Short answer: not important at all.

Elizabeth Yin thinks that advisory boards, generally speaking, are pretty useless in fundraising your next rounds. She often sees pitch decks with a batch of advisors, and while these people may be awesome, these advisors aren’t ultimately running your business. 

You are. 

Investors discount the “advisor” slide entirely which means you should probably just remove it from your deck. That doesn’t mean that it’s not helpful to have these advisors helping you out, though. It just means that other investors don’t really care about them. 

The kind of advisors that tend to be the most helpful are the ones who: 

1. Have connections to people you wouldn’t otherwise be able to meet. Even better is if they sign an advisory contract to write the specifics of what they’ll offer as an advisor
2. Are super famous and willing to essentially promote you or have their face/name partnered with your brand

These advisors are not doing any day-to-day work. They may not even be doing any strategy work with you. But helping you with distribution and partnerships is probably the most helpful kind of advisor that you can have.

If you have any of these kinds of advisors, you may still want to put them on your deck… but ultimately investors will probably discount that slide anyway.