About

Why I built Prepared Board

I'm Ethan Hawkes. I sit on boards, I chair boards, and I spent nearly a decade advising boards and CEOs. Prepared Board is the tool I want in each of those seats.

Why I built this

From the director's seat and from the chair's seat, I've watched the same pattern repeat. Important decisions get made from thin records. Board packs arrive late and in a rush, so directors walk into the room less prepared than they want to be. And when someone later asks why the board decided what it did, there is often little to show beyond a few lines of minutes.

That isn't a failure of intent. Directors are busy, chairs are stretched, and most board tools were built to distribute documents, not to help a board decide well and keep a record of how it decided. I built Prepared Board so every director can walk into the meeting prepared, and so the board can show afterward what it read, who stepped back, what evidence it weighed, and how it reached its decision.

Who's behind it

Ethan Hawkes

Founder, Prepared Board · Kittery, Maine

I'm the founder of Prepared Board, based in Kittery, Maine.

I'm a former McKinsey & Company consultant, and I worked with boards and CEOs there for nearly a decade. Today I serve on several boards myself, so I live with the problems Prepared is built to solve as a director and as a chair, not only as the person building it.

Board roles today

Chairman of the board of my former company
Chairman of the board of my current company
Board member of a private company
Board member of two other organizations

I don't name the organizations whose boards I serve on. Board work runs on confidentiality, and so does Prepared.

How we hold ourselves accountable

A director, a chair, or your AI agent should be able to check anything we say. These are the commitments we keep, and where to verify each one.

We say what is live and what is not
One plain-words list of what Prepared does today and what is not live yet. The same claims are published for software at /agent-facts.json and for AI agents at /llms.txt.
/facts
Route-by-route capability map
Every capability marked live or not live, with the honesty caveats next to it.
/for/investors/capabilities
Your record leaves with you
What a full-record export includes, in what format, and what it does not include. A board should stay because the record is good, not because leaving is hard.
/leaving-prepared
Security and AI use, stated plainly
Our security practices, what we do and don't have yet (no independent security audit or certification yet), what AI does and does not do, and our subprocessors.
/trust
No fake claims
No invented testimonials, customer logos, or usage numbers anywhere on this site, including this page. Our public copy is checked by an automated test for overclaims, and when something isn't built yet, we say so.
See what is not live
Prices in public
List prices from Free to Ultra. Billing checkout is not live yet, and the page says so.
/pricing

See it on a board like yours

See a finished sample decision record, or request a pilot for your board. Prepared is an invite-only beta: founder-led setup, first meeting cycle free, export anytime.

See a sample decision record Request a pilot