In this episode of On Boards, hosts Joe Ayoub and Raza Shaikh welcome Raffaela Rein, a seasoned entrepreneur and board member with expertise in frontier technology and innovation-driven leadership. Raffaela began her career as an analyst at BlackRock, and launched three companies for the world’s largest incubator, Rocket Internet, across China, Australia, and Taiwan before becoming an entrepreneur.
She serves on multiple corporate and private equity-backed boards, including
Porsche, Mutares and International University IU.
As the founder of WildWildVentures and CareerFoundry, she has scaled startups to 120-plus employees and advised many venture-backed businesses. Raffaela serves as a board member for the German startup Verband, where she helps improve legislation for startups.
Raffaela was named one of Forbes top women in tech, and she is among Europe’s most influential women in startups and venture capital. She has built a career at the forefront of business reinvention.
Raffaela discusses her entrepreneurial journey as founder of BoardLens
a new AI tool she is developing and how it will transform the future of board
meetings and excellence in board members.
Key Takeaways
1. Board effectiveness
Only 30% CEOs rate their boards as effective. With an expectation that
board members come to meetings well prepared, Rein recognizes that
board members are tasked with consuming hundreds, and often
thousands, of pages of information in preparation for meetings. It is an almost impossible task to complete a thorough review especially if you
are if you have a full time job.- In Germany, it’s common for board members to hire consultants or a
‘chief of staff’ that will help them with their board responsibilities. Raffaela is creating a tool that will serve a similar role for board members worldwide.
2. How BoardLens can transform board meetings
- Raffaela anticipates launching BoardLens in mid-2025. It is an AI driven tool that is built to aid board members with meeting preparation, research, executive summaries, questions and risk analysis. It is meant to support board members while enabling members to fulfill their fiduciary duties and make a meaningful contribution in board meetings.
- Raffaela likens BoardLens to hiring a personal Goldman Sachs analyst. It is trained with proprietary data and that will enable it to act, think and analyze like a board director.
3. Human edge is still crucial
- While AI can process vast data and respond quickly, human directors can provide intuition, pattern recognition, and emotional intelligence—skills developed through lived experience that are essential in nuanced decision-making.
- As technology advances, AI is bound to replace some human roles but to maintain the balance between AI and humans, Rein suggests thinking about how people are able to provide a unique and individual perspective to issues on a board’s agenda.
4. Privacy and confidentiality concerns
- Uploading board packets into non-enterprise AI tools can be a confidentiality risk. BoardLens, however, will be trained to only read one organization’s board materials and will not cross share data. Rein explains that the company’s IT department will be able to access the software’s security suite.
Quotes
”Here in Germany we have this system that you can get a consultant or chief of staff who actually helps you, not just with your preparation, but also with thinking things through deeply, doing deep market research, basically doing weeks and weeks of work to help you prepare for a board meeting.”
“I don’t like the word ‘Copilot’ for BoardLens because it feels too passive. I like the word “analyst” because if you think of a Goldman analyst, they will do their best to really make you shine and to prepare you, so you should think of it as an
analyst that fights for you.”
”The breadth of expertise and the breadth of knowhow you need to have and need to gain very rapidly as a director these days is significant and has accelerated dramatically in the last five years.”
Links
raffaelarein.com
Guest Bio:
Raffaela Rein is a seasoned entrepreneur and board member with expertise in
frontier technologies and innovation-driven leadership. She serves on multiple corporate and private equity-backed boards, including Porsche, Mutares, and the International University IU.
As the founder of WildWildVentures and CareerFoundry, she has scaled startups to 120+ employees and advised venture-backed businesses.
Named one of Forbes’ Top Women in Tech, Capital’s 40 Under 40, and among Europe’s most influential women in startups and VC, Raffaela has built a career at the forefront of business reinvention and innovation driven leadership.
She began her career at BlackRock and launched three companies for Rocket
Internet across China, Australia, and Taiwan before becoming an entrepreneur.
