Mentor Me and Believe In My Product, or Let’s Just Break Up

Vineet is the founder and CEO of TeliportMe, an India-based start-up. Last week he identified three major problems in the Indian start-up scene. Now he’ll detail the first of those. Check back next week for part two. You can follow him on Twitter.

An entrepreneurs dilemma - does the mentor believe in your product? (Image copyright: Matt Groenig)

As a follow-on from my previous post I wanted to write a little more in detail about the foremost area I felt was lacking in the Indian start-up eco-system: the lack of good mentors.

Every start-up needs a mentor/advisor. Most first-time entrepreneurs like myself have so many questions about so many decisions that it helps to consult someone who has done it before. A mentor comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s important that you find the right person for your style of entrepreneurship.

Let me explain this with my experience with mentors and advisers, and this will give you a view of my thought process – or, bias – on this issue in India…

When we started TeliportMe about a year back, we were known as BITS360. It was more of a service company that sold our product to clients, like hotels and colleges. We were one of the four finalists of a very famous national business plan competition. We had a real business with real customers and actual revenue and profits.

Right after the competition we were approached by one of the judges who asked me to get in touch with him via email. I did this, and he offered to advise the company, as he felt we had an interesting product. He was nice and helpful, and I liked him a lot. We worked together on a business deal which did not work out, but that was ok. However, he had no idea – or did not understand – our larger vision, and slowly it began to get difficult for us to explain to him what we were building.

All the while he kept telling us to focus on the services business because that’s the sector he came from. I remember him once telling me, “Vineet, let’s not get into the smaller details because I want to look at things from the top level only.” I understand that, and appreciate all that. But if you have never seen the product (yes, he’d never seen it), it just becomes difficult to have any conversation.

One day he said, “Vineet, we should formalize this relationship.” It sounded weird and out of the blue. It was like when a girl you are having a great conversation with suddenly says “we should take this to the next step.”

I backed off. Maybe it was my mistake here, but I clearly knew that he did not understand the product, and did not understand the web. It just didn’t feel right.

Taking Things to the Next Level

My second advisor and mentor was from the semiconductor industry. He was a very well-established authority in his field, with three companies sold in Silicon Valley. He was awesome, and I’d known him for quite a long time. But while he was more educated on the web compared to my previous advisor, he still didn’t get it to an extent that made sense. But he liked me a lot and he opened one major door that lent some credibility to our product. He also popped the same question about two months down the line: “We should formalize this relationship.”

This time I was ready and he seemed like someone I could move forward with. We sat down to discuss what terms would make sense for him. He then spewed out numbers that didn’t make sense: three to five percent of the company, consulting charges and some more demands.

I then called a few people who had done this before and they all exclaimed: “What the hell! Ask him to at least make it tiered, like if he helps you raise X amount in funding, you give him the entire five percent or you make it an initial one percent and the remaining two percent across two years.”