“Nonprofits are led by boards with varying levels of experience, interest, and involvement. Many individual trustees bring valuable expertise from their fields of work or study. Their job is to scrutinize and question. In addition to their fiduciary responsibility, they are tasked with hiring executive leadership and reviewing their performance with metrics they rarely collect themselves. Ultimately, their job is to trust the leaders they choose to do the work. The relationship simply can’t work without it.”

Start-ups and nonprofits actually share a lot of DNA—we both run on extreme resourcefulness and mission-driven energy. Tech bros think they invented it, but we know nonprofit employees were stretching time, money, and people creatively, long before the internet. In both sectors, employees wear multiple hats and engineered work-arounds even when resources are limited. More importantly, we are also all motivated by a shared sense of purpose and possibility. 

So if we are cut from the same cloth, why don’t nonprofits borrow more tactics that seem to work well in Silicon Valley? The following tenets of Start-Up businesses provide an interesting reframing of the way we run our organizations.

In working with numerous organizations, I have learned that this process isn’t meant to be the burden, nor the lifeline. Instead, it should be a constant effort of evaluation, consensus gathering, and thoughtful implementation.