Transcript:
Joe: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to On Boards, a deep dive at what drives business success. I’m Joe Ayoub and I’m here with my co-host, Raza Shaikh. Twice a month, On Boards is the place to learn about one of the most critically important aspects of any company or organization; its board of directors or advisors, with a focus on the important issues that are facing boards, company leadership, and stakeholders.
Raza: Joe and I speak with a wide range of guests and talk about what makes a board successful or unsuccessful, what it means to be an effective board member, and how to make your board one of the most valuable assets of your organization.
Joe: Before we introduce our guest today, we want to thank the law firm of Nutter McClennen & Fish who are again sponsoring our On Boards Summit this year taking place on October 20th in their terrific conference center in the Boston Seaport. Nutter has been an [00:01:00] incredible partner with us in every way. We appreciate all they’ve done to support this podcast.
Our guest today is Raffaela Rein. Raffaela is a seasoned entrepreneur and board member with expertise in frontier technology and innovation-driven leadership. She began her career as an analyst at BlackRock, and she launched three companies for the world’s largest incubator, Rocket Internet, across China, Australia, and Taiwan before becoming an entrepreneur.
Raza: She serves on multiple corporate and private equity-backed boards, including Porsche, Mutares and International University IU. As the founder of WildWildVentures and CareerFoundry, she has scaled startups to 120-plus employees and advised many venture-backed businesses. Raffaela serves as a board member for the German [00:02:00] startup Verband, where she helps improve legislation for startups.
Raffaela was named one of Forbes top women in tech, and she is among Europe’s most influential women in startups and venture capital. She has built a career at the forefront of business reinvention. Welcome, Raffaela. It’s great to have you as our guest today on On Boards.
Raffaela: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Joe: We’re excited to have you, and let’s start with your background and your professional journey because it has really informed where you are currently, which we’ll get to in a few minutes. So, start with even as far back as BlackRock a little bit, and then talk about the work you did at Rocket Internet, and then we’ll go from there.
Raffaela: Yes. So, I started out at BlackRock in London as an analyst in their multi-asset solutions department, and that was in 2009, so right [00:03:00] after the financial crisis, and you can imagine it wasn’t the most exciting time to be in finance, but it was actually very exciting at BlackRock because BlackRock used the time to acquire iShares, for example, made a couple of very major moves that turned BlackRock into what it is today.
So, it was an exciting time and it was also the time when Rocket Internet, which is famous for taking successful tech companies and replicating those ideas in other parts of the world, or infamous, you can say even, and they were specifically targeting people from places like BlackRock, like Goldman, to come work for them all around the world.
I was approached to move from London to Beijing to start a company for them, and I was 24 at the time. It sounded like such a challenge and such an exciting opportunity, and so within a few weeks I packed my bag, moved to Beijing, and we launched what was a copy of Groupon back then. And [00:04:00] it wasn’t a complete culture shock for me because you can imagine working for BlackRock already in 2009 was a very well managed, incredibly well managed company, and then going to China in a work culture that I did not know and into a tech company where we grew from 40 people when I got there to 3,000 people in just six months, we grew from one city to 126 cities in China in six months. So, there was so much chaos in that crazy scaling phase, and you actually had to be in the office before 8:00 AM to even get a seat. They just couldn’t buy enough chairs for the amount of people that
joined every day.
But I also realized I love that. I love that chaos that you have in building something new where you do not have established processes yet. You don’t know always what the best way from A to B is, and basically I really got a love for building and entrepreneurship. [00:05:00] So, at the end of that time, I didn’t just do China. I also built after that a company in Australia for Rocket, and then they sent me to Taiwan to do the same company again. The companies in Australia and Taiwan were both fashion marketplaces, a little bit like Zappos, you can imagine it, and actually the one in Australia is nowadays one of Australia’s most successful tech companies, it’s called The Iconic because Australia is very into online fashion shopping as it turns out.
