Mentors, Coaches and Teachers

This is actually a question I get asked a lot - "what's the difference?" - to the point where I wrote a page for our Australian website on the difference [1]. The only (minor) disagreement I have to Steve's answer is that any of a Mentor / Coach / Teacher will care (should care) - the key value in a Mentor is that they have usually 'walked the path before'. When a mentor gives you answers, they're often from specific experience which can be immensely valuable... except when you're trying to do something different to how everyone has done it before, of course.

The best thing about having a Mentor, as Steve notes, is that the two-way street normally makes it accessible to people who are starting out. If you want to build a start-up, you can't pay for a consultant, you probably can't hire a coach (unless you're funded, or they're cheap - in which case, why are you listening to them), and a teacher is unlikely to give you the practical grounding you need to implement good ideas.

Having a mentor who's built startups before means being so much more focused sooner, and you also energise them - see Fred Wilson's post yesterday [2]. So they're available. YC etc give and receive so much value, and Mentoring is (from an outside perspective) a key part of it.

The reasons I (and, it seems, others) get asked the difference a lot is because some people see mentor / coach / teacher as an OR conversation - which is better, "which of this OR this OR this is right for me?". In reality, it's an AND conversation - "how can I get the most out of this relationship AND this one AND this one?"

Get a mentor who has walked the path. Get a teacher when you want education on a specific topic. Get a coach when you want someone to give you the skills to build the strategy and to guide you, with experience and (ideally) proven frameworks, through successful implementation and beyond.

[1] http://shirlaws.com.au/coaching/about-coaching [2] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/reinvesting-capital.html

Edit: It's also worth noting that, in the commercial world, these terms (plus 'consultant') are often seen as interchangeable. I'm sure there are coaches out there who would vehemently disagree with my approach here. If you're paying a mentor to guide you through implmentation, go for it - that relationship, not an industry term, is what matters.

A lot of people don't realize this, which inspired me to write "How to get your Professors’ Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring:" http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2... . I've observed lots of people doing it wrong, so I wanted to describe how to do it right.

I don't think of the mentoring and teaching as majorly different activities, as you do, but I think a lot of people don't realize they need to do something special to make themselves worth of investing in.