Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

EVERYONE IS A MENTOR

The best moment in a mentor-mentee relationship is when the mentor learns as much, or more, from the mentee. If you ask most mentors why they do it, this is one of the core reasons. If you take a long view on the mentor relationship, it becomes clear that both the mentor and the mentee are actually mentors. If you extend this to the startup community, everyone becomes a mentor.

Often people ask me what they can do to help the Boulder startup community. One of my responses is to find one person they can mentor. Focus on your specific skill or background, and let the community know you are willing to mentor one person on this. Show up at the startup events, like the Boulder New Tech Meetup, and announce that you are an expert at thing X and you are willing to teach it to one other person. Better yet, hold a regular seminar, Meetup, or open office hours around it.

The culture of widely sharing knowledge, experience, and expertise is incredibly satisfying and self-reinforcing. The more you do, the more you’ll see others in the community do. There are gems everywhere, often undiscovered, that appear when everyone becomes a mentor.