How to use mentor whiplash to produce better decisions
There’s an old saw in the startup world: if you want money, ask for advice; if you want advice, ask for money. When you’re growing a startup, you’re going to ask for a lot of money. You’re going to get a lot of advice.
In fact, the surplus of advice happens often enough that there’s a name for it: mentor whiplash.
When advice becomes too much of a good thing
Mentor whiplash is what happens when a lot of well-meaning business veterans peek at a small slice of a company’s trajectory and give advice from their own experience—often contradicting other advice from similarly qualified sources. In a single day, founders might hear from one mentor that they need to prioritize product, then get advice from another to focus on user acquisition and community growth, only to have yet another urge more customer discovery before doing either of those things. One mentor might tell them that if they aren’t venture funded, they’re toast, only to have another suggest that bootstrapping, crowdfunding, or friends and family deals are plenty for now. Even strong teams can get paralyzed by mentor whiplash.
It isn’t that these people don’t know what they’re talking about—they do, and we know they do. Mentors are usually held to very high selection criteria (either by investors or accelerators, as well as by the founders themselves) and tend to bring a lot of expertise in building companies or going deep in a particular specialty area. We expect mentors to be high-caliber people volunteering considerable expertise and insight to help a startup. That’s usually what happens.
The problem is that every company and every stage in a company’s life is unique. The CEOs of two photo-sharing app companies are going to have had very different experiences. A CEO of a company at 20 employees will have a profoundly different experience than a different CEO running the same company at 300 employees. The founder of a device company sees different best practices than the founder of the company making software for that device. B2B founders manage a different product approach and sales cycle than founders focusing on consumers. Healthcare technology founders have different problems than wellness company founders. Etc. etc. etc.
There’s lots of different types of mentors, and they all bring something valuable to the party. But that value has a natural limit: no one is truly an expert in your company at this moment—maybe not even you. How do you handle all the well-intentioned advice and channel it into something that helps the company’s growth?
Too much good advice is a great problem to have—but still a problem
First, take a big deep breath. Lots of people are trying to help. That’s a nice problem to have.
Second, recognize that no one—not your board, not your investors, not your mentors, not even your first non-founder employee—will understand the company the way you do. Everyone is looking at a slice of your reality, but you are the one that has lived it from idea to bringing all these people into your circle. Never lose sight of how deep your view is. That clarity is your anchor.
Third, know that experiential diversity is a good thing. Your deep knowledge of your idea and your company will always benefit from the conflict of new ideas and new ways of thinking about things—so long as you don’t lose sight of your guiding purpose—your “why”. If your mentors are challenging you, they’re doing their job. That job creates tension and dissonance, though, and it can tend to exacerbate differences within your team.
How not to interact with your mentors
Founders receive advice in a range of different ways. Less confident ones may circle the wagons and double down on what they already know and do. Teams that are less solid in their “why” may take every bit of advice as gospel and race from approach to approach, blowing in the wind with no coherent direction. They may engage in hero worship, putting the mentor on a pedestal and in doing so subconsciously bringing on the belief that they will never be able to equal that mentor’s accomplishments or genius. Teams may assign different members to implement different suggestions, each valuable on its own but contradictory when taken together. Or, they may become overwhelmed with wealth of opinions they receive and become paralyzed. This usually shows up as tending to the mechanics of the business while speaking worriedly about the things the team wishes it could do.
Worst of all, a founder may unconsciously begin “opinion shopping”—talking to several mentors until she gets the answer she wants. No one wants to admit to doing this, but it happens. And because mentors are experienced, successful, and wise, it’s easy to defer to the expert with the opinion you wanted to hear.
That’s a lot of pressure and pitfalls for founders, and there usually isn’t a mechanism to manage the contradictions among mentors—except the easiest one. Founding teams can get their mentors into the same room.
Mentors give better advice when they give it together
There aren’t many times in a startup when all the mentors are in the same room together, and in those few times, most are socializing and sipping cocktails. For the remainder of the time, teams meet with mentors individually. That is, they hear an opinion, take it on to try to do something with it, and then they hear another opinion and repeat the process. The program runs in a serial process when the more efficient approach for integrating advice is to run a parallel process—turning asynchronous advice into a synchronous event.
When the mentors all come together in the same room, they hear opinions from each other rather than filtered through the team. They can respond in real time, asking better questions and testing different hypotheses. Where they are more experienced or accomplished, they can push back on each other more strongly than the founders might be able to do. They can argue, clarify, and collaborate with each other as peers—on behalf of the company they are mentoring. Mentor advice alone is a gift, and blended together all at once—it’s priceless.
Despite how busy everyone is in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, bringing the mentors together every now and then is much easier than you might think. Despite typically being a volunteer gig, most mentors care deeply about the health and success of the mentored company and its team—in fact, that’s usually why we do what we do. Despite everyone being busy, the things we care about are a priority. People make these things work when they care about them.
Also, it’s an honor to be a part of team’s process. It is a gift to any mentor to see a company she has worked with grow, get funded, get featured in the press—these are things that make us feel like proud parents. We always hope that our contributions become a part of how the team works. What better way to ensure that than to test our advice among peers who really understand the advice from hard-won experience?
Lastly, it is also a gift when mentors get to work with other people whom we admire and might not get the chance to collaborate with otherwise. There’s usually no other forum where we would be able to assemble that kind of talent to do what we do best. It’s incredibly valuable to hear how the people we admire work—while they’re in the middle of working—and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. If you don’t pull us together for yourselves, do it for us.
What to do when you can’t get your mentors together
It won’t always be possible to get a bunch of mentors together when you need to, and doing so isn’t a magical cure for the persistent information overload. If you can’t bring people together physically, try for a call. If you can’t get them together for a call, consolidate all the various perspectives into one document (with the mentors’ identities removed) and discuss as a team. You might even do this as a practice for your own thinking.
You know more about your company than most people. Your team knows the company just about as well as you—but from their own perspective and experience. Your mentors know about companies in general far more than most people. These are very different types of inputs, and they’re going to clash. The idea here is to remove all of the associations with the person (they’re all impressive, right?) and evaluate the advice as objectively as possible.
The pace of a startup is really fast. You’re not always going to have time to pause for everyone to get together (though planning to do it on at least a quarterly basis might help). You don’t have to follow the plan above or give up entirely—there’s plenty of middle ground. Your job is to work backward from the outcomes you’re looking for—less personal, more iterated advice about the big problems and opportunities in the business—and figure out how to work with what you have to get them.
Mentor whiplash is one of the challenges any startup team is going to wrestle with, and it’s going to produce lots of conflict and occasionally some valuable insights. Don’t be afraid to engage in the battles—there is a lot of value on the other side of them. In this case, free advice is worth far more than you pay for it, but it’s down to you to be smart about how you take it and what you do with it.
