Laurie Yoler: Boards at the Edge of Innovation

(0:00) Intro (1:47) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel (2:34) Start of interview  (4:12) Laurie's origin story (6:19) From Management Consulting (Accenture) to Product Innovation (Visa). "What they all had in common was that I got to start with a blank sheet of paper." (8:52) Toward Venture Capital and Board Governance. From Sun Microsystems to Packet Design to investing. (13:07) How she got interested in board governance. Her first board experience with Interactive Investor (cross-listed in US and UK) (14:27) Joining Playground Global in 2019 (16:16) Tesla’s Day-Zero Board (20:15) Zoox and Autonomous Ambition (24:11) Boards Across Company Types: VC-backed companies and family businesses. Example of her time as board member at Bose. (27:57) Lessons from Church and Dwight. The roles of M&A and marketing. (30:37) Her co-authored paper on The Artificially Intelligent Boardroom (Stanford GSB)  (35:30) Private Markets and Trillion-Dollar Valuations (40:28) The role of private equity in this environment, and its distinctive board structure. (42:55) Geopolitics and Supply Chains (47:20) Cybersecurity Oversight in the AI Age (50:45) Courage in the Boardroom. “As board members, we have to be courageous enough to ask the right questions at the right time, rather than sit back and hope everything will be okay.” (52:22) Books that have greatly influenced her life: Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier (2004) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot (2010) Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, by Yuval Noah Harari (2011) (54:14) Her mentors: Heidi Roizen  Scott McNealy Peggy Johnson (56:49) Quotes that she thinks of often or lives her life by. "It is easy enough to be pleasant, when life flows by like a song, but the man worth while is one who will smile, when everything goes dead wrong." Ella Wheeler Wilcox (57:32) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that she loves. Dancing, after following research from Kelly McGonigal. Hummingbird feeders. (59:39) The living person she most admires: her husband, Ben Lenail. Laurie Yoler is a venture capital investor at Playground Global, former board member at Tesla and Zoox, and a director or advisor to more than 25 boards. She currently serves on the boards of Church & Dwight and the NACD Northern California Chapter. You can follow Evan on social media at:X: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__To support this podcast you can join as a subscriber of the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at https://evanepstein.substack.com/__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