Chuck Eesley: Find a Mentor

UPDATE: We now have mentor profiles on Venture Lab!

Mentors: Thanks for agreeing to be a mentor on venture lab. I am sure the students will find your wisdom and experience invaluable. Could you please sign up at:

http://venture-lab.org/mentors/sign_up

We will need very basic information, a short bio, and preferably a picture. If you need any information or have any questions, please feel free to email me or mentors@venture-lab.org

Finding a true mentor is one of the quickest ways to learn and one of the most important things an entrepreneur can do.

Mentoring younger, less experienced entrepreneurs is one of the most rewarding experiences an experienced entrepreneur can have. In a good mentoring relationship the learning flows both ways. As we often say in education, you learn much more by teaching someone else.

I'm excited to announce a new mode of participation in the course - mentorship. If you're an experienced industry veteran, entrepreneur, angel, or VC investor, or even if you've been an early employee in a few ventures. I'd like to invite you to mentor a team in the class.

Please use this page to post your bio in the comments. You do not have to leave your contact information. Students who are interested in being mentored by you will reply to your comment and leave their contact information for you to reach out to them if you are interested. Or you can email us at: mentors@venture-lab.org

When the OAP assignment is due, we will have everyone in the class vote on these and the mentors will choose the top 30 or so teams to mentor for the OEP final presentation.

However, if mentors are interested and willing, I encourage them to get started mentoring a team now. Anyone who is interested can leave their short bio below in the comments and students or teams will reply with their contact information and a little about their team if they would like to request mentorship.

If you know of a good mentor, or have a mentor, please encourage them to stop by this page and leave their bio. We have tens of thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs from all over the world. You could mentor someone in your industry, from your home country, or an alum from your school. We are in the process of building a mentor profile and search functionality within venture lab.

Brad Feld has a great post on mentorship here.

[Transcript download]

Information for Mentors

In my class at Stanford I assign 2 mentors per team and tell them that it's about 5-10 hours total over the course of the 10 week quarter. In the case of the online class, obviously we cannot provide two mentors to each of thousands of teams. We may need mentors to coach more than one team if possible. Mentors respond to student questions and give them feedback on their presentations and to the extent they are comfortable they should open up their network a bit. In short, whatever help you can provide and as many teams as you have bandwidth to help, we'd all be very grateful.

Obviously, this is a big learning experiment for all of us in how to open this up to be an online course with massive scale. So if there are things I can do to help make sure you as mentors have a great experience, please let me know!

Opportunity Analysis and Execution Projects

As important as the class lectures are, the most important part of the course is the hands-on, out-of-the-building projects. We organize the class into four-person teams who have to deliver two team projects; Opportunity Assessment and Opportunity Execution.

For the Opportunity Assessment project students will learn how to tell the difference between a good idea in the dorm and a great scalable business opportunity. They have to identify and define a market opportunity and pitch the opportunity to their classmates.

For the Opportunity Execution project students will explore how you actually assemble a company – thinking through how they would sell, distribute, create demand, attract a team, build and fund their product.

While these two Opportunity Assessment and Execution projects are the core components of what would be a business plan, students are not expected to write a business plan.

For both of these projects it’s just fine if the team’s analysis results show that the idea is not worth pursuing. The purpose of the project is not to come up with a marketable and fundable opportunity. It’s to teach them how to think about analyzing an opportunity. Additionally, the idea pursued in the Opportunity Execution Project need not be the same as in the Opportunity Assessment Project. If it becomes clear that the initial idea is not scalable, you should encourage the team to head in a new direction for the Opportunity Execution Project.

As you work with your team remember it’s your experience and wisdom in guiding your team and pointing them in the right direction is what mentoring is about. Guide them and challenge them. Make them think through the “what if’s,” share with them your experience of businesses that tried various approaches.

Getting Out of the Building

One of the lasting skills we teach the students is that their presentations are simply hypotheses until they actually validate them with customers and partners; and since there are “no facts inside the building, they need to get outside.” This means as part of this class for their Opportunity Assessment and Execution presentations they need to talk to actually talk to customers, channel partners, and domain experts and gather real-world data – and given the limited time they have, to do so quickly.

For engineers talking to potential customers or channel partners can be a daunting and formidable task. To the best of your ability, help them network, teach them how to send email and make phone calls and run customer surveys. Open your rolodex to whatever level you feel comfortable with.

Mentor Time Commitment

The wisdom and advice you give these students are invaluable. We’ve found that successful mentor/team interactions look like this:

- Meeting with your assigned team at least three times during the quarter prior to the major deadlines for the project

Additional communication as needed by phone or email