We are all mentors

My notebook doesn’t lie: it’s Friday, and I have already spoken with 11 teams, which want to create their own product.This week I’m devoting to it 1/3 of each day, from Monday to Friday.

(To be fair not every week is this intensive. This week in Cracow there is Innovation Nest Accelerate as well as Chance Warm Up taking place. In both programs the organizers have seen certain value of my mentoring and I’m doing my best to not let them and their teams down.)

Why am I doing this? Few days a question was asked: what is my motivation?

There are a couple of reasons:

• I’m looking at Cracow in a 10-year perspective. I couldn’t care less for “building another Silicon Valley” because this motivation doesn’t make sense.

I want Polish, and especially Cracow-made projects, to be recognizable worldwide and laying down foundations for this takes place now.

• And in 10 years my perspective won’t change — it will still be reaching a decade ahead. It is an incessant process. (I’m not recreating the wheel here, read about building startup communities in this book Brad Feld’s Startup Communities.)
• I’m not and I won’t ever be working a full-time job. So I don’t have to protect the knowledge I’ve gained in any way. I can understand the motives of employees, who don’t want to explain their craft in order to not weaken their position at a company. I don’t have such a problem.
• I would like others to be able to smoothly go through stages, which I had to cut through. There is indeed an infinite number of mistakes you can make when starting with your own product, but passing on my experiences to young teams I increase their chances of achieving success. There are a couple of mistakes they don’t have to make.
• I’m learning myself — each day, every project is a challenge. I feel strong in B2B SAAS products, whose dynamics I understand well and where I have the most experience. But I also try to help a team solving the problem of recruitment, offering an e-book comparison service or selling long johns (this will be a holiday hit, I bought two pairs). Often times the product or company problem lies where founders are not looking any more — they have been with the project on a daily basis for a long time and lack perspective of someone new.

What I’m basically trying to do is to give back to the community what I got from it earlier. Just as young teams are listening to me, I am too sitting with my mouth wide, listening to my mentors. Everyone’s a mentor in a way and no matter what you do, there’s someone seeking your knowledge.

I encourage you to reach out to your local startup community and exchange experiences. If you reckon you don’t have one in your town consider this: there was nothing going on in Cracow 5 years ago.

pawel@turbo.cat