Joe: Good for them.
Raffaela: Yes, that’s a very big country, e-commerce really helps people to get their shopping done. And then I returned to Germany where I’m from and was committed to start to build my own company, and back then it was really start of the big tech boom, but hardly anyone had the skills. There weren’t enough developers or designers, and so I decided to build an online education company that trained people very fast in six to 10 months into these new [00:06:00] skills that you needed in the digital economy.
We grew very fast. We raised about $10 million, and it grew into what is today one of the largest online schools, especially for UX and UI design. We trained about 10,000 people at this point, and the company is still around, but I exited my share to a private equity in 2018, and that is when Porsche came and approached me.
Joe: I just wanted to ask, so what is the name of the company?
Raffaela: Oh, CareerFoundry. I founded it in 2013, careerfoundry.com. We’re still in the business, we’re still training people, anybody who’s looking for a career change, although I doubt there’s anyone on this podcast who’s really looking for a career change. But please do check it out for your kids and grandkids. We’re global, so we have customers all around the world.
After the exit, Porsche approached me and they were looking for advisory board that was specifically helping them on their sustainability strategy, on their future strategy, and again, it’s hard to say no to when some company like Porsche comes knocking at your door.
There were a lot of perks [00:07:00] to this mandate, such as the Porsche driving experience. I have driven almost every Porsche there is by this point, and my favorite is the Taycan, the electric car. There’s a lot of debate. So, if you meet a Porsche lover, everybody has their own favorite car, so never go to a Porsche lover and start a debate. It’s a bit like religion. Don’t start.
Joe: Wow. Yeah, so that was your first foray into the board world.
Raffaela: Yes.
Joe: And as you became more familiar with the board world, you became aware that there were some issues with what was going on in the boardroom, and I just wanted to cut to a couple of things that I’ve seen from a deck you sent me that 30% of CEOs rate their own boards as ineffective. How did you begin to understand that there was a real gap between what was expected and what management was perceiving from their [00:08:00] boards?
Raffaela: First of all, I want to say that I believe I’m actually in very good boards, so all of my boards, everybody wants to make an impact, everybody does come prepared. But even in the best boards, I would say, sometimes the materials do not arrive quite on time. You have sometimes very little time to digest an enormous amount of information because the better you prepare, the better you can really help the management. That’s why I think strong boards in the end mean strong companies, and weak boards mean weak companies.
Here in Germany, we have a bit of a different governance structure than in the Anglo-Saxon world. But what we also have is, here many of the big corporates in Germany, the CEOs or the leadership team, they would also serve on other boards and they would have an internal department inside the company where their CEO or an executive to help them prepare for their external board mandates, I guess entire departments in the top German companies for this, and then the people that work in these [00:09:00] departments eventually leave and become self-employed as consultants, and then they help independent board members such as me with their board work.
So, here, it’s actually very normal if you go to any sort of member meeting of board members, that people would have a consultant like this or a chief of staff, or however you call it, that helps them with their board work. And I think I mentioned this in the preparation for this podcast. The other day, I met a board member or like a private equity investor who serves on 20 boards and he even employs three full-time staff just to help him prepare for all of his board work.
Joe: And this is in Germany.
Raffaela: this is in Germany. So, here it is very normal to basically not be alone in this incredible complexity that you are faced with as a board director.
Raza: Raffaela, but talk about the rest of the world then, what is happening there? What are we challenged with as board members? Are we getting too much materials?
Raffaela: So, all over the world, I think [00:10:00] complexity has just increased tremendously over the years. So, that’s partly regulatory. There’s just a lot more laws because things have gone wrong. There were a couple of bad things that happened in the media, so regulators made more regulations.
But at the same time, you also have just a lot more items that need now board oversight that didn’t use to. So, if we think about ESG, AI, cybersecurity, those used to be part of the legal department or part of the IT department. But now all of these items need board oversight because they are critical governance items for the business.
