As I travel around the world helping communities to start accelerators, I’m often asked in various ways about the challenges of finding mentors who are willing to volunteer to help novice startup teams – and thereby contribute to the greater success of the accelerator. After all, by definition, a truly good entrepreneur uses his time carefully, and has no shortage of valuable ways to spend his time, right? Why would people whose time is so valuable give it away freely?
Yet, every good accelerator I’ve seen has ultimately got more expressions of interest from more good mentors than it can use.
In my discussions with mentors, I’ve discovered the following reasons why mentors are eager to get involved:
1. Giving Back: Other than Gordon Gecko, everybody likes to give a little back every now and then.
2. “Keep the saw sharp”: The good accelerators can be quite selective with the teams they admit. This means that the entrepreneurs are unusually talented and/or the business ideas have unusually high potential, and these two factors, individually or often jointly, often make for a fascinating mentoring experience. Mentors learn more from mentoring these talented teams than the mentees recognize.
3. Deal Flow: Mentors are often potential angel investors. They may not have formerly been actively investing, but generally they have the means to make occasional angel investments and they’re generally interested in doing so. They just may not know how, or put the time into, attracting interesting deal flow. Mentoring provides an opportunity to discover great investment opportunities.
4. Job Flow: Many mentors don’t need to work, but they’re bored not working. If they’re between gigs, there’s a good chance that by mentoring, they’ll find interesting work opportunities. This happens far more often than one might think.
5. Street Cred: Telling people you’re a startup mentor has cache in the startup community, especially if the audience understands the learning that effective mentoring requires.
6. Networking: Imagine debating strategy with other seasoned entrepreneurs. There are many ways to skin a cat, and debating alternate strategies with other experts is a good way to learn from them and build relationships with them. Since I’ve been mentoring, the growth in the breadth and quality of my professional network has been immense, and this has been echoed by many many other mentors.
7. Increase the quality of your life: I believe that if you’re a successful entrepreneur, there’s a high chance that entrepreneurialiusm is a major passion in your life. If that’s so, what could be better than being part of community that creates more and higher quality opportunities to spend time strategizing about exciting business opportunities with both talented aspiring entrepreneurs and accomplished end expert entrepreneurs?
