Mentors Are the Secret Weapons of Successful Startups | Hacker News Reader

Mentors Are the Secret Weapons of Successful Startups

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Key is that the mentor is 'an experienced entrepreneur'. This is very important - everywhere I see nowadays are startup programs with 'mentors', most times they are just corporate employees with no entrepreneurial trackrecord.

What do experienced entrepreneurs know?

Their advice is initially ignored and they know that that's normal. Every first-time entrepreneur has wrong assumptions that they are advised against. But they just must test them out themselves. Non-experienced entrepreneur mentors want their advice followed and quickly give up mentoring if it isn't so.

That advice is still very important: the advantage is that you get to a point quick where you remember the advice initially ignored and pivot faster and learn much quicker.

> What do experienced entrepreneurs know? > > Their advice is initially ignored and they know that that's normal. Every first-time entrepreneur has wrong assumptions that they are advised against. But they just must test them out themselves.

Yeah, I think you've got the wrong root cause. When you are a corporate flunkie, you also make a lot of wrong assumptions, are advised against them, and do them anyway.

I think this other comment describes the reality more accurately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9247352

Alternate headline: Very successful people seek out mentors to enhance their own capabilities.

More seriously, I've always found two distinct types of mentors, and discovered it's crucial to separate the two types apart from each other and not confuse one for the other.

One type is the "been there done that" type with decades of experience in one particular area, and they simply share with you lots of anecdotes about how things have played out in the past as empirical evidence of how they may play out in the future.

The other type is the kind of mentor who provides you with an analytical framework to be able to prioritize and evaluate decisions on your own. This person often helps you see the forest from the trees, or helps you recognize blindspots you might not be aware of.

Both are valuable, but it's important to know the difference.

I've always been seeking a mentor, but have literally never met someone who would help me in life. All I want to do is be a programmer? You're saying that's not why I've has such poor success at finding opportunities or applying myself correctly? You're saying that isn't a field that someone can easily help someone else succeed in? The people I helped get jobs in college didn't seem to have any problems. Please explain!

Perhaps english isn't your first language, but your grammar is so painful it's hard to know what you are asking.

If you are seeking a mentor for programming, join an IRC channel dedicated to your current favorite language and start listening, learning, and asking questions. Over time, a mentor will emerge.

@strathmeyer - you say that you have never met anyone who would help you so here you go: I will. Contact me at this handle at gmail (I don't always check that address but I will check it for the next week or so). I will share my background and let you decide if you will find it valuable.

One of my biggest personal and professional mistakes so far has been not seeking quality mentorship early enough. The boost in growth you get from having someone actually care about how you are doing is practically incalculable. The bond between master and apprentice is also such a beautiful part of human experience, you definitely want to experience that in your life.

Or - One weird trick to business success: take advice from people who know what they are talking about.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately. If you give up typical mentor equity - ~0.5% in exchange for someone who can open doors and quickly make connections for you, payable upon company exit, this can end up being a pretty good deal. Consider this, many of the things mentors can do for a startup are things that could be done by a high level employee, but could take up lots of time - sourcing talent, getting intros, removing roadblocks, etc. If you hire someone to help with these things, it costs you $100,000+/year in your prime growth stage where working capital is vital. If you have a mentor who can do these things in a fraction of the time because of his or her network and experience, if you have a $100mm exit, this ends up costing you $500,000 somewhere between 5 and 10 years later. It also frees up that salary which can then be used to finance growth in operations or some other vital need. Of all the financing and investment options a founder has available, if you have access to good mentors, this seems like one of, if not the, best option to help with the growth of your company.

There are too many things wrong with your calculation. First, you need mentor exactly because you can't replace that role with your high level employee. Mentors are typically a successful founders themselves and have enough cash in bank not to worry about employment. Good mentor don't help startups because they are getting 0.5% equity but rather because they see new founder as image of themselves, huge promise in their approach and yeah, may be a big bucks they can generate one day. If your mentor is haggling about equity% then you are probably talking to wrong guy. Also it's hilarious to me that you think $100K salary can buy a person who can do the job of a mentor. The role of mentor works exactly because they are not your employee and they can tell you to your face that your suck at XYZ. It also works because mentor typically has seen the movie dozen times and can compare and contrast in their past experiences.

