by Brad Feld
This is one of the most difficult things for a first-time entrepreneur to learn to do well. After the founders, the first few employees set the tone for the company. If they are awesome, you will be off to a good start. But if one of them isn’t, it’ll drag everyone down.
This is another case in which great mentors can be extremely helpful. At Techstars, we encourage all of the entrepreneurs to use their mentors to help them with both recruiting and screening new employees. In many cases, the mentors have a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the founders and can help evaluate new hires more effectively. Furthermore, the mentors usually have a lot more experience hiring people, so their evaluation skills and processes are more refined.
Getting the best possible people on your team makes a huge difference in the success of a company. Don’t forget to use all of the resources available to you—especially your experienced mentors—to help you accomplish this.
Chapter 24
How to Find and Engage Mentors
David Cohen
David is a cofounder and the co-CEO of Techstars.
Most first-time entrepreneurs I know seek out mentors for their companies only when they decide they want funding. They do it then because they have to, as part of the process of attempting to raise money. To further the process, they begin to listen to and react to the thoughts of investors as a way of gaining favor. This is the wrong way to think about mentorship and is unlikely to lead to mentorship.
Great mentors need to be woven into the fabric of any startup from the beginning. To be most effective, mentors need to understand more than the numbers, the technology, and the markets you’ll serve. Effective mentors know how you react to adversity, they know how you’ve structured your business, and why. They know what your strengths and weaknesses are and can help you overcome obstacles based on those strengths and weaknesses. By the time you get to the point that you need money, you will have gone through adversity, you will have persevered, you will have refined your technology, and the mentors who have been with you from the beginning will be part of your growth. In many cases, they will be able to help you more than the investors who show up at the funding stage.
How do you find a mentor to be with you during the very early stages of your startup, when things are messy and unclear? Who will spend the time and effort to mentor you? Well, most people already have one or two mentors in their lives. Many people don’t even know who their mentors are or have been until they reflect upon this for a moment. Often, I think that’s a good sign and indicates that you already have a positive mentoring relationship with someone, even though you haven’t thought about them as a mentor. For a lot of people, the mentors in their lives are one of their parents, their best friend, a past boss, or perhaps a college professor. If you stop for a moment and ponder the impact that these people have had on your life so far, you’ll probably realize that a lot of them have been mentors to you in one way or another
A lot of the mentors you have had will not be helpful to you as a startup entrepreneur. It should be obvious that you need to find mentors who will have that same kind of impact on your business as the other mentors have had on your life.
How Do You Find Potentially Great Mentors?
First, you have to make it a priority. Finding a mentor is not a part-time activity or something that you can be casual about. It has to be something that you desperately want and that you pursue strategically. A first step is to think about your own network. Who has vastly more life or startup experience than you do? Start there before you decide to look elsewhere because people in your own network are easy to approach and, since they know you, they’ll think of good people for you to connect with if they are unable to help you.
If you have maxed out your own network, the next step is to expand that network. Start learning about local companies you respect and consider seeking out their founders or key executives. Approach them by explaining that you admire the business they started and would love to hear the story of how it was built in hopes of making your own startup successful. Do some research first! You should know the basics of their story and prepare some questions in advance. Often founders of successful companies are actively engaged in the startup community anyway, and they love thinking about other startups and meeting energetic founders who remind them of a younger version of themselves. Don’t pick a mentor just because of how they look on paper. Read their blog if they have one and study the things they’ve done in their lives and in their careers. A great mentor for you is not necessarily a great mentor for everyone. Some legwork on your part will help identify the mentors who can be helpful to you.
What Makes a Great Mentor?
Ultimately, great mentors see something in you and want to help you reach your potential. They don’t always do this with direct advice. Often, they do it with introductions, resources, or through the process of thinking out loud with you. Your best mentors will become friends and permanent fixtures in your life.
Approaching Potential Mentors
People make the natural but routinely incorrect assumption that great mentors would simply be too busy to help them. Ask anyone who has sought meetings with successful entrepreneurs in Colorado—I think you’ll find that when you approach people in our community (or any community, for that matter) you’ll find an amazing number of open doors. Most people just never knock on the doors of potential mentors out of fear of rejection. This is silly. Imagine how good it must feel to be asked for advice from a smart, dedicated, and motivated founder like you. Keep in mind that you have something to give back, too.
Engaging Potential Mentors
A final tactic to getting the most from relationships with mentors is to engage them. By definition, they’re not a mentor until they’re actively engaged with you.
This sounds simple, but almost everyone screws it up. Engagement is not accomplished by sending an occasional email updating the person on what you’re doing or the major news every once in a while. It’s not built by offering to take someone to lunch. It’s built over a long period of time with small, regular, interesting, and thought-provoking communication. In my opinion, the best way to do this early on is by email, as it maximally respects the time of the mentor you are engaging.
