I have a confession to make. Until a couple of years ago, I'd never had a real mentor. I'd had co-workers who took me under their wing. They modeled the kind of leader I wanted to become and often had remarkable insight to share with me about how they approached their jobs. I had advisors, who sat on specific committees and gave advice on specific programs I was running. I even had a board that I reported to on a quarterly basis and that could fire me at will. But I'd never had an actual mentor.
Mentoring relationships are slightly, but meaningfully, different from co-workers, board members and even most advisors. Mentors are there specifically for you – to help you think through challenges from both a professional and sometimes a personal angle. They aren’t beholden to act in the best interest of your employer or a program you run. They’re there to help you grow. That means a good mentor will respond to what you want to talk about and ask the questions you most need to hear. It also means that you aren’t stuck with a mentor that isn’t helpful for you.
After years of not having a mentor (and feeling like an imposter every time I told a startup founder they needed to find a mentor), I’ve been fortunate to form a few relationships with mentors. I recently began reflecting on this, because mentors are a core part of the Synthe6 Materials Accelerator, providing a second sounding board to complement the Synthe6 program staff. This got me thinking about my preconceptions about mentorship, how most founders work with mentors, what they sometimes get wrong, and how we can all create more effective mentor-mentee interactions.
Build your mentor and advisor pool with intention
One of the clearest definitions of an advisory board I’ve encountered comes from Harvey Nelson, whose framing I use in our Synthe6 workshops: an advisory board is a group of people who have done what you are seeking to do, chosen by you, focused on you and your business with no handcuffs, who must care about you.
I also find that it’s helpful to contrast this with what an advisory board is not. It’s not a board of directors with fiduciary responsibilities. It’s not consultants or service providers doing task-oriented work. It’s not a wall of impressive names or logos assembled to reassure investors. When founders build advisory boards to look good rather than to get better, they end up with relationships that don’t produce anything useful for anyone. And when potential investors call those kinds of advisors as part of due diligence, they often find the big names know nothing about you and your business, which is a huge red flag.
Most founders think about advisors in the wrong direction. They start with “who would impress our investors?” when the better question is “what do I actually need advice on right now?” Your advisory board should map to your current gaps. If you’re trying to scale your process from kilograms to hundreds of kilograms, you probably need someone who has scaled a very similar process before. This might mean a technician or process engineer, rather than a big-name former startup CEO. If you’re trying to get a foot in the door at a multinational corporation, you might want an advisor who has done business development with similar corporations in the past.
An adhesives company I was on the board of missed a huge opportunity a few years ago. We spent several weeks chatting with an alumna of our same university, who worked as a consultant running tests to support applications development for the big players in the adhesives industry. Her job title and resume weren’t particularly impressive, but she brought a deep knowledge of what tests industry players cared about and what adhesive chemistries were most common for specific corporates. Rather than working with this potential advisor, we filled up our advisory board with academic luminaries and angel investors. A couple years later, we realized we were missing much needed practical expertise and finally added some advisors who understood industry benchmarks for adhesive chemistry and testing.
Target advisors that can help you within the next 6 months
The right mix of advisors will change as your startup grows. Early on you might need experienced entrepreneurs to keep things real. Later you might need industry experts who can open doors, or technical specialists with specific manufacturing knowledge.
The first rule is to build your advisory board for now and the next six months. This gives you a board that fills your current gaps, rather than a board that’s half full with people you don’t need yet and who might be tempted to talk over the opinions of people who fit your current needs. This technique also ensures your advisors have something meaningful to do. If you add an advisor too early, they might feel useless and start to disengage before you ever have a chance to activate them.
It’s fine to start forming relationships with advisors that you might need in another year or after your Series A closes. Just don’t ask them to join the advisory board until you know that you’re about to need their expertise.
The second rule is that advisory board membership is not a permanent position. Don’t keep an advisor after they’ve stopped being useful. The advisor who was exactly right for your first year of commercialization may not be the right person for year three. Their expertise is misaligned, your questions evolve, and continuing the relationship out of politeness does neither of you any favors.
Advisors are professionals. You can be direct: “I think we’ve reached a point where I need different expertise. I’m so thankful for all the work you’ve done to help me, but I think it’s time for you to rotate off the advisory board.” Most advisors will respect this. In fact, many advisors will already know that they have run their leg of the race with you but may be waiting for you to make the decision. (Mentors and advisors almost unanimously tell me that one of their pet peeves is being ghosted. Don’t be that founder – be honest and tell them directly that you’re parting ways.) Removing an advisor frees up space on your advisory board and time in your calendar for fresh perspectives that fit your current needs, and it frees up your advisor to go mentor someone else who fits with their expertise.
Vet your advisors like you would a new hire
One thing I see often that still surprises me is founders rushing to ask someone to formally join their advisory board. They see someone’s resume on LinkedIn or talk to a person once at a networking event and immediately ask “will you join our advisory board?” They hand out advisory board seats like swag at a trade show and are surprised when they have too many advisors to hold beneficial advisory board meetings or get coherent advice.
If you think of your advisors and mentors as an extension of your team, it seems crazy to invite the first person with a relevant background to join. It’s equally illogical to load up a team with everyone who volunteers. You’d never hire that way. The best founders I know treat advisory board seats like finite resource. After all, having worthless mentors and advisors consumes your most precious resource: time.