Keep in mind the fact that lots of high level employees play the role of mentor on the side for other start ups, and at the same time, many high level employees are individuals who have started their own successful ventures at one time or another, and now prefer to work for someone else for various reasons. These two roles are far from mutually exclusive. I also never stated anywhere that it would be acceptable for a mentor to haggle about his equity stake. ~0.5% is a rough estimate of what most mentors receive in exchange for their advice and help. Frankly, you're right that most mentors do it out of a desire to help and their equity position should be just enough to have some skin in the game. However, those mentors also have a responsibility to help you. That help comes in many different sizes and shapes. My point was that some of the things a mentor does to help is to make connections that can take lots of time to otherwise make, and to help overcome hurdles that otherwise would likely prevent success.

As far as their role, if you need a mentor to tell you that you suck at XYZ, you're probably not ready to run your own company yet. A great founder knows his weaknesses and surrounds himself with people who fill those gaps and raise the bar for the entire team. Sure, there are inexperienced founders who need to be told this, but if that's the mentor's main job then that start up is going to have bigger problems than the equity stake of the mentor vs a high level employee.

I think you might've misunderstood my point. I wasn't saying that $100K will buy you someone who can do what a mentor can do. I was saying that a mentor can help do many of the things that a $100K employee would otherwise need to do, at a fraction of the cost and much more efficiently. This is of course dependent on a founder making a prudent choice of mentor(s), which if he was the type of founder described above, he will have done.

The article itself is not terrible, but I have a strong aversion for horrible titles like that. Why not just say something like: "Start ups greatly benefit from experienced mentors"?

I get the same kind of eyeroll response when people define themselves 'social media ninjas' or 'growth hackers' or 'panini artist'.

When I read the headline, my first thought was, "This must be a guest post on TechCrunch."

Glad to see a "proof" of the gut feeling I have had since before launching my startup. I chose to turn down VC money and accept deep-pocketed BAs instead. First, we all have "skin in the game" Second, and more importantly, a 50-thing BA with several successes and/or failures is much more valuable to me than a 20-30-thing analyst whose job is to check my excel files, do a broad market analysis and inform his boss.

(I have nothing against 30-things, I am one myself. I value our generation new ideas, but I also admit that experience is useful :-) )

What is a BA?

Business Angel?

yup.

Mine are individuals who succeeded in their respective fields, all related to our product.

Accross the board I can get a quick answer to two crucial questions:

a-Would you buy this?

b-How would you sell it?

And unsuccessful companies usually ignore their mentors' advice and fail (all the while scratching their heads as to why the mentors quit).

I can't tell you how many startups I've mentored where the CEO/CTO/founders would not listen to me or the other mentors/advisors on the team, and eventually it gets to the point where there is no reason to continue, the company's doomed to fail or stay stagnant in terms of growth/additional funding.

The key is knowing when to listen mentors - or actually doing what they suggest - and when not to. The more seasoned, experienced and older you are, the better you can filter the advice given.

One of the worst things is first-time entrepreneurs bombarded by mentors and their advice, and the startups then actually doing everything they're told. Have seen many great startup teams and ideas ruined by that. Happens especially at 2nd rate accelerators.

pretty good proxy for life advice, am I right?

That's kind of like saying Harvard is the key to getting a high-paying job. The novice entrepreneurs that build successful relationships with experienced ones are also sending signals that they will succeed before that relationship begins in earnest. The previously successful entrepreneurs are picking winners whose efforts they can magnify.

I believe this to be true in other aspects of professional life as well. When I was learning to fly to become a commercial pilot having a mentor who was himself an accomplished pilot and mechanic helped tremendously. I was able to advance through my flight ratings at a much greater speed than if I had been learning on my own.

