Top 5 Learnings After Mentoring 100 Startups

As a 16-year-old high school kid, I started my startup journey reading Paul Graham’s essays on how a few smart developers could produce value worth millions per year through shared creativity and speed. That captivated me. 

At that age, some would fall in love with pop artists, but for me, those engineers were the real rock stars.

When I was 22, I started a company that led my co-founder and me to be hired by another startup, VectorWatch. A few years later, Fitbit acquired it, and we built the biggest European Development Office. We worked on global projects that impacted the lives of millions of users. After another few years, Google acquired Fitbit, and so we created the biggest Wearable Development Center in Central Eastern Europe for Google.

It was quite the journey, with ups and downs, that taught me valuable lessons. I joined a startup accelerator program on its first edition in 2012 and remained close to it as a mentor for the following editions. I wanted to pay things forward with the lessons I got from my journey to save other young founders time and energy and avoid mistakes I experienced myself.

In the past 10 years, I have mentored over 100 early-stage startups. Some were at the idea stage, while others were scale-ups with 1000s of users.

These are the top 5 things I’ve learned through my experience as a mentor, starting startups, and going through 2 acquisitions.

1. The best teams are diverse

Innovation emerges from a diversity of perspectives. I struggled for quite some time to articulate how innovation happens. After observing startups and teams that came up with something novel, it looked like diversity is the common foundational ingredient.

It’s the perfect case where 1+1 does not equal 2. It can equal way more.

Different backgrounds, different views, different experiences. The best teams are diverse. These are the ingredients that spark innovation.

A diverse team is not the only factor. You still need other things, but diversity is the building block.

In college, I failed to build real businesses because I didn’t know how to sell and didn’t bother to team up with people who did. I was getting very excited with my fellow colleagues about building platforms and apps, but once we built them, we lost interest and moved on to the next shiny project.

Looking back, I lacked the skill of understanding how to build something users want and then be able to sell it. I could have educated myself on that part, or I could have teamed up with somebody good in this area.

The outcome would have been different if we had gotten some business-savvy colleagues on our team. How do I know this? We did this in our later startup. We had some incredible folks selling like crazy, and the project was successful because of them.

If your team is made only of technical founders, believe me, you will have a hard time building a business. Aim to build a diverse team with diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and skills. You will significantly increase your chances of success.

2. Mentors buy time and experience

Mentors save you time. You could be great at marketing and sales in about 10 years, but would you rather fast-track all that experience today? By getting a great marketing mentor who can teach you the tricks of the trade that are not found in books, you will save yourself time and pain by learning things faster.

The problem with mentors is that the great ones are hard to find, and when you find them, they are hard to convince.

A mentor can save you time, but the top ones are not cheap.

This is the time you need to sell yourself. The best approach is to think from their perspective. What’s in it for them?

It could be a percentage of the business, the ability to learn more about your niche, or they want to pay it forward to the community. You need to figure out their reason and driver because that is how you will convince them.

In my case, I mentor startups as a pay-it-forward mantra during startup programs. This usually involves a few hours during the program with each startup and responding to emails and LinkedIn messages throughout their journey.

It depends if somebody is looking for a more time-committed mentorship. I could be convinced by the team, the space or both.

One important thing I have seen is that you need to have some chemistry with your mentor. Getting somebody that you don’t like or you don’t respect will not work out.

Buy time and experience. Yes, you can become a great marketing specialist in 10 years, but why not be great today? Get mentors to fast-track your future experience.

Startups are a game of competitive advantages. Having a great mentor who can teach you things and open doors for you is one of them.

3. Choosing the right co-founders

Many teams break up because people don’t discuss their real interests up front. They shy away from the hard conversations. Deep down, they know they should have them, but they postpone.

What I have learned myself and seen at other startups is that the issues this triggers down the road are more significant than facing the difficult conversations up front.

People want to start startups for different reasons. Some want fame, and others want money. Some just want to work on cool impactful projects with smart people, while others hate authority and want to do their own thing.

It is good to understand the real reasons and motives of every co-founder. This will help you determine whether they will stick around when the going gets tough or when a new shiny opportunity appears.

It’s important to have a diverse team that complements your skills. See my first point on diversity. If all of the founding team is technical, you will have a huge blind spot toward business.

You will do what you know, like building products and making great tech. But the risk here is that you might end up with a great system nobody wants because it does not solve a real problem.

You will shy away from having difficult conversations with users who will tell you your idea or product is no good, but those are exactly the conversations you will need to have early to be successful. I’ve been there, not a fun place to be.

The reverse is also valid. If everyone in your team only knows how to sell, you will end up selling customers an idea that can’t be delivered.

4. Getting lost in a sea of advice

Mentors are great, but you need to be careful about a couple of things. Sometimes, they can give conflicting advice. The best way to see this is in a startup accelerator program where you do speed mentoring. It’s like speed dating, but you have 20 minutes of a mentor’s time.

Ask the same question, and I guarantee you will not get 2 similar answers.

Be aware of advice paralysis. It can overwhelm you and keep you stuck.

The biggest cause of startup death is getting stuck. You are the one who has to take in all the advice and decide which direction to take. In the early days, the probability of your startup getting killed by not moving is bigger than exploring each path fast and then changing directions.

Don’t follow advice from mentors in areas that they are not experts in. Mentors, like all of us, have biases. They may be experts in one field but not experienced in others. They will sound confident when they say things because they get it from their main field. You have to think if that is their true area of expertise and if you should follow their advice.

The best mentors know and give disclaimers when they are outside their area. They ensure that their limitations and biases do not pollute the advice they give.

5. Speed is essential

You might not have a great idea to start with. You may not even have the perfect team and you are looking to build it along the way. But the thing that you absolutely need to have is speed.

You have a great idea, but it is most likely wrong. It will need to evolve in the next month and then again in the next month. You must progress until you reach the edge of a specific field.

Paul Graham has a good short essay on how to get new ideas.

Reaching the frontier of a field, you will stumble upon something that hasn’t been solved yet, which will make all the difference. Society will reward you for offering something it wants but hasn’t been able to obtain so far.

The way to that point is through trial and error, iterating, and uncovering different truths. Nassim Taleb explains this concept of trying things with unlimited upside but limited downside.