If anyone has the formula for an effective board, it’s WeTransfer’s symbiotic Chair and CEO pairing, Martha Lane Fox and Alexandar Vassilev. They joined us at Boardwave Live to share their learnings.
“In my experience you can both underestimate and overestimate the importance of boards”, says Martha Lane Fox, kicking off our Boardwave Live session ‘Effective Boards: Building the right engine for success’.
The WeTransfer Chair, and former board member at the likes of Marks & Spencer, Twitter, and Channel 4, joined CEO Alexandar Vassilev to reflect on how the company’s board has helped it navigate through a testing but pivotal few years.
It’s often said that in moments of transition or crisis, boards show their true worth – and so it proved when WeTransfer pulled its IPO in 2022 due to market volatility, and the strength and guidance of its board came to the fore.
Building deep bonds and supporting through crisis
Having both joined WeTransfer in 2020, Vassilev and Lane Fox had to be braced for turbulence. Offices were fully remote, making it difficult to grasp the culture and what was going on within the company.
If the uncertainty and isolation of COVID wasn’t enough, the challenge of making the company IPO-ready meant that the board and wider company had to get on the same page, fast. “Going public meant spending time together and building deep bonds”, Vassilev says, adding that having the common goal of going public was a unifying force.
So when the IPO didn’t materialise in 2022, WeTransfer had some bouncing back to do. Here, CEO Vassilev says that having the backing of a supportive board, and in particular a supportive Chair, was critical.
“When you have to pick up the team after an IPO that didn’t go through – when things are difficult, when you’re scaling the company and rethinking where it’s going, having someone who brings support from day one, not only for the company but for you as an individual”, says Vasillev. “It gives you that backbone to be authentic, to be vulnerable, to bounce ideas off. It makes the job easier.”
“Manage through disappointment, stay calm and steady”, says Lane Fox, mantra-like. “As a Chair you’re like the pilot.” Her key focus during this time was allowing the CEO to stop worrying about an exit, keep the team motivated, and stay focused on developing the product – which over the last decade has attracted 600,000 subscribers and 80 million monthly active users.
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