Our first board meeting ... we are on our way!

Well - we have hit our first MAJOR milestone. We have completed our first board meeting!!

First by way of introduction, here is the makeup of our board. I couldn't share this until today as we had nominated our board but they had not accepted their positions. They did that as one of the first actions. They are:

Rich Green - EVP of Software at Sun Microsystems
Lewis Gale - Dean of Goddard School of Business at Weber State University
Mike LaFave - Head of Sales for Consolidated Printing
Curt Roberts - Executive at Youth Star and Former VP Marketing for Nike
Dale Ferrario - President of FreshBrain and VP Software Sun Microsystems

The employees and volunteers of FreshBrain have been heads down working toward our first board meeting. We prepared a number of version 1.0 documents, a website prototype and a board presentation. Here is the complete list:

• Agenda
• Board Presentation
• Objectives, Goals and Metrics Document
• Engineering Plan
• Marketing Plan
• Fund Raising Plan
• Student Scenarios
• Nonprofit Documents (By Laws, etc.)
• Partner Two Page Overview
• Website Prototype

Prior to the meeting we held an informal technology discussion lead by Stan. He walked everyone through the platform that we will be building, the technologies that we are evaluating and a bit about how this will be deployed and supported in production.

Then we got into the board meeting. For me, it a first. Not only attending a board meeting but running it. What a great experience! Here is a summary of what we did.

• Called the meeting to order
• Discussed nonprofit status
• Agreed to board roles and member terms
• Reviewed FreshBrain vision, mission, objectives, goals, measures, roadmap and financials
• Demo'd the BreshBrain.org prototype
• Reviewed marketing approach and plan
• Reviewed fundraising approach and plan
• Voted
  
• Closed the meeting

This was a LOT of stuff. We had provided the document prior to the meeting, but there was still too much information to fit into the two hour slot we had allocated. But the discussion was excellent and we accomplished much of what we had hoped to accomplish. As a result, we are able to now function to the budget proposed and the roadmap presented.

We will be scheduling our next meeting with the board in roughly a month. This will be an opportunity to finalize on two remaining items. The first is the goals and measures. We have a good first pass but it needs some additional discussion and review before the board is comfortable approving. And second, we need to spend more time discussing and reviewing our fundraising strategy, target founding partners, timing and approach.

We had a very nice dinner following the board meeting. We had almost all of our board, the employees of FreshBrain and our partners Skona. We had this in my backyard. It was a nice culmination to the day and a chance to mingle and interact outside of the work environment.

Wow - great progress thus far. I am soooo excited to really get moving. The amount of work is a bit daunting, but the opportunity to make a difference is awesome and we are now truly on our way!!