Vivek Ravisankar’s Web

Who is your mentor? – I honestly didn’t think this question would trigger a blog post. I met this guy X, a couple of days back who is a wannabe entrepreneur (I hate this term, but that’s how he introduced himself). As we were chatting about his idea, he interrupted, asking who were the guys mentoring me and their qualification (NOTE: He was interested in their qualification more than their background).

He was shocked to know that none of them were either an MBA/PhD/Masters/any-other-extra-degree. And he proudly claimed that his mentor was a VP in a top MNC with an MBA from ISB, Hyderabad (with no previous startup experience).

I have been mentored by a group of serial entrepreneurs for almost a year and this led me to tell something about what I feel mentoring to a startup should be about.

• Aligning yourself in startup framework

  To me, the biggest value add a mentor should bring to the table is to help place the founders in a startup framework. A startup life is tough, very tough,especially in the early stages. Your business model can even take a 180 degree turn, to understand this and provide clean advice is the biggest value add!

  Only if your mentor has started a couple of startups, will he/she be able to place you in this kind of a framework since the journey is emotionally tough.

  I personally think it would be very tough for the VP to associate with any of the above. He might have never been in a position where there were resource constraints (or) his product being rejected by other companies, after all his MNC is such a big name. And even if that’s the case, he would have pulled up a team of engineers to build one more. Where’s the money in a startup?!

• A mentor isn’t going to run your business

  He was overjoyed to tell me how his “mentor” frames the B-Plans, the financial charts and even talks to people and converts them to customers.

  Firstly, I am not a great believer of writing B-Plans without having a product with a few paying customers – only if you have paying customers, does a B-Plan actually make sense. That aside,a mentor shouldn’t really run your business, he should definitely not be your boss but more like a co-founder to juggle ideas, brainstorm and take inputs.

  The basic tenet of an entrepreneur is expecting freedom and if that’s curbed, the startup gets a hit.

• The VP has a huge network

  Having a big connected network is definitely a huge add-on, but that’s not the only reason why you choose someone as your mentor. It’s good if your mentor is connected with a lot of people – helps in getting introductions, etc. But choosing someone because he has a wide network with top VP’s and isn’t a sufficient condition.

  Introductions/networking isn’t costly – most of them would be glad to introduce you to people whom they know closely provided you have a good enough reason, latch onto a couple of big guys, they would definitely do the intros (talking out of experience).

I tried telling him this, but beyond a point I stop talking to people who don’t understand the bigger picture and thankfully because of that I was able to write a blog post.

Bottomline being if he/she hasn’t founded a couple of startups (doesn’t matter even if it’s a failure as long as they hung on to it), I would not bother bringing him/her on the mentoring panel however impressive his qualifications are.

Image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisandrin/3056695077/