Intro.(1:42) - Start of interview.(2:28) - Nell's "origin story." She's the oldest of three girls, including former Harvard Law School Dean and current Professor Martha Minow. Her father, Newton Minow, was the Chairman of the FCC under JFK and authored a famous speech on the "vast wasteland" of TV (that still resonates 60 years later). She was influenced to speak out from an early age when she saw problems. Her ambition was to become a prosecutor but she moved to D.C., where she worked at the EPA and later at the White House OMB.(4:24) - On meeting Bob Monks, and being asked to join his "new startup" ISS in the mid 1980s (now the largest proxy advisory firm) to advise institutional investors on corporate governance. She didn't know much about corporate governance before joining ISS. "I arrived at the best possible time: the whole field was just beginning so I feel like George Washington or D.W.Griffith because I was there right at the start, out of pure luck." Since then, "Bob Monks and I have built and sold four different [corporate governance related] businesses."(6:57) -  On working as a shareholder activist with LENS ($100m fund) from 1990-2000: "All my career experiences have converged on system analysis: why things don't work as they are supposed to." "ISS had originally been conceived with an activist business plan, but it pivoted to focus instead on independent research for institutional investors. It was at Lens where we focused on activism."(10:23) - Strategy at Lens: "We bought stock in companies that were not living up to their potential." "About a third of companies would say that that they were already way ahead of us and had a plan in place, a third would say that the ideas were pretty good, and a third would fight us." "We did not have much AUM but we knew a lot of the institutional investors, and sometimes they would ask us to look at specific companies because they trusted us." "We sold Lens to Europe's largest institutional investor, however we kept the part we liked which was the in-house research, that became the Corporate Library."(12:43) - On starting The Corporate Library ("we called it intentionally the most non-controversial name because we had a reputation for being very provocative.") "We started by publishing reports on employment contracts of CEOs in S&P500." "My dream was to rate corporate boards like (AAA-to-junk) bonds, and that was the product that we developed, which we hoped to sell to investors [who did not buy it] but we sold them instead to D&O insurers [they loved it.]" "We later acquired GovernanceMetrics International (GMI) and took their name, and sold the whole shebang to MSCI."(17:44) - The history and focus of her current firm, ValueEdge Advisors: "We put on a conference every year for institutional investors, we prepare reports on various corporate governance issues for clients - it's sort of private label research."(18:48) - Her other focus as a movie critic. "The governance life is the frolic and detour, the movie life goes back as far as I can remember." Her favorite corporate governance movies: The Big Short, Owning Mahowny (featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman and involving the biggest bank embezzlement in Canada).(22:48) - Her take on politics in the boardroom. Discussion around her article "The Choice for CEOs on Political Issues is Not “Yes or No”, It’s “Helps the Brand or Hurts the Brand.” "If the people listening to this podcast take-away one recommendation from me it would be the following: subscribe immediately to Judd Legum's newsletter called Popular Information. He keeps track of companies that stated in January that they would not make any political contributions to candidates that would not certify the elections [and failed to live up to those promises.]" "It's no longer possible for a CEO to remain neutral."(27:10) - Her take on the "controversial" Coinbase CEO and Basecamp CEO statements.(29:04) - Her take on the rise of ESG: "It's a bit the best of times and worst