So, all of a sudden, board directors don’t just have to be maybe an expert in a certain area, they have to understand the risk, like what AI governance means. They have to understand multiple ESG regulations and they have to understand what cyber risks mean. They have to understand if the company is set up for all of these things.
Basically, just the breadth of expertise and the breadth of knowhow [00:11:00] you need to have and need to gain very rapidly as a director these days has accelerated and just alone in the last five years since I’ve become a director.
Raza: Another third factor that adds a lot to the amount of materials that the board gets is the management’s thought that, “Well, we provided the material.” They want disclosure, they want boards to have that, even if it’s a 600-page document, so definitely there are reams and reams of materials that we now get.
Raffaela: Also, like at this point, I’ve spoken to well over a hundred directors and it’s also from the company side of things, it’s safer for them to give you more. Say something happens, you don’t say, “Oh, you didn’t give us enough.”
Joe: I’m going to say it’s safer, but it’s easier. I mean, it takes more thought to take it from a thousand pages to 200 pages than to just say, “Here, we gave you everything. Don’t complain.” It’s not a great trend to have more documents going out to the board. With everything that has happened in the past and continues to happen now, [00:12:00] no management team wants to be in a position where they didn’t provide information that might later turn out to be important. I think that that’s not a great trend.
Raffaela: Yeah. And also, if you think about it, we used to, for example, do the annual report, and that would be a big part of the board to make sure the report is correct, and that alone will be a few hundred pages. Now, you also have the non-financial report that’s a few hundred pages more, and you have all kinds of other disclosures. So alone, that has gone from a few hundred pages to a few thousand pages in the last few years.
Raza: So, with that challenge in mind, Raffaela, looks like you’re working on a tool that will help boards cope with this. Talk about what you’re building.
Raffaela: As I mentioned earlier, here in Germany we have this system that you can get a consultant or chief of staff who actually helps you, not just with your preparation, but also with thinking things through deeply, doing deep market research, [00:13:00] basically doing weeks and weeks of work to help you prepare for a board meeting.
I actually hired one of these consultants when I had one of my first mandates and I felt fantastically prepared, like I was really, you can say, one of the best prepared persons in the room. I obviously then could have more impact in the meeting. I could help ask maybe more impactful questions, and it was fantastic, but it was also very expensive because it was an actual person who did weeks of work for every board meeting I would join.
Joe: Did you feel like you were giving someone else some of the work you should be doing as a board member?
Raffaela: Yes and no. But I’m an entrepreneur, and in that sense, I believe I’m better by not doing everything alone because that’s how companies are built. If you only had one-person companies, nobody would’ve gone very far. I do actually think there’s people that are better at many things than I am, and I do [00:14:00] generally like to rely on people that are better or work with people that are better than me in other aspects.
Joe: Makes a lot of sense.
Raffaela: Yeah, from that experience, I thought now with GenAI, especially with AI agents, which is sort of the latest version and the latest hype also in this AI cycle that we’re in, they can actually act like human analysts or even better, because they can do weeks of research in an hour. And the first time where it’s actually possible to do what this human board analyst did as a technology service, it just wouldn’t have been possible before GenAI.
That is what I’m currently building. It’s called BoardLens. You can imagine it like if you hired a Goldman Sachs analyst who works exclusively for you and this is a person who’s both trained in financial analysis but also market analysis, due diligence, who maybe even has an auditing background and basically really supports you in all endeavors of the board, also [00:15:00] regulatory side, and helps you both save time, but also make sure you really fulfill your fiduciary duty. You have a bigger impact in the board meeting, and in the end, also potentially foresee vulnerabilities and risks faster, and that way you can help the management steer the company in a better way.
Joe: So, what will be different in the product you’re developing, BoardLens, from someone using their company’s custom AI Copilot or some other custom Copilot, how will it differ what you’re developing?
