How do you Find Startup Advisors / Mentors?
I have been getting more and more convinced that the right way to give / receive mentorship is decentralized and fractional.
I sometimes get asked if I can mentor someone, and often my answer is “sorry, I can’t commit to meeting regularly given my schedule”. On the flip side also, I often feel guilty to reach out to other people who are more experienced than me to get their advice, let alone asking for their time regularly.
On the other hand, receiving mentorship is a fantastic way to avoid costly mistakes as we navigate uncharted waters. The only way I have been able to do this has been through more formal engagements where I’d sign a contract with someone (say an advisor) and compensate them for their time… which is, well, expensive, and too rigid.
As I continue my journey with various facets of health and how important they are for my success as a founder, I’m also increasingly realizing that I would need a whole crew of mentors for all different aspects: mental / physical / cognitive / social / financial health, and then domain topics like business and technical sides, etc.
It is unlikely that one person can teach me all the above, so I would need multiple people, and that just multiplies the logistical complexity of procuring and getting benefit from such a crew, esp if they are highly regarded experts. It just feels too big to even start thinking about lifting! So, it’s pretty much a non-starter!
If I think about it though, being a community builder, I have the advantage of learning from many people, like peers who might be a few steps ahead or behind me in their journeys, or even the ones that might be much earlier in their careers. The problem though is that this has been quite adhoc and without any proper rigor. I have also thought about this largely as a generic concept: social capital.
So, the question that I have been thinking about recently is, what does it take to create a meaningful, diversified, decentralized, fractional, mentorship network?
In other words, how can I intentionally create a ritual (or set of rituals) where I take advantage of logistically complex but highly expert mentors, while complementing that with a larger, logistically simpler, but highly diverse group of “peer mentors”?
Some ideas that I have used in the past that are related are mastermind groups, hosting journal clubs and workshops, running a talk show, etc. The core theme in all the above is creating an environment where someone I want to learn from also get some sort of value (eg. exposure) while teaching me (and others) interesting things.
I have also started doing more regular one on ones with people I consider my fractional mentors / advisors (even if they don’t know they are) and I just have open ended conversations with them about anything that’s on my mind! It has been phenomenal.
