Greg Rogers: Effective startup mentors possess intellectual curiosity and honesty
Greg Rogers · 20 VC 027: Greg Rogers on Techstars, Mentors and The Potential for Fintech · Apr 13, 2015 · at 19:06
Greg Rogers, Managing Director at Techstars, discusses the most critical qualities founders should look for when selecting startup mentors.
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“The best mentors are the ones that are intellectually curious, so you can get a sense pretty quickly by talking to somebody whether or not they love to work on puzzles. So are these the people who can sit down with you and just very quickly, and they, you can see that as you bring your strategic problems with them, to them, their eyes light up. They love this idea of sitting in front of a whiteboard and beginning to draw out this puzzle, and most entrepreneurial challenges are puzzles. Typically, they're strategic problems, and these are people, these are mentors who just love that challenge, and they derive a lot of intrinsic value from working with entrepreneurs on those challenges. And then second, I would say, and perhaps even more, more important, or just as important, is people who are intellectually honest. So mentors who are not going to just smile at you and tell you what you want to hear, but they're people who will be honest with you on what the challenges are and will show you all of the ugly parts of your business in order to help you make them more beautiful.”
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