So it seems that every tech entrepreneur has a mentor, is looking for a mentor, is a mentor, or all the above. It’s freshman year dating season all over again.
I might be crazy, but I’m not doing any of those things. I have good friends, trusted colleagues, confidants, but there is no sage person in the background offering up advice when the tough choices come rolling in.
Frankly, I wouldn’t know where to start looking for a mentor if I wanted to, and I wouldn’t know who to mentor (or what to mentor on) if asked.
But maybe it’s not really necessary. The business of DOM & TOM is pretty straightforward – you offer hours of services in exchange for money. In many respects, it is the same business as an accounting firm, or a law firm, or any other service-based business. It’s not exactly kungfu…
There’s desire to be mentored and to mentor others in the tech culture. I don’t know where else to attribute it to other than Silicon Valley, which sets the standard for all other tech cultures in the US. Part of that mystique is the mentor-student relationship that seemed to promulgate heavily in the late 90s and early 2000s.
In any case, I’ll reserve judgement on the topic of mentorship for another day. It’s been 5 years toil on this business, and I haven’t had the support of that sage person in the back room for guidance, but that doesn’t mean he/she isn’t worthwhile.
For me, a big part of the desire for mentorship is that people, especially running tech startups, tend to have very large gaps in their knowledge base. You and Dom compliment each other very nicely, but not all startup founders have one guy who knows the tech and one guy with a finance background. Just as often it’s only sales people or only tech people, who struggle to plug those holes. And it’s a drastic case of “not knowing enough to know who is worth hiring” which is why a mentor can be so valuable.
The second thing is that almost all startups face similar challenges at some point, and rather than learning by (sometimes) painful experience, sometimes it’s nice just to have someone point out the traps before you hit them. It’s like (classical reference incoming!) Prometheus saying “I don’t get what the big deal is about *not* being chained to a big rock and having a giant eagle attacking you every day.” If that’s all you know, then you don’t see the big deal.