The science of mentoring relationships
This story is brought to you by Antonio Castro Neto and Pierrick Bouffaron.
AM2 is a Singapore-based venture studio that creates and strengthens science-startup projects in the advanced materials and advanced manufacturing fields. Join an incredible community building the future 🔥🤖
The power of good mentorship is undisputed in startup ecosystems, and this holds true for academic founders. Many successful entrepreneurs recall the specific help they received from a mentor early in the development of their companies. Richard Branson famously said that the first step to find a great mentor is admitting you can benefit from it, because there is a lot of ego, nervous energy, and pride involved with startups. Trying to navigate everything without advice is a highly flawed approach. Key benefits of mentorship include accelerated entrepreneurial and industrial education for newbie founders (and seasoned entrepreneurs alike!), leveraged expert feedback, as well as a sharp increase of the founders’ opportunity recognition along the way. When delivered correctly, mentoring can have the single greatest impact on a deeptech startup.
At first, mentorship may appear to be a dichotomy to entrepreneurs, simply because many are trained to lead and micro-manage everything so they can survive until raising enough money to get help. Perhaps counterintuitively, to run a deeptech entrepreneurial marathon, it requires that academic founders acknowledge firsthand they don’t master productization, industrialization and go-to-market, and they quickly need help from others. For top academics, it can be a humbling experience. Usually considered experts in their fields, they are more used to having others come to them for information and support, not the other way around. Stories of top academics who have difficulties to break this ivory tower are countless. This is also why first time versus second time academic founders are often seen as different “species”, as they pay attention to different things.
Mentors are not simply tutors or coaches, bringing to the table a key knowledge-transfer value. Mentors are professionals who inspire founders to press forward even when circumstances appear difficult, and the outlook seems grim. They communicate transparently the hard truths and tell deeptech founders things they may not want to hear. Good mentors identify critical steps and share advice on how to keep these from negatively impacting the product development progress, the venture structuring efforts and the go-to-market. They have encountered many “unknown unknowns” in the past and are exceptional at conveying this mindset and bespoke methodologies to face unexpected events. Transformative mentors recognize the founders’ blind spots. Although most of our fellow scientific founders have the technical and academic skills which make them very experienced in their field of study, the right mentors provide practical operational wisdom. They share openly the consequences of decisions that can occur, based upon their cumulative real-life experiences. They are humble and conscientious too, staying abreast of best practices that are constantly evolving in their fields.
Surprisingly, there are no broadly accepted mentoring rules of engagement or code of conduct. In many emerging tech ecosystems, anyone can self-label and become a mentor, working in a matter of months with a portfolio of young companies. For inexperienced but socially connected mentors, there are in fact no real consequence, despite leaving a potential trail of psychological and economic destruction in their wake. The consequences of bad mentoring for early-stage ventures can be significant, even fatal. How many entrepreneurs endure the taskmaster-type of mentor giving them a long and complex to-do list inspired by a high growth-high impact mantra which, often, has nothing to do with their field or development stage? It is hard to evaluate. Some entrepreneurs end up shying away from mentoring influences altogether because they conclude these relationships are unproductive or unhealthy. A great mentor-mentee relationship is nothing comparable to this but is the natural outcome of a learning and teaching trust relationship between an experienced individual and a founder who is eager to learn.
A top-notch mentoring layer is one of the key ingredients of productive and healthy tech ecosystems.
The hard truth is that lots of mentors are operating lightly, without deep experience nor playbook. Many overlook the importance of learning, manipulating, and contextually adapting what other professionals have conceptualized. Often in between jobs or looking for a more exciting and diverse source of revenue, they go on with their gut and a few basic frameworks in mind, mentoring early-stage ventures based upon their convictions. Such mentorship is a double-edged sword for deeptech startups, for which domain expertise, in-depth knowledge of B2B processes and hyper contextualization are all paramount.
In Singapore, because the deeptech scene is still nascent, the local ecosystem does not have masses of experienced mentors like in other industries such as banking or retail. Yet tomorrow’s top deeptech mentors are growing today, as entrepreneurs, industrialists, investors. They live and breathe the acceleration of the local ecosystem, being hands-on with more and more startups, exchanging tips, best practices, and narratives with fellow mentors from the Bay Area, Boston, Shenzhen, or Tokyo. We watch from within the emergence of a new generation of mentors, both with delectation and pragmatism. In order to reach a critical size, the local industrial value chains are to evolve, sometimes leapfrog, and the positioning of Singapore as a haven for global talents is going to be more important than ever.
We believe good mentors are incredibly helpful for academic founders to define and chart the right trajectory. The vetting of a mentor remains in the hands of the entrepreneur, based on three main drivers:
Understand your short-term and medium-term needs. We easily liken deeptech companies to the melding of disruptive technologies and business, which results in a business of uncertainty. Deeptech founders need many mentors that span different areas: strategic and tactical industrial knowledge, personal and motivational support, business leadership, sales and marketing, translation of discoveries into commercial products, financial and venture capital acumen. It would be unrealistic to simultaneously have four to six mentors spanning different topics at the same time; entrepreneurs are too busy to process. Mentors who fill a current or immediate need for founders should be the priority. Once this objective is accomplished, other mentors for different aspects of business, science, or corporate development can be identified. From early-stage to exit, it will be a multi-leveled relay race.
Take the time to identify relevant mentors. Let’s be honest, finding a good mentor is not easy. It may be hard to identify the best profiles, and it does take time. Good mentors do not advertise and are busy individuals. First, keep in mind that not everyone with experience would be a relevant mentor for your company, and the easy catches are often a mistake. Second, don’t hunt for mentors who have a wide spectrum of knowledge to help you on every single topic. It is impossible to be an expert at product management, branding, sales, operations at the same time. From our experience, mentors arise mostly from relationships and common interests. Make sure to identify professionals who are good listeners, as they must understand what they are asking and doing before they can give advice. Good mentors invest time to understand your company’s unique situation; they don’t tell you how to do things, but they challenge your convictions. They are part of a network of professionals who can become go-to people for specific expert topics. They are also curious, eager, and inspiring learners.
Engage regularly, drive the conversation, and build trust. As a deeptech founder, you need neutral and skilled people able to easily challenge your assumptions, provide alternate perspectives, share market data and bring attention to roadblocks before they become too big to solve. Don’t hesitate to focus on the hard things and your weaknesses during your mentoring sessions and be a straight talker. Sometimes, note that referring to professionals or industrialists as “mentors” can make them concerned about an unusual time commitment. You can easily switch and refer to them temporarily as “trusted advisors”, pointing out they are helping you solve specific issues or problems they have experience with. Engaging someone to be a mentor is built over time until there is trust and comfort in the relationship. It is a two-way open-minded process.
