Working with Mentors
This is another blog post about our experiences in the Microsoft Accelerator powered by TechStars program so if you are more interested in biometrics or privacy you can just skip this one and go to the next entry. =)
To me, the main reason to join an accelerator program is to get access to the mentors and other resources in the network. Over the course of the three month program, we had dozens of people who were experts in their various areas come to us and talk about various topics. Plus mentors came in weekly to work specifically with us on our business. I think it would have easily taken me a year to set up and have the meetings I had during the program – assuming I could have gotten them to even answer my call.
We had over 120 meetings during the three month program with potential investors, technical mentors, pricing mentors, marketing mentors, sales mentors, operations mentors, potential customers and other founders. There is a downside – it’s hard to keep track of that many people. And with that many people listening to your concept and giving you feedback, you are going to get a lot of confusing and conflicting advice. It’s called “mentor whiplash” and it’s just what it sounds like.
Also, mentors typically only met with a few companies, so they remembered us (especially me with my long white hair). However, we met with hundreds of mentors and couldn’t remember them all. There were several embarrassing moments when someone would come up to us on the street as if they knew us, and we just had to pretend we remembered them until we figured out who they were.
There were days when I went home at the end of the day and my brain was so full that I could not remember who I had met and I had to review my notes. It takes time to sort through conflicting advice, research alternatives, get second opinions or maybe third opinions (what if that guy is super famous but also just wrong?) and time is not something you have a lot of in an accelerator. You spend a lot of time walking around in a fog.
But how on earth is a start-up going to get that kind of attention without a program like this?