Selecting Startup Mentors: A Guide for Startup Community Organizations
Recently I was asked what I thought should go into the vetting process to identify strong startup mentors. While there are plenty of articles out there for entrepreneurs on how to find good mentors, it turns out there aren’t many on how accelerators and other startup community organizations can better qualify the mentors they officially endorse to local startups.
After I sent my response, my co-founder suggested I share this and so here are my thoughts on what your startup organization needs to consider when selecting mentors.
Please keep in mind, when I say “tech entrepreneur” and “tech startup”, I think of companies like Starbucks, Amazon, and Blinds.com just as much as I think of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft…
1. Less is More (Except with Diversity).
Many times, when I visit an accelerator’s mentor website page — there are so many mentor names that it’s overwhelming. It also makes me wonder : if there are *so* many experts in the community then why is there little/no global “buzz” about our local startup community? Oddly enough — despite the long list of names on a mentor page — most of the time, there’s little to no other information about this person other than their name, title, and company.
As a woman entrepreneur focused on diversity in the workplace, I want to see photos of mentors so I can identify who’s succeeded against the odds that come with being a minority race and/or gender. I need advice on how to be a woman in this industry and succeed; and I need to find people who can connect me to minority rockstars who want to help me grow and who can advise me on how to create a culture that invites and supports diversity.
My startup is building an enterprise, cloud-based platform, so I need to know which mentors can advise a startup on designing an API and who among your mentors has built an enterprise platform. Yet, most mentor descriptions list very little about what expertise these mentors are best at offering and which ones have experienced a diverse array of challenges along their entrepreneurial journey.
Suggestions:
- Limit the number of mentors you accept and create a waiting list for mentors if you exceed that number;
- Require mentors submit information that includes a headshot, their top startup skills and links to mentors’ social media profiles like LinkedIn, Angelist, and Github; and
- Show how you hand-select mentors by having a list of diverse mentors with the depth of experience and skills needed to accelerate the startups who come partner with your organization.
2. Accelerating Global Domination and Scale is What Defines a Startup —
It’s great if a community organization wants to provide mentors for small business entrepreneurs — small businesses are crucial to our ecosystem. If your organization aspires to support small businesses, all the power to you and I truly want you to succeed.
However, if your goal is to support local tech startups as a resource — like TechStars, Capitol Factory, and Y Combinator — then you need mentors who understand what it takes in a team to accomplish that. There is a *huge* difference between what goes into growing a small business vs growing a business from 1 person to 5,000 and then taking that business public in under 10 years.
What proof do your mentors have that they know how to execute inside the kind of high-pressure environment of a tech startup? What startups have they worked with? I strongly recommend you get a founder/co-founder’s referral saying “Yes — this person was instrumental to the success of our startup in the area of expertise they’re claiming to have.”
Suggestions:
- Have a mentor application form that pre-screens/qualifies mentors by asking for their experience with startups and asks questions such as “Why do you believe you are a good mentor for a startup that’s seeking accelerated growth?” and “What experience do you have taking products, brands, companies global?”
- Follow-up with their references. It doesn’t do a community any good if the entrepreneurs trust your mentors and you didn’t do basic background checks to fact-check their claims. Do this even if you feel that you know the person well. It should be part of your protocol.
3. True Mentors are Continuous Learners -
Most programs in startup communities focus on educating the founders and startup teams but mentors need to keep their skills updated too.
Startup Weekend is a very good teaching program on what it takes for today’s entrepreneurs to navigate the early days of a pre-revenue startup. It also teaches a number of skills that go much deeper than just how to pitch an idea and how to build an MVP.
Google “Startup Weekend changed my life” and then go get involved in your local Startup Weekend. Require your mentors get involved as part of their mentorship agreement.
Suggestions:
- Host (and help organize) a Startup Weekend at your space;
- Make Startup Weekend participation a requirement for mentor status: mentor-applicants need to signup as a regular participant and join a team at a Startup Weekend; and
- Expect mentor-applicants to *pay* for their $99 ticket price for a Startup Weekend. If this is outside their budget then I highly question that they have the time or level of commitment available to be a mentor.
This experience will give mentors a unique, hands-on experience that many mentors are missing as well as give you, as the organization, the opportunity to see the mentor in action. This will dramatically improve the quality of mentors you bring in as you’ll see who understands execution and has the soft skills great mentors need.
4. Real World Experience Before Theory and Classroom Knowledge -
Have your mentors founded/co-founded a company with the intent of becoming the next Google, SpaceX, global startup? Regardless of success or failure, someone who spent 3–5+ years building a company with the goal of becoming that next big giant has 1000 times more knowledge and understanding than someone who has a service or consultancy or led a few employees at a marketing agency. Mentors need to be able to empathize and that means they need some first hand sense of what it’s like to launch and scale a startup. There’s a big difference between a mentor who’s walked the walk and a vendor or service provider who’s ultimately looking for customers.
Suggestions:
- Create a separate page for vendors and service providers — people whose customers are entrepreneurs and startups, and screen mentor applications to weed out those who are better suited to the vendor/service provider page; and
- Reach out to professionals who have failed with their startups, especially those that returned to the corporate space after their failure, and see if they would commit to a few hours.
Seriously — take a good hard look at that list of mentors and ask yourself: “How many of these mentors are currently at a company whose primary customer is a startup and/or entrepreneur?” — it is harmful to call these people mentors when they are really there with their own motives. A mentor’s motive should be a desire to use their knowledge and experience to help that startup succeed, not to ultimately create a business relationship with that startup.
And my final suggestion is that you take time to craft an ethics statement that all mentors must sign and agree to abide by.
The truest sign of a genuine leader is that a leader is consistent with her values regardless of the social pressure of the crowd — our mentors need to embody this in order to pass it to our future business leaders.