A Great Example
I want to give you a great example of how someone engaged me. Their names are David and Heather Duey and they understand how to engage with someone whom they didn’t know—at first. David and Heather emailed me dozens of times asking questions about their startup, Georneys. I’m connected to them in only two ways, and neither of those ways involved actual contact. First, they’re from Tallahassee, Florida, and I grew up in Florida and am a big Seminoles fan (yes, let the mockery begin). Heather and David knew I was from Florida from reading my personal blog. Second, they’re doing a startup, and they reached out to me because they knew that I love startups. That’s it—I had never even met them until after a remote mentoring relationship had developed.
David and Heather first contacted me after applying for Techstars. When they didn’t get into the accelerator, they continued the dialog with me. They frequently emailed me with well-thought-out questions that only required me to spend just a few minutes to get them some feedback on their business. Over time, they began to email me more complex or deep questions about their business. Then they came to the Defrag Conference and decided to move to Boulder. I know them personally now and I like speaking to them about their business. They probably don’t know it, but there’s two-way learning going on. For example, I’m a regular reader of both of their blogs and through them I’ve come to better understand some of the trials and tribulations of cofounding a company with a spouse (not that I plan to try that!).
Building the Relationship
Once you have established a relationship, regular engagement becomes the key to making it work the best that it can. While it’s important to keep the early relationship low-impact and largely nonintrusive for the person yo
u are getting guidance from, you can certainly step it up over time. The ideal scenario is to involve them directly in the strategy associated with the development of your business, your product, or you as a person. For example, you can engage a mentor by soliciting direct feedback on an early prototype of your product. Even if you get a trickle of feedback from them, you have the key ingredients of engagement. Think about their points, make at least one change or improvement that you agree with (there must be one!), and reply with an email succinctly detailing what you’ve done about each point.1 It’s okay (probably even good) to disagree with some of the points when appropriate—just efficiently explain why. In your response email, it’s important to ask them to give you more feedback now that you have made those changes.
Keep the loop going in this way and you’ll develop a positive conversation with the mentor, improve your product, and build a stronger relationship with them. My long-distance conversations with David and Heather have grown and changed over time and I now associate them with the qualities of strong follow-up, willingness to be coached, logic, critical thinking, and, most of all, forward motion. What I’m describing as a sought-out mentor is a process that you can replicate with potential mentors who are unknown to you. It allows you to build a remote mentoring relationship that is low impact for the mentor, but that ultimately leads you (if you’re good) to a point where asking for a meeting will likely result in success. From there, you can really get to know the person and continue this positive feedback loop.
Mentorship Evolved
Brad Feld (who is certainly one of my mentors) wrote a terrific blog post about mentorship some time ago that has a special spot in the quick-access RAM of my brain. He said:
. . . one thing stands out: the rare, but brilliant, moment when the relationship shifts, the distinction between mentor and mentee dissolves, and you become “co-mentors.” Even if you aren’t “peers,” the learning becomes bidirectional. Everyone in a mentoring relationship should strive for this equilibrium, because it is here where the greatest learning occurs.
I have some mentors that I’ve reached this stage with. David Brown was my cofounder at my first company and was always someone I constantly learned from. Our relationship has reached equilibrium, and I hope that he learns as much from my knowledge and experience as I do from his. For a number of years David and I worked in different worlds and bounced important ideas and situations off each other on a fairly regular basis. But now that David is at Techstars we are able to learn from each other on a daily basis, especially since we share an office.
The Fruits of Meaningful Engagement with Great Mentors
At Techstars, when I look back at the companies that are seeing early success, I see high levels of mentor engagement. The founders didn’t just wait until meetings with the mentors somehow showed up and were dropped in their laps. They acted early. They engaged many of the mentors they respected in ongoing, meaningful, and independent conversations. They took advice for what it’s meant to be—something to think about, to ponder, and to challenge them. The most successful startup founders reacted to the advice not just in the pursuit of pleasing a mentor, but in the pursuit of building value while being intellectually honest with themselves. They communicated regularly and effectively with their chosen mentors, involving them in the hard thinking that was necessary to build their companies. They regularly solicited feedback as they built their product, incorporated some of that feedback, and continued the positive feedback loop with their mentors. They gave their mentors positive experiences with their passion, ability, product, and company on a regular basis. The result was predictable. Those mentors were among the first to stick their hands up to participate in funding the company and continuing to stay active with it.
