Michael Ewens (Columbia Business School): What the Data Reveals About Startup Boards and Private Equity

Feb 3, 2026

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

(0:00) Intro

(1:19) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel

(2:05) Start of interview

(2:48) Michael's origin story. Academic Journey and Early Influences. *reference to Correlation Ventures

(8:55) About his paper Board Dynamics over the Startup Life Cycle (2020) with Nadia Malenko.

(11:30) Role of independent directors in VC-backed companies.

(16:05) Control Dynamics in Startup Boards

(17:21) The Evolution of Founder Control *Reference to E187 with Brad Feld (Oct 2025)

(28:11) The Future of Private Markets

(29:21) The Future of IPOs “What’s been missing from the IPO market since 1996 is the small- to mid-cap company. In my view, the solution for public markets is to restore their uniqueness by shutting down private secondary markets and making public-market liquidity distinctive again.”

(33:40) The Role of Private Equity in Governance

(39:47) Distinctions Between VC and PE Boards

(42:24) Insights from Private Equity for Public Companies “A PE firm is really an investment bank with a consulting arm, where the partners sit on both sides and have equity in the whole game.” "What PE solves is expertise alignment, and a clear investment horizon for an exit."

(47:36) The Impact of AI on Board Governance

(50:20) Books that have greatly influenced his life:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
Culture Series by Ian Banks (1987-2012)
A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett (2023)

(53:14) His mentors

(54:24) Quotes that he thinks of often or lives his life by: "All models are wrong, but some are useful" by George Box

(53:15) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that he loves. Watching the Big Lebowski.

(55:53) The living person he most admires: Derek Thomson.

(57:26) Moving from VC to PE Research in New York

Michael Ewens is the David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance and co-director of the Private Equity Program at Columbia Business School.

You can follow Evan on social media at:

X: @evanepstein

LinkedIn: 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