
Ask HN: Founders, have you ever mentored someone or been mentored? - AKhoo
I&#x27;ve read that having a mentor can really help when you&#x27;re a startup founder.<p>But how do you set up an effective relationship?<p>Do you have regular meetings? How often?<p>Is it helpful to have a standard agenda? What gets covered?<p>Would love to hear your experience.
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muzani
Much like you'd have a relationship with anyone else. Like dating or jobs, you
can hardly be passive about it. You have to go and search for one.

My first experience with mentoring was when I ranted about a bunch of stats on
an online game. I impressed someone who asked me to be his mentor. He helped
me gather more data, I helped to process them and taught him how statistics
worked. It was incredibly fruitful both ways, probably my benchmark of what
mentoring should be like.

There's another more regimented way, which I used with my thesis supervisor in
university and a mentor at an incubator. Set up a meeting time, same time each
week. Show what progress you've made. They'll comment on it. The mentor gave
me some good insights, such how I shouldn't have designed it as Tinder, or how
I should spend a week planning out my UI and testing it with people. I told
him that in a week, I could build a full app and launch it to real people to
test, and that's story of how I made a startup in 2 weeks and got a thousand
downloads overnight.

Sometimes all the talk is just rubber duck debugging. I'm not even sure you
need a proper mentor sometimes. Something like a devlog and fan base could
work as well.

Mentors are best at spotting things you've never heard about though. There
were many times when I considered a career path and a mentor just points out
the starting point or tells me how others on that path fared.