Think about what gaps in knowledge you most need advisors to fill now and in the next six months. Scour your LinkedIn network, contact list and lists of past customer interviewees, and ask people you know for recommendations. Look closely at each person’s background and try to have multiple candidates to fill each gap, so you won’t feel stuck if your first option doesn’t pan out.
Once you have a list of prospective advisors, meet with each potential advisor two or three times. Get a feel for whether they’re genuinely engaged with the problem your startup is trying to solve. Do they ask good questions? Do they give feedback in a way that resonates with you? One coffee meeting is generally not enough to know if someone clicks or if they are genuinely excited about the problem you are solving. Take your time getting to know them, then when you are relatively confident they are a fit, ask them to formally become an advisor.
You can still meet with and test out relationships with people who are not yet formal advisors. However, once you offer a formal mentor or advisor role to someone, you need to take active steps to part ways with ones who are out of the running (see my notes above on not ghosting advisors and mentors). Take your time and recognize that bringing on bad advisors or too many advisors is a drain on your time and energy.
The “must care about you” test
One part of Harvey Nelson’s definition of an advisory board (that you ignore at your own peril) is the idea that the advisory board must care about you. Not your product roadmap, not your cap table, not your pitch deck. All of these things will change over time. It’s crucial that mentors and advisors care about you enough to stick with your startup through the many pivots you are likely to make.
Advisors with relevant expertise are not hard to find. People who will invest genuine energy in your growth as a founder, who will ask about you before they ask about your business, and who will respond to what you actually need to talk about rather than what they most want to advise on are rarer.
The best mentors are often the most unassuming ones: those who know your industry well, have a knack for asking insightful questions, or make themselves available when you call. The mentors and advisors I have seen move the needle fastest tend to share three core characteristics:
- They don’t have huge egos. They may have impressive credentials, but they are incredibly down-to-earth when you talk to them. Rather than launching into pre-scripted war stories about their successes, they make conversations about you. And they aren’t afraid to share their failure stories, along with successes, if they provide insights that are relevant to your current situation.
- They ask a lot of questions. Often the problem you need to solve isn’t the one you initially identify. Mentors that are willing to spend time going a few levels deep in understanding a problem are the ones that are most likely to unearth root causes that lead to breakthroughs. Again, this puts the focus on you, more than them.
- They don’t get mad when you don’t follow their advice. As a founder, you are closest to the business. As a founder with multiple advisors, you’ll likely get conflicting advice. Either way, you won’t always do what a given advisor recommends. And that should be okay. A best practice is always to circle back and tell your advisors what you’ve decided to do. However, an advisor that takes offense when you don’t follow their guidance generates unnecessary stress and drama, and is often showing you that they don’t really understand their role in relation to the startup.
You set the agenda
Founders that find advisors unhelpful are often making a common but crucial mistake. They are letting their advisors drive the agenda for every meeting. In some cases, there is no agenda and the session drifts based on whatever the loudest mentor wants to talk about. In other cases, the founder offers a feeble “I’d love your thoughts on our go-to-market.” This vague statement has 20 interpretations, so each advisor filters it through the lens of their expertise and gives some random advice. Either way, everyone walks out with a lot of perspectives, no decisions and a sense that they just wasted an hour or more of their lives.
The founders who get the most from mentorship prepare the way they’d prepare for a customer discovery interview. They arrive with two or three focused goals and a clear accompanying question for each goal. They share context to ensure every advisor knows what is being asked and why. And they encourage advisors to ask clarifying questions before launching into advice mode. This formula leads to the most reliable outcomes by getting everyone on the same page before advising even starts.
A great advisory board meeting is generally one where you set the agenda and context and then get to sit back and listen to the experts debate. Rather than looking to you, the advisors discuss amongst themselves and pressure test one another’s ideas and perspectives. Your role then becomes that of facilitator, making sure that the discussion doesn’t stray too far off track and that the quieter advisors still get a chance to speak.
One founder told me the greatest advisory board meeting he ever participated in was one where the advisors seemed to have forgotten he was in the room. The founder set the stage with a thorny problem and the context around it, then was treated to 45 minutes of honest, candid debate on the various approaches. By the end, the advisors had converged on two potential approaches, and the founder was able to choose a path forward.
Know when to ask for more
The most underleveraged thing a mentor or advisor can offer is often their network.
Most founders wait until they’re in crisis before asking for an introduction to customer they need badly or an investor they’ve been trying to reach for months. By then there’s pressure on both sides of the ask, and the mentor starts to feel like a resource to be extracted rather than a collaborator. It gets awkward for everyone.
The founders I’ve watched work these relationships well treat introductions as a regular, unhurried part of the conversation. They ask early and they ask specifically: “I’m trying to connect with someone who has sold into automotive Tier 1 suppliers, do you know anyone?” A small, clear ask is easier for advisors to answer, so a few chip in to help. Over time, it becomes standard to ask for and receive introductions. When you actually need one quickly, there is already a trusted process to follow.
Mentors are core to what we try to build in Synthe6. Not because founders can’t figure things out on their own, but because having someone in your corner who is there specifically for you, with no other agenda, is genuinely rare. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand that for myself.
So here’s the question: Do you have an advisory board? Do you have the right group of people on it? If not, what would it take to fill just one gap you currently have in your advisor or mentor group?