Michael Ewens (Columbia Business School): What the Data Reveals About Startup Boards and Private Equity

(0:00) Intro(1:19) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel(2:05) Start of interview (2:48) Michael's origin story. Academic Journey and Early Influences. *reference to Correlation Ventures(8:55) About his paper Board Dynamics over the Startup Life Cycle (2020) with Nadia Malenko. (11:30) Role of independent directors in VC-backed companies.(16:05) Control Dynamics in Startup Boards(17:21) The Evolution of Founder Control *Reference to E187 with Brad Feld (Oct 2025)(28:11) The Future of Private Markets(29:21) The Future of IPOs “What’s been missing from the IPO market since 1996 is the small- to mid-cap company. In my view, the solution for public markets is to restore their uniqueness by shutting down private secondary markets and making public-market liquidity distinctive again.”(33:40) The Role of Private Equity in Governance(39:47) Distinctions Between VC and PE Boards(42:24) Insights from Private Equity for Public Companies “A PE firm is really an investment bank with a consulting arm, where the partners sit on both sides and have equity in the whole game.” "What PE solves is expertise alignment, and a clear investment horizon for an exit."(47:36) The Impact of AI on Board Governance(50:20) Books that have greatly influenced his life:One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)Culture Series by Ian Banks (1987-2012)A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett (2023)(53:14) His mentors (54:24) Quotes that he thinks of often or lives his life by: "All models are wrong, but some are useful" by George Box(53:15) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that he loves. Watching the Big Lebowski.(55:53) The living person he most admires: Derek Thomson.(57:26) Moving from VC to PE Research in New YorkMichael Ewens is the David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance and co-director of the Private Equity Program at Columbia Business School. You can follow Evan on social media at:Website: boardroom-governance.comX: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BoardroomGovernance__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