I think it's true in everything. Is one of the most powerful things that you can have IMO.

Having someone that went through the same that you did, and that now is helping with insight, and that tries to motivate is the key of success in anything.

This is one thing that I noticed reading biographies on successful people, they always, at some point had contact with other successful people, became truly inspired by them.

My experience is that mentors, being one step removed from the company, also have the ability to see the things that the founders don't want to either believe or see. But it also reminds me of the story we had a couple of years ago about how you can't recognize greatness if you haven't actually experienced it. So you think this friend of yours is the greatest <foo> you've ever seen and yet your mentor feels they are good, but not great, and you need to improve that area, what comes out is the 'mentor just hates my friend' which is the easier logic for the founder.

It's interesting how the loss of elderly wisdom in our society has came back in the tech arena. People who have legitimately been around the block know things. Strategy being one of the most important.

If anybody is on the East coast, I highly recommend Mike Krupit: http://www.trajectify.com/

He's helping me and he has some really great experience to back up his advice.

Mentors: it's like hiring experienced people, but without paying them!

The best mentors are elders in your family: dad, mom, grandparents, uncles, etc. Sadly we ignore them very often.

They also say that majority of successfully entrepreneurs are one where parents were also entrepreneurs.

But sometimes Mentor drive wrong way to company

"Correlation does not imply causation". That these founders are mentored by very successful people is not proof alone of the value of mentoring. It seems like mentoring is very powerful, but the fact these founders have access to such successful mentors may say more about the environment these people are founding their company, rather than the quality of mentoring.

I think it's more than just correlation. Mentors are usually well-connected people that can remove roadblocks and help in more ways than simple mentoring. The valley is incestuous and it's difficult to succeed as an outsider.

When I joined my current company, the CEO was mentored by an extremely well-connected individual. He'd previously been a CEO of a large Silicon Valley company and was on the board of at least one company that was considerably larger. While both our CEO and him would likely say that the arrangement was solely for mentoring, the end result was that we were acquired by the company that the mentor had formerly led. What started as partnership talks, facilitated by the mentor, quickly turned into M&A.

Much like a good VC will provide much more than money, a good mentor will provide much more than just simple coaching. Very few companies succeed in a vacuum, they need the right doors opened for them at the right times. Having the right connections opens those doors.

Stop misusing the phrase "correlation does not imply causation".

> While it is not the case that correlation is causation, simply stating their nonequivalence omits information about their relationship. Tufte suggests that the shortest true statement that can be made about causality and correlation is one of the following:

> "Empirically observed covariation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality."

> "Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint."

Well, unless you're in a extremely third world shithole, or you're some sort of ridiculous statistical anomaly in the first world, the true secret to success is (and was) always determination, hard work, and patience. Unfortunately, it's not much of a secret, it requires a lot from the individual, it stinks of republican ideology, and therefore isn't a very sensational topic to write a tech-crunch hype (redundant) article about. Plus, on some level, it offends people's idea of fairness and causality because there is some in-determinism involved such that 80 units of hard work on say Mark Zuckerberg = billion dollar public corporation, while 8000 units of hard work on you = only a humble small business.

What else is in the "environment" that could be helping? It's made of people.

Perhaps the successful entrepreneurs share another interesting trait. This trait is detected by good mentors, which leads to a correlation between entrepreneurs being successful and having good mentors.

the statistical term is sample selection bias. to test the importance of mentors you'd need to figure out some way to compare to groups of start-ups which are identical in every way except access to mentors... which i can't think of a good way to do... maybe if you could find start-ups that had been accepted by the same vcs.. so maybe one vc gives more money the other vc had more 'mentor's then you might be able to reasonable estimate the effect of vcs... but even this isn't great.

I was referring to more than just the mentor. Such as the ideas, practices and culture of their peers.

You are still describing a mentor.

I am also describing their competitors, teachers, parents and adversaries

"Shrinks for startups?" (http://twitter.com/mikellsolution/status/571590631304388608 ) might be part of a mature stack.

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