our partnership here: https://lnkd.in/eBsmWFxz

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Today, we're welcoming ORION Security to the Norwest portfolio. The #DLP market has grown to $5B, yet most solutions are still built on thousands of static, human-authored policies. Spending time with Nitay Milner (CEO & Co-Founder) and Jonathan Kreiner (CTO & Co-Founder) in Tel Aviv reinforced why ORION stands apart. Their work is grounded in firsthand experience with the limitations of legacy DLP, guiding their passion and urgency to pave the way for an autonomous, context-driven approach that confronts today’s evolving risks head‑on. Looking forward to seeing what the team builds next as enterprises adopt autonomous DLP at scale. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gH7vXs4x  

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Welcome to Vanta, Riskey! Vendor risk remains one of the harder problems in security: more vendors, more surface area, and traditional reviews that just can’t keep up. Riskey took a smarter approach: real-time, AI-powered monitoring to help security teams stay ahead of third- and fourth-party risk. We're announcing the acquisition today, *and* we've already integrated Riskey's technology into Vanta VRM. For customers, this means: 🔎 Continuous monitoring for vendor vulnerabilities, breaches, misconfigurations, and leaked credentials ⚡️ Real-time alerts to catch risk as it evolves 📊 AI-powered scoring to help teams focus on what matters 📁 Auto-collected vendor docs to speed up reviews 🌐 Visibility across your the vendor ecosystem, including fourth parties Welcome to Vanta, Koren Molcho, Yoav Dagan, Eldar David and the rest of the Riskey team! Excited for what's ahead –

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As I'm leaving AWS re:Invent in Vegas, I’m reminded of a counterintuitive truth: competing with the public clouds is often really good business VCs love to ask, “Why wouldn’t the incumbent do this?” But in markets this large (and evolving this quickly) that’s rarely the right question. The real questions are: Who can assemble the best team, get to market fastest and with the most focus? And where are there opportunities to partner with the biggest players rather than compete? We’ve seen this pattern repeat across the ecosystem: -People assumed Vercel and AWS were destined to compete. Today, they’re strategic partners with CEO Guillermo Rauch in the keynote -Snowflake vs. Amazon Redshift. Now, AWS is one of Snowflake’s strongest distribution channels -In Datadog’s early pitches, the concern was, “If it’s just monitoring AWS, why not use CloudWatch?” Fast forward to now, and Datadog is now $50B+ public company We’re going to see the same dynamics play out with OpenAI and Anthropic. These are becoming foundational platforms. But that doesn’t preclude incredible companies from being built on, next to, and even around them. Some will look competitive. Many will end up as partners. And the biggest outcomes often start in those gray zones

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I like Wiz's research (and marketing). Always on point. So I got excited when they started developing CISO insights. Here's their 2026 budget benchmark surveying 300+ security leaders. Full disclosure: there's likely bias here. Cloud security vendor surveys their customers, cloud spending looks great. That's fine... the data's very useful. Three things that caught my attention: 1️⃣ AI is the #1 factor driving spend (54%) Not cloud. Not skills gaps. Not incidents. AI-powered solutions and countering AI threats dominate the conversation. Up the hype cycle we go? Sure. But when 300+ CISOs say it's their top priority, founders building here have real tailwinds. 2️⃣ Tool sprawl and vendor consolidation rank DEAD LAST (11%) Everyone talks about "platformization". Analysts preach consolidation. We all love the "replace 10 tools" pitch. But CISOs don't wake up wanting to buy platforms. They wake up trying to solve specific problems. The 58% running 25+ tools aren't looking for philosophical purity... they're looking for something that actually works. 3️⃣ Compliance is still king (45%) Same as it was 25 years ago, despite all the innovation talk, regulatory requirements drive as much spending as anything else. For startup founders: The budget numbers look healthy - 53% spending >$5M annually, 88% expecting increases. But the satisfaction gap is massive. Organizations spending $25M+ are the least satisfied with outcomes. The opportunity isn't "another platform." It's solving real problems with measurable risk reduction. Healthcare and financial services are the biggest spenders (67% and 54% over $5M respectively). Manufacturing is most aggressive on budget growth (96% increasing spend). Full report attached. Worth your time if you're making budget decisions or building in this space.

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Slingshot Insights acquires Noble Insights Exciting to see consolidation in the expert network space. This will likely lead to more innovation, more proprietary content via transcripts and surveys and the opportunity to see a bigger expert network emerge.

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