Mark Rogers and Bobby Driscoll
Title: Founder, President & CEO; Co-Founder and COO
Age: 38 years old; 41 years old
Experience: 15 years; 19 years
Get Mark Rogers and Bobby Driscoll together in a room, and it’s easy to see why they make a good team. They’ve been working together on BoardProspects for four years now. They launched the site with the aim of driving the board recruitment process beyond the “Who do you know?” conversation, helping interested prospects match up with boards looking to recruit. As Rogers puts it, “There’s not a lack of people looking. There was simply a lack of a forum in which one could raise their hand and say, ‘This is who I am and this is what I have to offer.’”
Q: BoardProspects is in Version 2.0 now, right? What’s changed between the first and second versions?
Mark: Version 1 was most akin to a Match.com for the boardroom space. We wanted to shift it to more of a community feel to the site. We want BoardProspects to become a destination site for the boardroom community, so it would include news, information, best practices, education and group opportunities, on a day-to-day basis. Our next feature we’re launching is called Boardrooms. It’s very similar to LinkedIn subgroups, so you can join an open one or create an open one, or you can create a private one, where you can share information, news, and communicate.
What we eventually will do is begin to integrate premium subscriptions, and those will be distinguished from the standard subscription by the recruitment features, but we don’t want to do that until further down the road. Right now, we’re more concerned with building up the community.
Q: What kind of changes are you seeing right now in board recruitment?
Mark: First, you have a shift from the professional board member to the industry expert board member. People are realizing that just because someone serves on four boards, that doesn’t mean they’re going to be a good board member. They’re looking for specific industry expertise and skill sets that will add significant value to the board.
We’re also seeing a cultural shift going on right now. On paper, someone might have all the skill sets you need, but people are also asking, ‘How is this person going to interact with the rest of our board?’
You also have a push toward diversity, in particular gender diversity. That’s just a good best practice in corporate governance anyway. In fact, California just passed some legislation which encourages public boards to have a certain number of women members.
Q: Bobby, tell me a little more about your role in this.
Bobby: I work with our chief tech officer and the development team to make sure that we’re able to implement the most important features so we make this process easier and build a valuable boardroom community.
I worked with a member of our advisory board to do a worldwide search for [our chief tech officer], and we actually found him working on his latest project. He was living in Indonesia and had just come off another project in Romania. He has a wealth of startup experience, and was able to grasp the big picture and break it down into its small moving parts. That’s been invaluable over the last nine months. We feel we’ve built a much more robust and easy to use product for people in the boardroom space.
Q: You recently raised a little more than $3 million in capital. What was that process like?
Mark: It’s very difficult to raise money as a startup, despite the stories that are out there, especially when you are a startup that is pre-revenue and doesn’t anticipate revenue for the foreseeable future. So that is something we raised in two rounds.
They’re all private investors. It started with a couple business contacts I had from my days of practicing law and it grew from there, so we have about 20 private investors. They are private company CEOs, public company directors, investment bankers, but they’re all successful business leaders who all saw the need for this type of community that we’re creating. It’s been interesting for us. It is a vote of confidence in the concept we’ve come up with and the team we have.
Top Five Misconceptions About Board Service:
- Board service is only for the C-suite.
- Financial acumen is no longer a highly sought-after trait by boards.
- You’ve got to know someone to get on a board.
- Regulations limit the ability of those in the financial industry to serve on a board.
- Liability exposure for board members is too high.
