Executive succession is a critical event for organizations. Traditional succession research has often focused on when CEO succession involves an executive from inside the organization versus when a new CEO is selected from outside the organization. We depart from this tradition to explore an increasingly common phenomenon: when an independent outside director changes his or her role to that of an executive. As candidates for executive roles, independent directors are neither insiders nor outsiders, as they often have significant inside information because of board service yet they have not had executive experience in the firm. From an information asymmetry perspective, choosing a director as an executive can reduce adverse selection because the remaining top management team and board have come to know the individual’s skills, expertise, and working style and presumably have built some level of trust and respect that a complete outsider would lack. Building upon the concept of board/director capital, we hypothesize about what makes one director more likely to become an executive of the firm than others. We find support for our hypotheses using a dataset comprised of the S&P 1500 between 2000 and 2019.