As of February 2019, the five directors were John Leonard, chief executive officer of Intellia Therapeutics; Jeffrey Smith, Starboard's own chief executive officer; Janet Vergis, chairman of the board at Amneal Pharmaceuticals; James Tyree, chairman of Tyree & D'Angelo Partners; and Steven Shulman, managing partner of Shulman Family Ventures.

[5] Starboard also called for a merger between Office Depot and Staples, but the Federal Trade Commission ruled against it for anti-trust reasons, and a judge agreed with the FTC's verdict.

[12] In addition, Starboard has taken activist positions in Smithfield Foods, Calgon Carbon, Tessera Technologies, Yahoo, Brink's Home Security, Macy's,[1][5] Darden Restaurants, and Papa John's Pizza.

[20] In October 2014, after what William D. Cohan of Fortune Magazine described as a "brilliantly executed campaign" involving "withering public criticism" of the firm's leadership and "careful courtship" of its major shareholders, Smith effectively took control of Darden Restaurants, a Fortune 500 company that owns Olive Garden and Longhorn Steakhouse.

[1] On the HBO program Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver did a three-minute comedy bit based on Starboard's presentation.

By doing so, wrote Cohan, Smith "fired a shot over the bows of directors everywhere," informing them that shareholders were now in the ascendant, and "managers ignore them at their peril."

Only in a handful of times in the past few years has an activist managed to replace an entire board of directors, and never at a company the size of Darden.