Donating my time to grow a VC-funded company: why I quit mentoring at Plato | Hacker News Reader

Donating my time to grow a VC-funded company: why I quit mentoring at Plato

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

215 pointsyarapavan53 comments

It's a bizarre business model, but the aspect that is most baffling about this article is that he knew it before he signed up.

There was no bait and switch. They never said he'd be paid. He knew users of the service paid for it. They never said they'd donate his "take" to charities. These were things he knew before he signed up.

But he signed up thinking it would bring credibility/"exposure". Apparently it didn't bring enough of that, so instead he's using the feigned outrage to try to achieve the same. The charity bit is particularly weak.

Eh. There's a reason there is a lot of eye rolling. Many of the other "mentors" probably have a stake and duped guys like this into "volunteering" their time to sniff at their aura.

> Apparently it didn't bring enough of that, so instead he's using the feigned outrage to try to achieve the same. The charity bit is particularly weak.

Very relatable; I felt the same way about the article.

When I was a younger man, I built a website for free at the request of a distant acquaintance. I told myself I was generous; I was spending weekends slaving away on Java & Spring out of the kindness of my heart. In reality, I was hoping that acquaintance would praise me, like me, and introduce me to their exclusive social circle. When I finally understood they really did just want a website-- not me or my friendship-- I got frustrated. I immediately asked to be paid with cash, despite my previous insistence it was unnecessary.

There has to be a word for this invisible ledger that lives in our heads. The one that tracks the difference between our real investments and our imagined payoffs, that somehow wounds our pride and drive us to seek odd forms of recompense

There is an good book on this called No More Mr Nice Guy. It talks about how certain psychological traits cause people (usually men) to start make invisible contracts with other people. This is usually because of a lack of assertiveness and a certain “fear” of being made fun of for asking for something

The remedy is to go through assertiveness training, which the book covers. Another great book called When I say No I feel Guilty goes more in depth on this too

> There has to be a word for this invisible ledger that lives in our heads.

It’s called a hidden competing commitment. The book “Immunity to Change” by Kegan is all about it.

There are obviously substantive issues with the messaging - however, the piece reads like a hand-wavey bad-faith attempt at creating controversy for internet hype, for an upcoming book.

Silicon Valley is literally built on 'paying it forward'. Giving advice to others for free because that's how you got to where you are today. That's what the mentors here are doing. To feign ignorance of that, and then to wrap it up in a half-baked "bUt ItS Vc EvIL" is pretty transparent.

Paying it forward doesn't usually have a price tag associated with it. This seems extremely scummy. What is Plato providing for the money they are providing? A booking service and some basic screening? That can't be worth more than $5 or $10/mo.

> Silicon Valley is literally built on 'paying it forward'.

Yes, that is what makes this especially tasteless. Exploiting people's generosity and the SV tradition of helping other entrepreneurs.

Also, the point is not that VC is evil, it's that VC funded companies shouldn't make money from donations.

Volunteering your time to mentor people can be very rewarding in its own right though. But the fact that people are paying for it probably killed that aspect of it too. The cost of the service should have been a red flag from the start.

It's the same as if you provide technical services at cost, say just asking the same hourly rate as your day job in hopes it will lead to something when they can afford more. Since they are paying, they will presume that is the market value for what they are getting and treat it as a price ceiling, making it far less likely the relationship will lead to something bigger.

I also mentored for Plato and quit for very similar reasons. When I started, I thought I'd be helping people who are underrepresented in tech, or even just people who had interesting goals that my experience or coaching might help them achieve. Instead, I found people whose companies were paying Plato to give them a service, weren't particularly self-motivated, and were highly traditional in their backgrounds. Worse still, they would schedule my calendar then cancel at the last minute, and Plato didn't seem to discourage this, even though they required me to block my calendar. Then they wanted me to spend my time writing a business case study that they could use to promote themselves. I actually think mentorship could be a great place for innovation, and I could even see "volunteering" or doing 'pro bono' work, but not when it has almost zero return even from a feel-good standpoint.

"I thought I'd be helping people who are underrepresented in tech"

What made you believe this? The service doesn't seem to pitch that angle whatsoever. Indeed, being $300 USD per month (for what it is) puts it on a pretty pricey level and largely guarantees the opposite.

From a purely logical angle, people willing to fork out $300 a month for this could well be underrepresented in tech, not just those who cannot afford it.

I would check with your Alma Mater—we just stood this up 18 months ago at my business college, and the alumni jumped all over it. The system (peoplegrove platform) let’s you indicate how often you’re willing to connect with students, what your open to mentoring on (eg careers, industry, what courses world you take if you could roll back the clock (ps it’s always Analtics and scripting!), etc.)