Raffaela: So, first of all, most boards do not have access to any Copilot, even if the company already uses something like that, at least none of my boards do I have access to this. But we could get there, but I think we will go two, three steps further than a ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot will ever go, like we are building a whole [00:16:00] dashboard that doesn’t just help you critically and think through the board materials, also do market research, regulatory research, and is really trained to think like an analyst, not like a large language model.
So, maybe to explain this, a ChatGPT or a Copilot are so-called LLM (Large Language Model), but they’re still not thinking like a human, whereas AI agents, they really think and act like humans, so they can do a full on financial analysis and actually pick out if they think something might be an irregularity or doesn’t match up, but they can equally go out and find, for example, out of all of the media coverage a company may have on the internet, they can say, what of this is relevant for you as a board member?
So, they can do what would take you weeks in research and present it to you in a few hours. One more thing, we’ll also train it, for example, on cases where things have gone wrong, that it can detect [00:17:00] risks early, flag risks early. We will train it with proprietary data, so we will have partnerships with proprietary data providers, so that say you serve in a private company, we will be able to tell you what are typical benchmarks for liquidity or leverage positions in your industry, your market, your size. We will hopefully train it with best practices for boards through partnering with, again, potential education providers for board materials. So, we’ll basically act and think like a board director.
Again, if you were a bank, you wouldn’t do your main value creation activities on ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, because this is really where you create your value, so as a board member, why would you go to a generic tool as a board member if you could have the best in class tool?
Raza: Raffaela, that sounds amazing. I couldn’t read 700 pages, but now I can at least deal with them. How are you thinking about the modality, meaning, is it that I first share or upload the [00:18:00] materials with my BoardLens Copilot, and then do I ask questions off it? Or is it doing a standard set of things and answering some questions already saying, “Here are the important things that you should look at. Here are a few deviations from your industry that I see in your board materials and so on. How is the interaction with BoardLens?
Raffaela: Yeah, it will give you immediately a full analysis, so it will not just give you an executive summary, but it will immediately analyze it for you, so it will immediately ask questions around it. But then there is a chat functionality where you can go deeper, so you can ask, “Hey, tell me on which page should it say that or give me more context around that,” or whatever you may want to ask so you can go deeper.
That’s also why I don’t like the word Copilot because it feels so passive, whereas I like the word analyst because if you think of a Goldman analyst, they would do their best to really make you [00:19:00] shine and to make you prepare, and I think you should think of it like an analyst that fights for you.
Joe: We’re kind of hoping that Goldman will come on as a sponsor of this podcast, so it’s so great that you put in a good word for them.
Raza: Raffaela, my sense is this is just a random number, but let’s say 70% of current board members do not actually come prepared and have read all the materials. They may have glanced through it and so on, but not really actually read, and they’re in the meeting and that’s when they’re doing it. Now, with BoardLens being available to them, does it already actually just give them another excuse saying, “Well, I actually now do not need to read. My analyst has given me a good key highlights and things that I should be looking at, and that’s good enough. I do not now need to read all of these materials.”
Raffaela: As a board director, you always have a [00:20:00] fiduciary duty and you have, most of the time, also a liability yourself. So, I would not advise not reading it yourself, but BoardLens will inform, when you read the full document, what you should pay attention to. It will have given you some critical things to think about. It will have prepared you in a more actionable way and more tangible way.
But I would not recommend not reading the materials, whether it’s before AI or now, but unfortunately there are these people. But to be honest, my sense also with whom I’m speaking now is that those people, BoardLens will be more used by people who actually want to do a good job, who want to do impact, and those that don’t prepare today, I don’t think they would actually buy a tool like this.
Raza: Okay, and then the next part is just doing a thought experiment. BoardLens is working very, very well and in the not too distant future, are we seeing a world where boards will have a non-human AI as [00:21:00] one of the directors at the board itself, because that will be the smartest board member that you can imagine, not only the analyst, but even one level above that.