Great founders intuitively understand the importance and role of mentors. They seek them out for the right reasons and engage them on an ongoing basis. I think the presence of great mentors who are actively engaged (not just listing their names on the advisory board) around an early-stage company is a strong indicator of future success, and that has most definitely been our experience at Techstars.
The founders of Techstars are mentors to each other.
Note
1See my chapter (40) “Don’t Suck at Email” for tips on how to craft the most effective email.
Chapter 25
Hire Slowly, Fire Quickly
Matt Blumberg
Matt is the founder and CEO of Return Path, a company that provides email deliverability services. Matt has been a Techstars mentor since 2009.
In software and service companies, people are everything. It’s not just that they come first. They come first, second, and third. The earlier stage the company, the more critical each incremental new person is. Think about it—if you have 10 people in your company and you are hiring a new person, you are adding 9% to your workforce in one shot! You’re also hiring someone who will very likely have an impact on how the DNA of your organization develops, since it’s still embryonic in the first few years, even if it is dominated by strong-willed founders.
When a startup decides it needs to hire a new person, it wants to hire them right away. When it has hired the person, the startup is loath to let them go if they aren’t working out because they think they need them so badly. The desperate need for people in an early-stage startup creates two related temptations to avoid as you build out your team.
Temptation 1: Hiring too quickly. Just having a warm body in an open role that you need filled immediately doesn’t get the job done. When you are hiring such a large percentage of your workforce, you have to have a super-high success rate. At Return Path, we have sometimes left critical jobs open for months as we cycle through candidates looking for “the one.” As painful as it has been for us to limp along with the position open, taking our time and hiring the absolutely right person has always been the right decision.
It is said that with knowledge workers, the best employee is 10 times more productive and impactful than the average employee. Why settle for anything less than the absolute best?
Temptation 2: Firing too slowly. Everyone’s heard the analogy about a bad employee being like a cancer in an organization—his poor performance or attitude spreads and he needs to be cut out to preserve the rest of the organization. To build on this metaphor, I’ve always said that hiring a new person, especially early in your growth, is like doing an organ transplant. Even if you think there’s a good match, you need to see if the body accepts or rejects the transplant, and you find out pretty quickly whether that person will work out or not.
At Return Path, we always do a comprehensive 90-day performance and 360-degree review of every new or promoted employee. We aren’t afraid to part ways with someone who isn’t working out after 90 days. While it can feel harder to remove a new employee who isn’t working out, it’s almost always better to make a clean break and try again, as the effort to “fix the person” is likely greater than the time and effort to hire a better person, especially when time is your most precious resource.
This advice holds no matter what level the new hires are, although the more senior the hire, the more emphatic I am about the point. Build the best possible team for your startup—even if it costs you more time than you want.
Brad still remembers the first person he fired and recalls that it took him much too long to do it. His first company, Feld Technologies, had grown to a dozen people. A few people had left the company voluntarily, but no one had ever been fired. Feld Technologies was a tight, cohesive team—except for one person.
From the very beginning, this person didn’t fit in to the company. Everyone else cared about the quality of the work; she didn’t. People stayed late to get things finished. She didn’t. People respected each other and their clients; she made fun of everyone behind their backs. People ate lunch together and generally liked to hang out. She went out to lunch with friends of hers from other companies and never socialized. When someone needed help, others jumpe
d in. She stayed to herself. Most important, everyone else seemed to love what they did even when it was really challenging; she just viewed it as a job and did the minimum she needed to do to get by.
For months, Brad and his partner agonized over this. They tried to help the person, they made excuses for her performance, and rationalized the situation as “just the way it was.” Deep down inside, they knew she wasn’t working out, but they were afraid to act. During this time, Brad went on a weekend-long retreat called Birthing of Giants with about 60 other entrepreneurs under the age of 40. As he talked to his new peers—many of whom were much more experienced than he was (Brad was one of the youngest, at 23 years old)—a common refrain came up: “Fire her Monday.” The feedback was unambiguous.
When Brad returned from the retreat he talked to his partner and they decided to fire her the first thing the following Monday. Brad remembers tossing and turning all weekend, terrified of the encounter. He woke up very early and was in the office by 7 a.m. ready to go. By 10 a.m., she still hadn’t shown up. Around lunchtime, Brad got a phone message that she wasn’t coming in until Tuesday because she wasn’t yet back from a trip she had taken with friends over the weekend.
On Tuesday, after another restless night, Brad arrived at the office again around 7 a.m. This time she eventually showed up around 9:30. Brad went into her office and started with the punchline: he told her things weren’t working out, and that he had decided to ask her to leave the company. She didn’t look surprised, took a minute to pack up her stuff, said good-bye, and walked out the door. She’d clearly been fired before.