
Launch HN: PlatoHQ (YC W16) – Mentorship for Engineers - qhoang09
Hi HN!<p>We are the cofounders of PlatoHQ (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.platohq.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.platohq.com</a>) and we come from an Engineering Background.<p>After having graduated from college, with two of my engineers friends, we decided to build our own company (the name of our company was Birdly). We made a lot of mistakes along the way; and one of the biggest was to hire too soon a bunch of engineers. We were all three technical cofounders so we could have built the MVP ourselves. But instead of that, we decided that two cofounders over three would do the “Product management” and “Marketing&quot;, and that we should hire 3 engineers (including 2 interns) to code the product for us. That was before YC. YC could have prevented us from making that mistake. And this had been our worst mistake.<p>We transitioned from “Individual Contributor” to “Engineering Managers”. We happened to spend more time doing “management” than building the product and optimizing for product-market fit. We were doing the rookie mistakes most first-time engineering managers do.<p>Among some rookie mistakes: 
- We hired our engineers focusing only on their technical capabilities 
- We didn’t make one-on-ones, but rather two-on-ones, and we focused on performance and operational 
- We micromanaged them, and even time-boxed them sometimes 
- And many more mistakes…<p>But at the time, those mistakes were unknown unknowns. In other words, we didn’t even know we were doing the bad things.<p>We don’t all need to do all those mistakes, or at least, when we do, we should know it, figure it out and fix it.<p>That’s why we’re building Plato, a platform to find your perfect mentor to help you become a better Engineering Leader.<p>Mentors of the community come from top tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Trello, Netflix, Spotify, Digital Ocean, Segment, Uber… They want to help you avoid the common pitfalls they learned the hard way.
Among our mentors, we have the 
- First Engineer at Box (Going from 10 to 1200 employees), 
- the VP Engineering at Lyft (and founder of Google Street View), 
- Cofounder of Pagerduty, 
- VP Engineering at Segment, 
- Director of Engineering at Box, 
- CTO&#x2F;Cofounder of Jive Software…
- And more...
It&#x27;s real, you can really talk to them and receive advice.<p>Mentors are not paid that is why we can provide an affordable price of $199 per month for an access to all the mentors and an unlimited number of calls with them.  Mentors do this for other incentives, happy to discuss more if you&#x27;re interested.<p>Also, I know many of you already have learned the hard way many lessons like us. I’m sure many of you would be amazing mentors. Feel free to let us know if you want to become a mentor. Feel free to reach out if you&#x27;d like to become a mentor.<p>Looking forward to having your feedback on our new product, 
Thanks, HN community!
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daxorid
_Mentors do this for other incentives_

Can you please elaborate on this? It seems like your list of mentors is rather
vast, and I'm curious what you've offered them.

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rficcaglia
Perhaps it is simply access to a curated pipeline of motivated and
introspective potential candidates.

Hiring (good people) is a dev manager's/director's biggest pain.

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HenriNext
Though, if the mentors poach mentees, then the company of the mentee won't be
happy paying for the service.

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tabeth
I'm curious to how this is priced. For less than $200 you could buy a coffee
for yourself and someone else and meet with them in person _every day_.

I do see how a small start-up could benefit from this, though. However, unlike
most things this probably would become worse as more people use it as there's
a fixed amount of good mentors and a fixed amount of time with them. Unlimited
time with them means waiting, which would eventually make the product itself
unusable.

I don't see a solution to this problem. Education has the same problem, yet to
be solved.

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arikr
> I'm curious to how this is priced. For less than $200 you could buy a coffee
> for yourself and someone else and meet with them in person every day.

Seems worth it as a perk for a company to offer to their employees - would be
much more work for them to have to reach out and find mentors for their
employees manually.

For an individual, probably doesn't make sense.

For a company as an employee perk, seems to make a lot of sense.

~~~
qhoang09
Agreed! We have a bunch of CTOs/cofounders and small startups, but we have
also Lyft, TuneIn, Betterment, Scality, Telmate as customers.

Some individual paying from their own pocket to invest in their career, but
it's more rare ;)

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tln
I used Plato at a previous gig (now I'm back to a small startup). My
(previous) company was happy to invest in training for managers. Given the
unique challenges of managing sw engineers, getting such specific mentorship
was very valuable.

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qhoang09
I think I know who you are, T. :)

Any feedback about the product? Did you have some actionable and good advice
from the mentors?

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HenriNext
The idea seems extremely useful for the mentees.

However, i'm curious how you convinced YC, as this seems to be against what YC
normally wants:

\- Your market seems very small: only software engineers, and only at specific
career stage.

\- Your mentor side doesn't seem scaleble: top mentors won't be willing to
handle unlimited number of calls as the number of mentees grows, the number
potential high caliber mentors is very limited, and if you get lower caliber
mentors then the service won't be that valuable.

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sandGorgon
quick nitpick - on
[https://www.platohq.com/our_mentors.html](https://www.platohq.com/our_mentors.html)
, you should make company name searchable. for example, ctrl-f and searching
for "facebook" doesnt work, because you have used icons everywhere.

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jkarneges
> CTO/Cofounder of Jive Software

Matt's a great guy, and it's fitting that he'd be involved with Plato given
that his next startup is a tool for managers
([https://koan.co/](https://koan.co/)).

~~~
qhoang09
Indeed, Matt is great. He's one of our most appreciated mentor ;)

Everyone has their own incentives. Even though it can be linked to Koan, I
guess that it's alwasy a combination of many factors. His words :"i've been
lucky enough to have an exec coach for the past couple years and he's great. I
aspire to be better at it over time"

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Danilka
Good idea. Signed up for a call.