It has been thrilling to watch both mentoring alumni and growing students each benefit from these interactions, and there’s $0 involved for participants—-both sides have an incentive to play by the rules (it world be pretty embarrassing to have your former school ban you from talking to students for failure to follow protocol). And, the system connects to career services, so repeated abuse by students jeopardizes the services available to them (which in my college is HUGE).

One much more feel-good program I'm aware of -- Mentors In Tech is doing mentorship for community college students who want to break into the tech industry. [1] They're almost all from underrepresented backgrounds, many on their second career, and mentoring has a big proven impact on their outcomes. It's run by the person who founded the TEALS program which brought real CS teachers to thousands of high schools. [2]

[1]: https://mentorsintech.com/ [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/technology/microsoft-send...

> people who are underrepresented in tech

Sorry for the off-topic question, but why would you want to focus on people from _groups_ that are underrepresented? Wouldn't it make more sense to focus on _individuals_ that have had a hard time and need help getting into tech, regardless of demographic?

Can see why this is valauble and why people would do it. Mentoring is the hard problem to both generalize and scale. A world in which that problem is solved would have a means to take in arbitrary people and return successful ones who can do well by themselves and teach others.

It doesn't scale well because a mentor requires support infrastructure to be present and available with opportunity, and it is only as successful as the mentees openness to change. I was made a member of a private mentoring organization some years ago, and it's hard to stop indexing on mentoring as making others more like you. First it's having the relevant experience to share, and then being present to share it, and even then, just at the right moment on someones path. That makes mentoring a rare confluence of factors. Even if you sign up for skill lessons of some sort with someone, the mentoring that happens is a higher order effect of the practice and time together, and not just the tangible work in the lessons, that can be arbitrary. It's not therapy either, as that's a very specific kind of relationship that is separate from mentoring as well.

I would be surprised to see how it works on a transactional basis at all. There's a lot I don't know about it (most of it really) but what a difficult and important problem!

"They are the only two-sided marketplace who managed to pull off: all money goes to the middleman"

This sounds similar to publishing academic journals.

Anyone remember Experts-Exchange? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts_Exchange) I remember answering questions on there before StackOverflow existed. The mix of volunteers answering and paying users feeling entitled to answers felt really off.

A couple years ago I posted a 'Who's Mentoring' post [1] on the same day that the monthly 'Who's Hiring' post went up. Doing a search, [2] I can see that others have posted in the same vein over the years. It'd be great if the HN community could facilitate mentoring for targeted needs.

Over the years, I've talked with various folks from HN, and even launched partnerships with a couple startups that I met through HN. It's a great community, and I'd be happy to give back however I can.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284235

2: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=who%27s+mentoring

>However, Plato has a problem: and this is that they're venture funded and need to grow both in users, as well as in revenue.

Agreed, seems like a tough business model for VC scale.

But, this is actually a really fantastic product to build career momentum.

I have to imagine Plato's founders are spending a lot of time getting 1:1 mentorship from their platforms top mentors.

I have definitely spent my time creating less productive companies in the last 13 years of my startup journey.

This should set them up well for their next thing.

You're assuming that they're hiring high quality mentors. Most of the people who have the most valuable insights to spread (i.e. civic leaders, CEOs, leaders of fields, professors) would never bother giving their time to this platform because it gets them nothing, and just extracts time and energy from them. So they'll probably just learn from people who don't value their own time and life

Yea this Plato thing seems pretty bizarre and I completely agree that it's silly for the mentors to use it. Maybe there's a small value of just meeting people through it, but I think existing meetup groups can solve that problem pretty well.

The quibble I have with the author: if this was a for-profit company that _hadn't_ taken VC funding, would he be more OK with donating his time to them? I think his objection makes sense regardless of company taking funding and I don't think he needs to keep emphasizing them taking funding to get his point across.

It's not just VC finding.

It's YCombinator funding.

From https://tracxn.com/d/companies/platohq.com

Jun 01, 2016 : $120K : Seed : Y Combinator

How many predatory and scammy companies does YC have to fund, before we directly question YC itself?

Wait, do people assume YCombinator has any standard to their funding? I thought we all knew that it was just a hype machine wrapped around a bog standard VC group. Of course they'll fund them, it has a sick name and an idea you can state in 60 seconds, so Plato will probably get sold to a textbook manufacturer or something for 70 billion dollars because it's 2021 and nothing makes sense

> do people assume YCombinator has any standard to their funding

Some people for sure assume this and it’s a testament to the work YC has put into marketing and PR. Just look at HN — a mammoth content marketing project — for a VC fund. Just enough YC propaganda mixed in to where people still believe it’s impartial Hacker News.