Joe: Or several. Let’s say, I want one Goldman, I want one from some other sector. I want someone who’s a human capital AI and now I create a diverse board composition by different AI board members. Why wouldn’t that be something that we’d see five years from now or 10 years from now?
Raffaela: I can totally see that, and I think it would be fun. Imagine that with an AI version of Warren Buffet on a board, it would be, let’s say, at least very quote worthy, I hope.
Joe: At the very least, yeah. Isn’t that the temptation, you think? Okay, you said Warren Buffet. I can create a Warren Buffet-like AI. I can feed it the information that I think that level would have, and now, instead of going out and [00:22:00] recruiting board members, I can create on a computer or have someone create on a computer the profile that I want and feed it the information I want so that it will know what I need it to know. It will have the data I think that is important for it and it won’t interrupt me. It won’t be rude to other board members. It won’t try to take over the conversation. It won’t do all of the things that chairs struggle with in virtually every board. Why wouldn’t that be a really tempting way to build a board and maybe have a couple of humans just for old times sake.
Raffaela: Well, I think it’s more than for old times sake, I think, especially in public boards. I don’t see regulators, and at least not in five years going down the path. Maybe if the AI was actually built by the regulator, maybe they would allow it, but otherwise, I don’t think they would allow you to put an AI that just agrees with everything you say on your [00:23:00] board as a public company.
Yeah, I can totally see a mix. Personally, I use AI a lot for brainstorming and thinking things through, and I feel it helps me ginormously and often in a better way than maybe a human. because sometimes a human for really complex questions, they wouldn’t have the time or the context. So, I can totally see that an AI board member or a set of board experts that’s AI based would help.
But on the other hand, I think also some of the human advice or judgment that that board directors bring, I don’t see that actually being able to replace that so quickly because say often I speak with young founders and I would pick something up just from one or two words they say or gestures they make because I have been there, and I just have this radar that turns on because I’ve been there and I see the struggle and I see they just say one or two words, but I know exactly what they’re going through and I can immediately navigate that and address certain topics that an AI would just not get from one or two words, [00:24:00] or they wouldn’t see the body language in the same way I do.
Joe: Maybe not today, but in five years, AI may be able to do much of what you said, and I want to push back on something else. You said a bunch of AI just doing what they’re told and just agreeing with management. That’s a problem on boards today, human board members often will not push back. They don’t want to be the only one voicing opposition. The CEO or the board chair may want to take their seat away. With AI, that fear would not be there. They could be trained to say what they really think rather than just agreeing so I could make the argument that in X years, five to seven years, you could train the right AI to be a better board member, say what you need to say, take the positions, answer the question honestly, not because you’re looking around the room and you don’t want to [00:25:00] stand out and the person that brought you on the board is sitting next to you, not because the CEO is really
Raza: Charismatic.
Joe: What did you say?
Raza: Charismatic.
Joe: I said overbearing. Either way, and it’s really just trying to get to a result that she or he wants to get to. AI may not care about that, so I could make the case that AI actually solves some of those problems better than almost any human.
Raffaela: I could definitely see a world where a regulator says one of the regulatory board members has to be on your board. But I think also that brings up a philosophical question, because that could then mean will all politicians be AI at some point because there’s a lot of things that are flawed and potentially an AI would be less susceptible to a certain, yeah, part.
Raza: Yeah, I think this may go in phases and the first phase is the analyst, and then the next phase is that it is a non-voting board member with expertise skills. They’re saying everything but they don’t have the human vote or the [00:26:00] fiduciary vote for it, and I think phase three might be the vote as well that comes. I think for that, society and regulation has to be ready to accept that the vote will also come from AI.
Joe: Yeah, I think the regulation issue is going to be front and center. What is it that is going to be required? Do you require a certain percentage of humans on a board? Do you require that the votes are taken in a different way?
Raffaela: It’s like what we had with the women quota, you’ll have a human quota.
Joe: Yeah, I would say this is a little different than that though.
