Coco Brown: Founder & CEO of Athena Alliance on Board Opportunities and Governance.

(0:00) Intro.(1:14) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel.(2:02) Start of interview.(2:37) Coco's "origin story." (4:32) Her professional background with HR, comp and IT.(6:32) Her time at Taos, a professional services business in IT consulting (17yrs). Ultimately acquired by IBM in 2021.(8:35) The origin story of her founding Athena Alliance (2016) as a non-profit.(11:00) Three core issues with board placements: 1) access to opportunities, 2) positioning for the role, and 3) how to compete to win. *They have placed ~500 women to boards.(13:52) On the business model of Athena Alliance.(16:50) On transitioning from a non-profit to a for-profit model. (20:56) Distinguishing board service between companies with different capital structures (ie. public, PE, VC, ESOPs, etc).(22:18) The landscape for independent director board opportunities (~30,000 companies). On ESOP companies and closed corporations and/or family businesses.(28:18) On Athena's Board Readiness Course.(32:20) On in-person vs remote work, both on an executive and board level. "How do you scale intimacy?"(36:14) On the impact of AI in the boardroom. (39:48) Books that have greatly influenced her life: The Popcorn Report,  by Faith Popcorn (1991)The Science of Evil, by Simon Baron-Cohen (2011)(43:05)  Her mentors. "Different people for different things" e.g. Ivonne Wassenar and Scott Maxwell.(44:20)  Quotes that she thinks of often or lives her life by.(44:41) An unusual habit or absurd thing that she loves.(45:12)  The living person she most admires. Toni Townes-Whitley (CEO of SAIC)Coco Brown is the Founder and CEO of Athena Alliance, a company helping to position top 10% of executive women for advancement and board opportunities.  You can follow Evan on social media at:X: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__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

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