The Startup Board series video Choosing Your Board Members with Brad Feld highlights a pivotal decision many entrepreneurs face. Moreover, many entrepreneurs don’t provide the necessary time and consideration in identifying the best startup board members.

Like choosing a significant other or a co-founder, board members are long-term partners with significant responsibilities and controls such as the ability to hire and fire the CEO as well as influence key company decisions. As such, constructing your Board should be very “deliberate” — as noted by Brad — and take a long-term lens.

Throughout the video Brad provides wonderful advice on the importance of choosing Board members, the qualities to value in potential board members, as well as key red flags to identify. Among the treasure-chest of helpful advice, two areas in particular struck me:

• Diversity. Brad defines diversity through thought, experience, background, gender, and ethnicity and further highlights the need for diversity and skills in board members over vanity metrics like fame. I couldn’t agree more on the need for board diversity. To best serve your company, your board should complement the skills, knowledge, and perspective that you as an entrepreneur already have.
• Choice. In many investment situations a specific lead investor may require a board seat. As Brad says, even in these situations entrepreneurs still have a choice in choosing their Board by simply turning down the investment. In fact, if the thought of a particular investor on your Board is worrisome, that may be a red flag for the entire investment and partnership itself.

Altogether, the video offers a prescriptive guide to build the perfect board for your startup.

Much of this advice resonates with me, and my board experiences at my group travel startup Travefy. Following our initial Seed investment in late-2013 our board composition was to be two Travefy Directors and one Investor Director. Thankfully, we were provided the opportunity to suggest Investor Directors from our pool of Seed investors.

For us, selecting our Travefy Directors proved fairly straightforward as there are two Travefy co-founders and we each provide unique perspectives as the company’s CEO – or business chief – and CTO who manages the product.

Identifying the best person from our pool of investors, however, was a much deeper decision. At a high level, we sought someone who would be our champion as we grow, but we also wanted someone to challenge us to be better (honest feedback is a core Travefy value). In a great way, many of our investors fit this mold.

From there, we assessed several criteria that included invested capital, company involvement, travel or software domain expertise, as well as factors like availability and relationship dynamics. In the end, our choice was clear and Travefy has benefited immensely from the amazing advisory and support of our board.