Factory's CEO accused adviser Chris Degnan of sharing confidential information; Degnan denied it.1
That dispute is unresolved in the reporting cited here. What follows is a fictional governance problem, not a reconstruction of what happened between those people.
An imaginary startup has recruited an impressive adviser. He knows customers, investors, and competitors. This is why the founders wanted him. It is also why the confidentiality paragraph should have received more attention than the photograph.
Access is the product
Our fictional adviser attends a meeting. He hears about pricing, a stalled enterprise sale, and the product feature the company plans to launch next. These are useful things to know when helping a business.
They are also useful things to know elsewhere. We can recognize the value of access without assuming anybody misuses it.
A founder asking for help may imagine that the relationship itself supplies the boundary. An adviser may understand the role more narrowly. An investor may have a separate set of interests. A friendly introduction does little to reconcile those assumptions.
The imaginary company therefore needs to decide what information the adviser receives, what obligations accompany it, and how the relationship changes when the adviser considers another role. The answers should be explicit enough that nobody has to infer them from a warm first meeting.
Our investor recommends keeping the conversation informal. Formality could damage the trust required to share the documents. The lawyer asks what trust will look like when they want the documents back.
We can narrow the room
Adviser access does not have to be all or nothing. In this fictional arrangement, the company might share a bounded customer problem without circulating the entire forecast. It might ask for an introduction without inviting the adviser into every strategic discussion.
That can make the relationship more useful. A clear assignment tells the adviser what the company needs and limits the material received incidentally along the way.
The less helpful arrangement gives a person a prestigious title, an indefinite mandate, and access to whatever turns up. Everyone can describe it as value-add until somebody asks which value was added and to whom.
A role change should trigger a new discussion. Continuing access can be reconsidered before the person starts the new job. The company's hypothetical contract can require notice, specify continuing confidentiality, and establish how materials are returned or retained. Those are proposed features of our invented agreement, not claims about the contracts in the actual dispute.
Network effects have counterparties
A well-connected adviser can be genuinely valuable. Founders should not have to choose between useful relationships and basic clarity about their boundaries.
The negotiation concerns the particular relationship: the work expected, the information needed, the compensation, and the circumstances that end the arrangement. A vague promise to help is difficult to assess and surprisingly easy to renew.
Our imaginary founder finally asks the adviser for a concrete plan. Which customers can he approach? What will he need to know? How will the team evaluate the result?
The adviser answers well. They agree on a narrower assignment and begin working. The photo can still happen.
What the company has lost is the comforting idea that a relationship becomes safe because everyone involved has an excellent résumé. What it has gained is something the résumé cannot supply: terms that remain legible when interests diverge.
The network is valuable. The boundary should be visible too.