HeyJaredIlya Strebulaev
Stanford GSB Professor of Finance. Venture Capital & Private Equity.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 16
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 12, 2026
Latest issues
Inside the Boardroom: How Startup Boards Are Built, Seat by Seat (opens the original)
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In August 2017 Benchmark Capital Partners VII, a fund operated by the Silicon Valley venture firm Benchmark, sued Travis Kalanick, co-founder and former CEO of Uber. The accusation was that Kalanick had committed fraud “to entrench himself on Uber’s Board of Directors and increase his power over Uber for his own selfish ends.”Hi, I’m Ilya. I teach Venture Capital and Private Equity at Stanford GSB, and this is where I publish my research — including the investor rankings — along with <a href="ht
Ten Votes to Your One: How Supervoting Separates Ownership from Control (opens the original)
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In the years before Figma, backed by Index Ventures, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, went public, co-founder and CEO Dylan Field held roughly 9% of the equity and just over half of the voting power.Two mechanisms produced that gap. Figma had three classes of stock: Class A carrying one vote per share, Class B carrying fifteen, and Class C carrying none. Field held Class B. On top of that, his co-founder Evan Wallace, who left the company in 2021 and retained an economic stake of around 5.
Shareholder Voting in Startups: Counting the Votes That Count (opens the original)
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In this article we discuss one of the three corporate governance buckets essential for founders and investors: shareholder voting. Shareholders approve the decisions that change a company most — selling it, amending the charter, creating new classes of shares. In VC-backed companies, however, voting works differently from what the way it works in many traditional companies. Preferred shares vote, employee options do not, abstaining counts the same as voting no, and the percentage on the cap tabl
Who Controls Your Startup? Why Governance Matters from Day One (opens the original)
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In February 2016 the board of Zenefits, a private VC-backed company then valued at $4.5 billion, removed its co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad. It took one board meeting. Three of the four directors were company executives, Conrad among them; the fourth was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the lead investor. No shareholder vote was required, and the number of shares Conrad owned played no role in the outcome. The board hires and fires the CEO — and the board is assembled years earlier, in fundra
The Lifecycle of a Startup: From Garage to Exit (opens the original)
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People talk about startups as though the word describes one kind of company. It does not. A startup at eighteen months and the same startup at eight years share a name, a logo, and often a founder, and almost nothing else. The problems are different, the people are different, the money comes from different places, and the definition of a good week is different.Hi, I’m Ilya. I teach Venture Capital and Private Equity at Stanford GSB, and this is where I publish my research — including the investo
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