How accelerator programs can crack the mentoring puzzle

Summer cohort of 2017: startups and their mentors at Microsoft Accelerator in Bangalore. Photo credit: Microsoft Accelerator.

At Microsoft Accelerator Bangalore, we discovered the hard way that outsourcing mentoring to external volunteers doesn’t work well. Over the first six batches in Bangalore (and four batches with partner accelerators), we’ve repeatedly found that founders were unable to take advantage of stellar, world-class mentors, who were themselves fellow entrepreneurs, investors, and who were committed to helping the startups succeed.

The tough lesson we learned was that unless a mentor deeply understands the founder and startup well enough, most advice is too shallow. But only a few mentors were able to go deep enough, even if they were fully committed to helping the startup on their journey.

As we struggled to understand this, we decided to go deeper into what was good mentoring and how we could repeatably, scalably, deliver high-quality insights to all our startups, from our world-class mentor pool.

The unknown unknowns

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. – Donald Rumsfeld

Photo credit: Tech in Asia’s Kathrinna Rakhmavika.

First, we realized that mentoring is about helping a founder know their ‘unknown unknowns.’ Once founders know their blind spots and biases, they need help to prioritize digging into the now ‘known unknowns.’ So, really, a mentor’s role is to help with unknown biases, blind spots, and gaping voids that are invisible to the founders. The catch here is that to do this, a mentor needs to spend 8-12 hours with a particular founder! This is an unreasonable ask, even for the most committed mentors in our pool.

So we decided to change the model.

We became the ‘family doctors’ who spent 10-15, even 20+ hours one-on-one with each founder, using four strategic frameworks to peel the startup onion, while creating deep meaningful connections with each founder. Once we did this, we were able to identify individual biases, blind spots, and ‘unknown unknowns.’ These conversations also help the founders become more self-aware and realize where they need to pay more attention.

See: Meet 14 promising startups Microsoft accelerator picked to get them enterprise-ready

And the known unknowns

After we identify the ‘unknown unknowns’, we help the founders prioritize their ‘known unknowns’, create specific problem statements, and identify the right subject-matter experts who can quickly assist. The conversation with the subject-matter expert becomes far more straightforward: there is very high value transmission in a very short time, leaving both the mentor and mentee satisfied.

For example, one startup had founders who were all from an enterprise sales background, doing a mid-market SaaS product. Busy as they have been signing up customers with field sales, they’ve been blind to what it takes to grow a serious inbound/inside sales team and processes.

Once we had this conversation, it quickly became apparent that this was a major weakness, causing them issues with their VC & fund-raise. They then crystallized the problem statement to ‘create the core inbound process for lead-gen in the next six weeks,’ and we connected them to an alumnus who is among the best in India at inbound marketing. They were able to accelerate their learning in just 3-4 half-hour sessions with this subject-matter expert mentor, and got a playbook, a hiring guide, processes, and deep feedback, which helped them build a solid core for their inbound process.

If you’re a startup mentor

If you’re a founder with good mentors