Defining Entrepreneurship: Mentor v. Advisor v. EIR

Mentors

Let’s start with mentor. We actually have mentors around the Tech Ranch®, and initially, because I was so concerned about the whole setup of the different types, we didn’t just publish a bunch of names on our website. I actually want to make sure we’re building the right kind of relationships. Tech Ranch® is built around a martial arts metaphor. I studied martial arts for many years, and a lot of times you learn from the other people that you’re interacting with. And the mentors can be like that with regards to entrepreneurs. We don’t necessarily define it differently than the whole rest of the world, but I actually have spent a little bit more time on defining different types. And we’ll go through that.

The question is: what situations would make this helpful? If you’re ever up against the wall, and also the thing to kind of keep yourself accountable, know one of the things you should be doing is actually having these different types of people around you. And does it make sense to work with a mentor in any particular type of business? Yeah, in actually all different types of business. There’s not one type.

There are four different types of mentors. You’re saying, “Hey, wait, you’re going to talk to me about mentors, advisers, and entrepreneur residents.” I actually want to even talk about mentors and what you should be looking for. The four different types that I see:

• Running buddies, or in my case, I call them drinking buddies, the guys that you hang out with. One of my best friends – a gentleman by the name of Brian Massey –  is a person who’s been a long term friend. He’s also another practicing entrepreneur, and I actually consider him one of my mentors. Even though he’s my age and he’s been building in business roughly the same amount of time I have been, I need a series of mentors at my peer level. You should be creating those kind of relationships and cognizant that the conversations you’re having with other entrepreneurs are running-buddy-mentor relationships.
• The next type of mentor is the general mentor, someone that you’re meeting with maybe once a month, has a little bit of insight, or maybe just meet a couple times a year. I call that person a general mentor, where you’re not necessarily asking them a specific question, but more you’re checking in – connecting with them.  It’s like ‘general purpose’.
• A very important mentor is a subject-matter-expert mentor. As an example, when I was looking for the next place I was going to take the Tech Ranch® I sought out a mentor who has subject matter expertise specifically in real estate.  There’s a whole language that real estate agents know that I would have never been able to learn quickly enough to get the job done.
• The last type of mentor is someone you might never get to talk to or interact with. That’s an aspirational mentor. As an example, in my case, I got to work for guy named Steve Jobs for three and a half years. I never knew him personally and I only interacted with him a handful of times, but, he’s an aspirational mentor to me. It’s someone who has followed a path and created a very big vision, kind of like I’m doing here with Tech Ranch. Another person in my background that I actually looked up to, even though there’s no way I’ll ever meet him, is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., right? He’s an amazing leader that lived and had his life taken away too early, but the things about how he stood, and what he stood for, and and how he spoke – that’s an aspirational mentor. He’s an excellent example.

Advisers – I reserve that term for someone you’re meeting with on a weekly basis. And the whole idea is that it’s more formalized. Mentors you might meet in a casual, random setting, whereas advisers there’s some type of business relationship. You might be giving them a small chunk of your company, say a half a percent of the equity. You’re asking for their advice and you’re listening to their advice.

Typically, if the relationship is more formalized, you could ask them to serve on your Board of Advisors to help fill gaps in specific areas. What is it that you might ask them to do that you might not ask a general mentor?  In my case, because finance is not one of my strengths, I’ve had a financial adviser who was responsible for really paying attention to that part of the business. How is my business being financed, not just in preparing it or in the investment conversation, but the overall finance and accounting of the organization?

It can make sense to have an advisory “board” at almost any stage of the company or startup. It’s not necessarily something you wait for. It could be, at the earliest stage, you build out a Board of Advisers of three to four qualified individuals in different areas to have some real meat on the bones of the startup. That’s a great way to get things going and to engage a few people who are dedicated to making you successful.

The third type of relationship is the entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR). What an entrepreneur in residence is – here at Tech Ranch® – is an individual that participates in our Venture Builder program. The relationship lasts six to eight months and one fourth of the battle-scarred executive’s time is being part of the startup team. An EIR is someone who has got a lot of scar tissue and can offer to the team ten or more hours a week of heavy involvement.

The idea here is to work  side by side with the entrepreneurs. Maybe the entrepreneurial team is really young, and they need to bring in someone who has been there, done that. Many times these EIRs will want to get involved in your venture because they are getting a little bit older but are not interested in being the first guy driving the venture. We find that a lot of times the love of the startup process is so strong that maybe the EIR is done working for financial reasons, but want to get involved in just helping out a series of entrepreneurs.

To Review

So, in just reviewing:

1. Mentors – more of a random relationship, without much structure to it. It can be a one time meeting all the way up to something that’s happening, maybe once a month
2. Adviser – has a specific defined relationship of how they’re interacting and there’s typically some level of compensation, even if it’s just stock. Generally, the adviser has some stake in the game.
3. EIR –  someone who gets really heavily involved, whether the EIR is heavily involved in a venture fund or through the Tech Ranch® Venture Builder program.

Where do you find them? 

There’s all sorts of different ways of finding mentors.  I found that the most successful thing for me is to consciously target a handful of people, reach out to them and go from there.  You should have a sense of what you’re asking of the mentor or adviser or EIR and you should establish that up front.

Too many times, I get emails from different people who say, “Hey, Kevin, can I just get together with you and pick your brain?” or “Hey Kevin, let’s meet up” and the difficulty with that many times is that I have no idea even if I feel like I’m qualified to meet with a person and they are asking me to make a commitment of time to them even before I understand what they need. The best ways that an entrepreneur can actually connect with a mentor adviser or EIR is to say up front, “Hey, this is who I am, this is what I’m up to,” in a very succinct way, “and this is the set of requests I think we could operate around. Are you interested in having a conversation?” Do that on the front end. It is much more respectful if you truly are interested in building a relationship .