Mentorship

“You want to be coachable. You want to be easy to help. Otherwise they're going to go, well, screw you.”

“You've got to give to your mentor just as much as you're getting. Right, like, and in whatever way that you can do it, right, if you're younger, I want the younger people telling me about AI. Like, what's the next thing? Like, I, it shouldn't just be me and po…”

“They think they need to sit down with that person and have one-on-one conversations all the time, but the best mentors haven't got time for that.”

“For the mentoring to be impactful, I have to make it so obvious that it's so stupid, they haven't yet focused on this, that they're like, I'll show him. And then they act on it.”

“Oftentimes people would want to match me to the only underrepresented professional that had made it to the top. And that felt odd to me that a large corporation, because that's my entire background, would take a high performing, over eager, very moldable talen…”

“Do not build an emotional dependency on your mentors. Your mentors are not a place for your codependency. They are not a replacement for a parent, let's say. Your mentor is there to support, advise, and guide you. To become the best version of yourself.”

“You can have any mentor in the world that you want. There's so much out there, like, pick somebody that you really respect, and just, like, be a sponge, get obsessive, learn everything you can about them. How did they do it? What did they do? Like you can real…”

“Ok, let's not confuse the fact that a person doesn't understand the intricacies of e-commerce with the person, with the fact that that person doesn't understand how to grow a business, because you can learn e-commerce. Working with distributed teams, growing a…”

“I think we tell women things like, you need to find a mentor, and you need to find a sponsor, and that's just another set of hoops that we have that we tell women to jump through that I don't think we tell other parts of population to jump through.”

“I tell them it's actually better to have a stable of mentors. You want to have three or four. And ideally what you do is you meet with each one of them once a month on a different Friday of the month, right? And so you might have three or four people on every …”

“It's just something that it's an unspoken thing. It's just like you have someone generally they're like, 10, 15, 20 years older. They've been through things that you've been through.”

“You don't build real community by having a one-time Let me pick your brain. Here's 10 questions, and then never call them again. You know, those people are never going to be, quote, your homies. They'll be your homies if you actually are able to create a real …”

“But I look for two things. One is, are you good at one specific thing I'm trying to get better at? And then two is, are you good at explaining it? You know, and those two, at least for me, they're important. I know people who are really good at their roles, at…”

“But then the key is once you get that foot in the door, like it could be a quick email, a tweet, a quick chat at an event, that sort of thing, and you get some advice that's useful, the key is to circle back with them at a later point and show that you've actu…”

“I make sure to bring something very specific that I'm dealing with where they can provide input. And this is the opposite of what many people do, where they're like, hey, can you tell me about how you know, whatever, your path to PM, which may or may not be re…”

“I think in the traditional sense of the word, what it meant was you had one person who you had a fixed meeting cadence with, and you spent this number of minutes once a month with this person, you'd get together with them, and you'd talk about your set of Sche…”

“I think what's really, what I see sometimes is that people reach out and ask whether you want to be their mentor. And I think that's Unlikely to be a yes for me, but I think also from other people. I think you want to kind of, you want to start small, iterate …”

“What I consider to be free, this person considered to be paid. So she called herself a mentor, but charged people, which I would consider a consultant or an advisor.”

“Seeking a mentor is a advanced form of procrastination. You think that you need a mentor before you do the thing. And in reality, your mentor and all other people who succeed don't use mentors as a prerequisite.”

“The way you actually do form a mentorship bond is you ask somebody for a specific situational piece of advice. So not just what should I do, but like, Hey, I'm debating between these two options. How would you think about this? Or here's how I'm thinking about…”

“When you're running around a thousand miles an hour and everybody's working 12 to 14 hours a day, there's no real time to mentor people either. There's no real time to walk through decisions or judgments and try to learn from other people.”

“So I believe you should be about getting to know more and more people, and the mentorship happens organically as you get to know people, because you can't make somebody be a mentor, and for it to work, That relationship, there has to be trust, and you gotta be…”

“Look, it's a relationship, and it's got to be a relationship where there's value going in both directions, where, you know, you're actually interested in that person, not in what you can get out of them.”