Why I built Quorums

When you join a board, you arrive a stranger to its memory.

Everyone else in the room has the history. Management lived through the decisions. The investor directors have sat there for years. The corporate memory (what was tried, what was rejected, what was promised and quietly forgotten) belongs to them. You, the incoming chair or non-executive, are handed a board pack and a warm welcome, and for the better part of a year you operate a step behind: nodding at references you can’t place, taking decisions on a context you weren’t there to absorb. You catch up, in time. But “in time” can mean twelve months at a disadvantage, on a board whose whole reason for having you there is to ask the right question at the right moment.

It wasn’t forgetfulness that made me want Quorums to exist. It was this: the simple problem of arriving late to a long conversation.

Because the gap closes the moment the history becomes searchable. Load a board’s previous packs and minutes into Quorums, and the proposal being tabled as fresh thinking turns out to have been raised and shelved two years ago, and you can say so. The risk that quietly slipped off the register has a date attached to its disappearance, and an answer to whether anyone ever resolved it or simply stopped mentioning it. The newest person at the table can suddenly see as far back as the longest-serving. The question still has to be yours to ask. But now it lands with the weight of someone who was in the room all along.

And the problem only compounds with every board you take on. A single board pack runs to seven thousand words and carries dozens of KPIs; across a year of meetings that is well over a hundred thousand words and numbers to absorb, then to trend each one against the last, for every board you serve. No one holds that accurately in their head. I certainly don’t, and I’d be wary of a chair who told you they did. Every one of those pages gets read properly once, the weekend before the meeting, and then, if we’re honest, never again. The pack is filed, the minutes circulated, and the thread handed to the one storage system every board ultimately leans on: human memory. Mine included. And mine, like yours, holds a board pack for about a fortnight.

And the tools don’t help as much as they should, because at this stage, for most companies, there really aren’t any. The board’s record lives wherever it happens to land: a thread of email attachments, a shared Drive folder, a Dropbox, the odd PDF nobody thought to protect. It’s all there, technically; you can open any of it. But you can’t ask it anything. A folder full of packs doesn’t lose the thread; it never had hold of it in the first place. Storage is not memory, and scattered storage is barely even storage.

So I built the thing I wanted to exist. Quorums reads everything a board produces (packs, minutes, transcripts, the management accounts) and remembers all of it, board by board, year over year. It tracks the decisions, the actions, the risks, and the things worth a second look. It writes me a brief before every meeting. And when I want to know what we decided about something eighteen months ago, I ask, and it answers in seconds, with the receipts.

A confession, while we’re at it: I started life writing code, and never expected to find my way back to it. Thirty-odd years of running and chairing software companies later, the chance to combine business, board and technical skills in one product was simply too good to miss.

Quorums runs on my own boards first. Every feature has to survive contact with my real Mondays (real packs, real minutes, real awkward questions) before it goes anywhere near anyone else’s. That is not a marketing line; it is the development process.

If you chair a board, or sit on several, you already know whether this is for you. You knew at the first paragraph.

Worth a conversation? I’d genuinely like to hear about your boards.