Don’t say, “We’ll mentor you”. Be Cool. Please.
As a 22 year old entrepreneur running a deep-tech company, I often find myself in situations where people who are slightly older than me try to strong arm me through the words “we’ll mentor you”, or “you have a long way to go”, or “you don’t even know what lies ahead of you”. Their age has given them the ability to look into my future. These are mostly individuals who went to business school and have never built a company themselves, or lawyers and consultants trying to get free sweat equity. Any self respecting individual who has built and exited a successful business will never use the words, “I’ll mentor you”.
The reality about the concept of mentorship is that those who mentor, don’t say it. They don’t tell you that they are mentoring you. They don’t call you their student in front of the world. They don’t ask you for money or equity. They don’t want it. They empower you to move ahead, they’re by your side every step of the way, and there’s as much gratitude and fulfillment for them, as there is growth and comfort for you. Helping and Mentoring are not the same thing. A mentor is always available for their mentee. A helper is not always available for the person they are helping.
Choosing your mentors
While it’s imperative for every individual to have the humility to accept that they don’t know everything and that they may seek advice repeatedly on their journey, it’s also important to be careful about whom you take advice from.
One of the people I really look up to is Vinod Khosla. In this conversation with Sam Altman of Y-Combinator, Vinod said few things which really resonated with my day to day experiences. The first one which really stood out to me was that people had to earn the opportunity to be on the board of a new startup. If you’ve never built a successful company yourself, it’s unlikely that you know what it takes to build a moonshot startup, let alone a regular business. The second one was the question — “ Are you building a Zero Million Dollar Company or a Zero Billion Dollar Company?”, and the third — “Knowing whose advice to take and on what topic is the single most important decision an entrepreneur can make. ” Coincidently, the only person whose mentorship I have actively asked for in my life is Vinod. Everyone else, I was very lucky to find on the way.
My Mentors — they’re rock stars, yet cool dudes.
Parents are always our first and lifelong mentors. When it comes to survival in the world, they are the ones who teach us and stand by our side almost always. For me, my father stood by me and mentored me in discipline, in saying things as they are, in sticking to reality, and trying to be as helpful as I could be. My mother has always been the first person who learns about what I’ve built or who I spoke to, and so on. She’s been my constant source of validation throughout my life. Everyone else could say what I’m doing sucks, but if the mother said it, I’d take it very seriously. However, as we grow, our parents may not always be able to guide us the best in areas they don’t have experience in.
Growing up, I’ve been very fortunate to have many mentors — all of whom played a significant role in my life. When I was younger and in school, I played soccer professionally. I had an extremely strict, brutal, yet thoughtful coach — Mr. Mohan Pillai. He was almost like an army commander. Everyone was scared of him. However, through the eight years where he built the athlete in me, he taught me a lot more than soccer. Resilience, humility in success, team work, discipline, agility, perfection, ethical play, signal over noise, and above all patience. He never told anyone I was his mentee. He was cool.
Later in grade 6 when my fascination for science was increasing, I met Mr. Dilip Ogale. He taught me physics for the competitive Homibhabha science exams. Mr. Ogale would build small projects to bring science to life. This blew my mind away and I became a fan. Soon I went to him with the dream of building my own hovercraft. In grade 6. In India. Let that sink in. Instead of discouraging me, he introduced me to my next mentor — Mr. Shailesh Sansare. Mr. Ogale definitely was my tutor, but never told anyone that he was mentoring me. He was cool.
Mr. Sansare taught me that one could build anything. He was always motivating and often used the words , “Kar Lenge” in Hindi which means “We’ll do it, We’ll figure it out”. For a 6th grader to hear these words while throwing random dream projects like hovercrafts and electric go-karts out, it all seemed unbelievable. But while motivating me, he also taught me to start small and to be frugal. He always set stepping stones for me before I could reach the big projects. He first encouraged me to build a small desktop version of a hovercraft using everyday materials and a small computer fan. I failed at it. I learned about materials and scale that day. Later he encouraged me to participate in IIT’s Techfest competitions in Mumbai and mentored me for the few years that I did participate — I built a solar powered boat, a hand gesture controlled vehicle, and many more small projects. In the 5–6 years of learning from him, Mr Sanare never accepted a single rupee in what we in India call “Gurudakshina.” He mentored many more students like me, but never called us his students. He referred to us as his team. He was cool.
Later, when I dropped out of school, I started working with the MIT Media Lab on few of their projects in India. I was a research student. This happened after I wrote a rather angry email to Dr. Ramesh Raskar from MIT. The email was not meant to be angry, I just spoke very poor English at the time, and had no hope of hearing back. To my surprise, Dr. Raskar replied in 10 minutes asking me to speak with Kshitij Marwah who was leading the activity. I got to work with them in Hyderabad first, and then Mumbai. Through the 2 years that I worked under them, I had the opportunity to present to Mr. Ratan Tata, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, and find a whole new set of guides and advisors such as Dr. Maulik Majmudar, Dr. Rajiv Gupta, Rohan Puri, Dr. Achuta Kadambi, Dr. Anshuman Das, and others. Dr. Raskar opened up a different world for me — one where scale was never a problem, funds were never a problem. You had to just be 5 years ahead of everyone else and build technology that’s scalable and affordable to solve difficult problems for the world. He also has this saying, “Don’t follow the rainbow, it’s an illusion.” Dr. Raskar is a bigshot, and I never imagined being fortunate enough to have a mentor like him. I ask myself a hundred times if something is important enough before I write to him. But even with his unbelievably busy schedule, I always appreciate the check in message I get every few months as shown below. Or alternatively, whenever I update him about something in my life, the response is, “Great. What’s next?” He is cool.
Outside of being my fathers closest friend, Naresh Shahani is my mentor and Praan’s advisor. He is someone who maintains an extremely low profile, but internally has been the strategy and growth guide for some of India’s largest companies and their CEOs. Him choosing to spend his time to mentor us, was a decision outside of his obligations to his close friend. He has been stern, and extremely realistic while helping us establish expectations. He’s been one of Praan’s key dot connectors and influencers in helping us raise grant money from our friends and family in the very early days. He’s someone who understands “Zero to One” better than any other consultant I’ve met, and also understands the “One to N” stage in extremely clarity — he’s also a lean six sigma black belt and coaches multinational companies on the same. It’s been over 2 years that he’s been Praan’s mentor, and about half my lifetime where he’s been my mentor. One of the more hilarious learnings I have from our interactions is where he has taught me to tell people who overprice themselves to “Take a long walk on a short bark.” He’s never told anyone that he’s my mentor. He’s always been there for us, any day, irrespective of time zone. He is cool.
Offering us your mentorship
We are young and have a lot to learn. Hence finding the right mentors would help us be better and unlock certain perspectives which we may be missing. However, we are often wary of the people who enforce their mentorship and ideas on us solely in order to increase their equity asks. If you truly are someone who would push us a long way, we’d never bargain to you about things like equity. However, most of the times, the people who begin the equity conversation are not the people who could help us. To those who offer mentorship to the next set of 20-somethings struggling every day to build their dream, I request you to mentor freely. Have an open heart. Wish that the work you do helps people grow. I know for a fact that if any of us at Praan get that opportunity to help someone grow, we will take it in a heart beat without any expectations — as we have done several times in the past. It’s a privilege to be called a mentor, and to embark on the path set forth by our own mentors. The path that helps us be cool to someone else :)