> Wait, do people assume YCombinator has any standard to their funding

That is basically the whole point of YC, that their investment gives you a stamp of approval.

you're not uncomfortable with the practice of relying on customers notion that the company is paying mentors, but taking 100% of the fee?

If you actually want to give back at the intersection of tech and mentoring this is very straightforward. Create or go to a local makerspace, community center, or prison and volunteer to teach people technical or management skills.

This has a few advantages. It doesn't cost anything, you're actually helping people who stand to benefit the most from your knowledge, they will be grateful in return, and you avoid all the wannabe 'elites' who spent their time on clubhouse or plato or what have you.

The big disadvantage is that you'll have a very limited selection of mentees. They might be the ones most in need of help, but it's a bit overkill for some unicorn founder to help random people at a maker space, there are plenty of people that would be just as qualified to help people at that stage.

Sounds a lot like peer review for commercial publishers like Elsevier!

It does seem shady. As someone who volunteered a lot in the past I would not feel well about someone making profit off my efforts - it's just feels wrong.

This seems to be the general way these mentor companies work. I've noticed the same on growthmentor but they're much more up front about the fact mentors are donating their time.

This was the same author that wrote about the Uber iOS YOLO recently [0], without cursing Travis Kalanick.

I somehow missed the second half of the title (with the word "quit") and I was worried he was again getting into a situation where he was doing a lot of heavy lifting for a company that was ultimately taking advantage of its contributors.

Glad to see he dumped Plato.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27267368

I did some work for another (shall remain nameless) on-line learning company, writing content for which I was paid a reasonable work-for-hire amount. But they also had mentors, and I looked into that and was thinking "you have to be kidding, you pay them what???" It was just absurdly low for a senior developer. So either those mentors are being badly exploited or are actually not good at their jobs.

Just want to add a friendly plug for SharpestMinds (YC W18),a mentorship platform built on income share agreements.

Mentees only pay if the land a job, and mentors get the majority of the ISA.

We are focused on data science (and other data roles) at the moment, but will expand to other markets soon.

https://www.sharpestminds.com

Hey everyone! I’m Quang, co-founder, and CEO of Plato. I’d like to chime in as we had several discussions with Gergely and Plato definitely doesn’t fit his vision. Happy to have this debate with you in a public setting.

This discussion is a good reminder that we probably need to update a bit the message and be even more transparent on the dynamic in play and the incentives for mentors, here are they:

(1) Giving back to the community: - People just feel really good about helping, seeing someone grow- In addition, to being a mentor in Plato, I'm helping every week people (for free) to prepare for YC interviews and I really feel good about helping as I've received so much help from others in the past

(2) Learning - I'm mentoring in Plato myself every week, 1h-2h every week, 1 call over two, I feel I'm saying the same thing, but 1 call over 2, I'm learning myself a lot. For example, I had a call with the head of engineering of a 50 Engineers Company from a startup in France last week, and their company had a really interesting way of functioning to do a performance review, it's not done by a manager, it's done by peers who are assigned to you every quarter. I learned a ton thanks to all my mentees - It helps me to synthesize my thoughts and deliver my learnings with a simple and clear message - It's also very intellectually stimulating to be challenged every week with a different challenge it's helping me sharpen my skills

(3) Networking with other mentors: - Mentors get free access to Plato (it was in an experimental phase and we're deploying it to the broader community next month) - we’re organizing regular happy hours between mentors and some are joining every week - and plenty of other events we're organizing for mentors for free

(4) Brand (we offer speaking opportunities to mentors who’ve been here for a while - Many Mentors are proud to be a Plato mentor, and many of them are sharing their plate public profile and put that they're a Plato mentor on Linkedin - Also, the best mentors and those who have been in Plato for a while are regularly proposed to be speakers at our conference, for example, http://elevate.platohq.com/ and https://www.platohq.com/webinars

(5) Charity We have no problem adding a 5th point about donating to a charity. But those 4 are already strong and that’s why we have 1000+ mentors and some of them are here for 3 years+. This is one of the initiatives we'd like to do in the next 6-12 months.

Finally, I doubt that paying the mentors will move the needle. When we started to do that, we started to attract worse mentors who are doing that for the money. But giving away XX% of revenue to a charity of your choice (that is aligned with our mission to improve Eng Leadership) is a good idea (that we are already working on)

If you think that is a completely new business model and dynamic, it's actually not. Plato’s model is no different than the business model of a conference: Companies paying for attendees to learn from speakers. Speakers unpaid (most of the time) Incentives for speakers?

