How-to get that guy as your mentor | Hacker News Reader

How-to get that guy as your mentor

gabrielweinberg.com

58 pointsduck15 comments

I agree with the basic principle but I'm not sure that every mentor relationship should turn in to an equity based one.

At risk of tooting my own drum (did I say that right? ;-), you could always sign up at http://EveryMentor.com and try to get matched to a mentor there. I envision it as the online equivalent to a workout buddy.

There are a couple hundred "mentors" on there now at varying skill levels, with several dozen happy matches.

Interesting concept. Few thoughts on it:

As Gabriel mentioned in the blog post - "Identify people that would make good mentors, i.e. with the right domain experience." The site looks very generic from outside and forces me to signup without even giving me a peek of kind of people I can expect to see in the community.

I might be looking for a startup mentor in a particular domain, and may be there is none of that type on it right now. Or may be some people on it are providing mentor-ship on how to go about learning a specific skill like flying etc that I am interested in, but since I have no clue, I probably won't sign up.

You can think of highlighting a few profiles or at least a few categories helping a visitor understand whether (s)he should join this community or not.

Good luck, and hope it becomes a good success.

Thanks for the feedback, right now it is HEAVILY weighted towards hackers and such (my main push has been in Hacker News) although one girl found a wedding designer match. That's kind of unexpected!

Hmmm... I'm trying to sign up right now and I'm stuck at the "Ideally, how would your mentor's experience level compare to yours?" single-item drop down.

You see, I think I would make a good mentor for a junior software developer. I've worked in a lot of different domains, using a lot of different tools. I took the Construx "peer mentoring" course, have led educational seminars, etc.

But, I'm also part of a small team working on a brand-new startup, and would love to be on the learning side of a mentor relationship with someone who has early-stage startup experience. And I have to pick just one option. Seems conceptually broken to me. Maybe I'm an outlier.

A lot of folks signed up for multiple accounts. Just think, finding some with the exact mirror of you might be difficult, but you could fill both roles with two different "mentors". But, I still totally see your point. During streamlining, I made the decision to simplify a lot of the matching.

Also, your sort-by-distance in the search sorts 1000 miles before 5 miles, which makes finding someone close to me difficult.

Common enough bug, probably an easy fix.

Definitely, thanks for pointing that out.

Last bug report, I promise:

In chrome on Windows, the bio field you see on mouseover is showing up to the left, partially off the screen, so I can only see a few words of the bio.

Nothing wrong with 'tooting your own drum' as you put it. If you don't, who will? Well, as you get more exposure more will.

The saying you're looking for it "tooting my own horn".

I really like the concept!

On their end, the equity should be enough where it is motivating to stay engaged. In practice, I think this is 2%+. That is significantly higher than normal advisor relationships.

How much equity would you give for a normal advisor relationship?

Varies on person/startup/etc., but 0.25-0.5% is common.

Thanks!

Aside: that earn-mojo thingie on the right side? that just earned it's rightful place in my /etc/hosts deny list.

Please don't.

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