Raza: All right, but it is, like the tables are turning. That’s how AI will take over and rule us, either you order the machine what to do, or the machine orders you what to do. But this is incredibly fascinating in the future to kind of look forward to that makes us all more efficient, effective, and be able to manage risk better.
Joe: I would say also it’s [00:27:00] something that we need to give deep thought to, and I’m curious just to kind of close out how should we be thinking about the future? AI is here, and it’s just going to get more and more advanced and more sophisticated, and have more and more human-like skills. What do we need to be thinking about to make sure that the future, at least in the boardroom, is balanced so that there’s a mix of AI and humans in the boardroom, how do we think about that and what kind of regulations might we want to consider?
Raffaela: That is a very good question, and in the end, no one knows where the future goes. What I do think, and I’m generally a believer, to go away from the pure box ticking and really thinking what can I bring into the boardroom? What are my unique skills as a board director, and how can I support management, help on the governance?
In different companies also more support is wanted or in some also less, so it also depends on the circumstances, but in the end, yeah, I believe [00:28:00] it’s asking what is my unique source and how can I bring that in more, because I think sometimes on boards there’s a very strict agenda, and it can be easy to not bring in your own lens on topics, or, for example, suggest to speak about certain things that are happening. At at least, we should all have conversations about AI and how the company is not just tackling the risks, but also the opportunities of AI in the company.
I think it’s things like that, and if the company’s perfectly covered, all fine. But I think especially when it comes to AI, probably everybody can do more. Also, when it comes to the team, how do we get the team to wanting to explore AI and use it in the best possible way and make the company more effective?
Raza: Yeah, Raffaela, speaking of using AI, one of the obvious thing that will come up and must have come up is the confidentiality, security, and privacy of the information, that very important and sometimes [00:29:00] sensitive, strategic information that is being now shared with BoardLens or AI in general, how do we alleviate those concerns?
Raffaela: These concerns are absolutely valid, and that’s why directors should not upload anything into ChatGPT or Copilot at least not if there’s not an enterprise version that the company has bought. But at least in all of the boards where I serve, we, for example, have enterprise versions for most of these tools, and normally that means the data that is uploaded is not used for training. It is SOC 2 compliant. It basically stays within the environment and it doesn’t leave. It doesn’t get blasted out into the internet for everybody to see, quite frankly. And this is what we will do at BoardLens as well, so there will be a dashboard that a IT department or head of IT can access where they can look at all of the standard security protocols that you would have as an enterprise software and [00:30:00] can basically just look at it as they would look at any vendor and we will have the full security suite that you would need to deal with sensitive information.
Raza: And you’re not commingling the data, your AI is getting trained on only your board materials, and it’s not cross-shared across organizations other than general industry data and all of those things that that are publicly available.
Raffaela: Exactly. That’s obviously very important because as board directors, we have a fiduciary duty not to disclose any non-public information and I certainly wouldn’t want to violate that. I think you get a high fine if you do so we make sure that won’t happen.
Joe: Well, Raza and I will really watch very closely on the development of BoardLens. It will be really interesting to see, once it’s on the market, how it’s working and to really be a part of seeing what the future may look like.
Raza: And you are recruiting beta testers?
Raffaela: Yes. So, we are looking for early users. We’re launching in June, so if [00:31:00] anybody’s interested in using it, yeah, we’re excited to have you in to bring this to market.
Raza: Absolutely.
Joe: Fantastic. Raffaela, it has been terrific speaking with you today. Thanks so much for a great conversation, and thank you all for listening to On Boards with our guest, Raffaela Rein.
Raffaela: Thank you for having me. It was a fun conversation.
Joe: We loved it.
Raza: Please visit our website at OnBoardsPodcast.com. That’s OnBoardsPodcast.com. We would love to hear your comments, suggestions, and feedback. If you’re already not a subscriber, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. And remember to leave us a five-star review.
Joe: And please tune in for the next episode of On Boards. Thanks.