Episode Details

Thanks to Adam, Felix and the Tallen AV team.  Thanks to the Council of Institutional Investors for having us, and hopefully we alienated just enough people to get invited back.

This is Proxy Countdown. Welcome to the big CII show for the week of March 9, 2026 alongside my tag team partner Matt Moscardi. I'm Damion Rallis. On today’s very special CII-scented proxy countdown:

A peek into what we do and who we are: storytellers of ESG data and events backed by our exhaustive data set of director performance analytics covering 220,000 directors.

Trends we are following into the 2026 proxy season

Some dippy poll questions to keep you awake and hopefully lots of audience questions.

And on the Big Vote, Matt takes a deep caffeinated dive into Starbuck’s upcoming annual meeting

Matt intro

Trade Wire - BUY/SELL

Top Stories:

What’s the deal with conference food? Wait, that’s the wrong script.

Let’s start with a few small appetizers before we move on to our big trends of the year. In no particular order:

How about this half-win for Ethics at Luminar Technologies?

following a Code of Business Conduct and Ethics inquiry by the Audit Committee CEO and Chair Austin Russell and director Jun Hong Heng immediately resigned. However, the former CEO will remain on the Board AND be available to the incoming CEO on transition and technology matters. 

How about this new version of a CEO Pay ratio?

Jabil’s former Executive Chair Mark Mondello, who just stepped down with a Consulting Agreement until 2028–we are seeing a lot these actually, consulting agreements that extend until the end of the rainbow–where he will provide advisory and strategic services when requested for a monthly consulting fee of $145,833 resulting in a Consulting Agreement pay ratio of 144:1

Got that? He will earn 144 times the Median employee ($12,144) when requested.

Dollar Tree added three directors to the board named Mike, Bill, and Tim. Considering they already have a Jeff, Dan, Tom, Paul, and Ned, it’s no surprise that the man with the lowest influence (6%) according to Free Float Analytics is a complicated fellow named Bertram. I knew that joke would fail

Fallout from the Epstein files included two high-profile exits: Goldman Sach’sChief Legal Officer Kathryn H. Ruemmler and Hyatt Hotels’ Executive Chair Thomas J.