(1) Giving back to the community, when you're a speaker at a conference, you're actually happy to help a community that you care about

(2) Learn as synthesizing your thoughts and delivering a message (through a keynote or something) is helpful

(3) Networking with other speakers

(4) Brand (being a speaker is helping for your own brand or your company's brand)

(5) Sometimes a speaker can choose a charity to donate

Although I agree that we could be better organized and transparent with those 4 (or 5) incentives for mentors (maybe add a system of points or whatever), those are highly appreciated incentives for mentors and I do think it will scale.

Also, our monthly subscription fees include:

- Cost of customer success: we help our customers build programs around TAlents Development

- Cost of Engineers: we pay our engineers who are building the platform that helps mentees and mentors schedule and reschedule their time, be matched, take notes, write action plan etc.

- Cost of Talent Coaches: a talent coach (someone who is a professional, paid by us, who is uncovering your challenges and needs and matching you with the right mentor and keep you accountable on your progress). More about it here: https://www.platohq.com/how-it-works-for-team

- Cost of Mentors Community Managers: A team that are running all the initiatives above

Again, Happy to have this debate with y'all!

It looks like some of the investors have volunteered to become mentors. I suppose they have an incentive to curate eliteness on the mentor list to support their portfolio company. I'm curious how many hours/week of mentoring these investor regularly clock in on the platform (for example, Luc Vincent, Andrew Niklas, Jeff Queisser, Tido Carriero, or Seth Sakamoto).

(In your place, I'd either ignore my prodding or answer with a bland "I'm sorry we don't disclose these numbers to protect the privacy of the mentors", so I wouldn't blame you for dodging my prodding.)

Either way, I think the real issue is that you've done a gone job of explaining the benefits of your service to both mentees and mentors, but the mentees are misled into thinking some of their fee goes somewhere other than your pocket. If you make that clearer to the mentees, I suspect your service would be looked on more kindly, and it would avoid the unflattering comparison to Elsevier elsewhere in the comments.

> Again, Happy to have this debate with y'all!

I’m not sure how much there is to debate, but it seems like you’ve got something more like a decent small (productized) consulting business than a VC-funded startup.

Given that you aren’t paying your mentors, I genuinely wonder how scalable it is. You mentioned that you have tried paying before, but I wonder if you were offering enough for top mentors who are able to be hired. The price for a good mentor can be very high when it’s not free and given out of some sort of goodwill.

Regardless, best of luck!

No matter how you try to reframe it, this really doesn't feel like "giving back to the community". It feels like "giving to Plato Incorporated". It would be reasonable if you charged something nominal like $20/mo, but charging $300/mo (or more) to be a gatekeeper doesn't pass my intuition of fairness.

Your pitch really does sound like Elsevier. Sorry.

The half hour or a hour a mentor takes to help Plato for free and you can't bother to even assist them by allowing to send a share of the profits to a charity of their choice. If they want Plato to send money to Alzheimer Foundation you should let them and not limit it to some 'improve Eng Leadership'.

Also remember that a mentor could also just arrange this themselves by getting an open office/walk-in hour via Calendly and spend its one hour a week better. One hour can reasonable represent a $175-250+ hour rate. Close to Plato's monthly fee.

Personally, I would go for the latter, or help the local school with teaching kids through something like Codeclub. Codeclub was really lot of fun

1) and 2) aren't very relevant, I'd argue that if Plato does indeed help people then you should focus on that.

As to the remaining points, they all focus on helping mentors. I don't think they need much help, they're already well off and successful, the issue is that the mentees have to pay.

Plato would make much more sense as a non-profit, where you would finance engineering and marketing with donations, and mentors would donate their time.

I threw a static page for something like it a while back: https://onehumanrace.io

Folks pay u in charitable donations for your time.

I modelled a similar idea with actual celebrities (think pop stars, not fang execs) and the main problem is getting successful people's time.

Money is obviously not a good motivator, so preying on their emotion and will to do good is the only thing left.

It's sad that these people even started mentoring for a for profit company. Yet it's not too far from contributing to big corps open source projects

I shake my head every time people give away their time/work for free and then get surprised when people value their time/work at $0. Face palm. Times 10. The more you give away your time/work for free, the more you devaluate not only your own time/work but also the time/work of everybody else.

If you're interested in being a business mentor, I recommend looking into SCORE: https://www.score.org/

I'm wondering how they got the initial mentors from the well known companies on board. Is it good connections or some "quid pro quo" deal?

Not that absurd, its like getting into Soho House and enjoying a performance of people that wanted exposure and performing for free

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