I've noticed two types of interactions
between mentors and entrepreneurs: serendipitous and planned.
Serendipitous meetings between mentor and entrepreneur tend to occur
at networking events, events like Startup Weekend or Philly TechMeetup, or even at coffee shops. Just as the word implies,
serendipitous is unplanned, and even though neither party knows they
are going to be in the same space at the same time, they discuss
business and the mentor provides advice. Planned meetings between
mentor and entrepreneur tends to occur over the phone, Skype, or
face-to-face in office space or even a coffee shop. Planned meetings
are more secluded and are set for a specified amount of time when
compared to serendipitous meetings. When performing these
observations, I asked myself what is required for learning to occur? I conjectured that it must be a safe mental space. To answer this question and test the validity of this statement, I looked for evidence of the emotional states during the interaction between mentor and entrepreneur to see if I could determine whether the entrepreneur was receiving business feedback in a safe mental space. Even though this statement helped guide my observations, in the end, the observations were useful in designing the prototypes for serendipitous and planned interactions.
Serendipitous Interactions:
One of the major patterns observed
amongst serendipitous mentoring is a reflection of affect between the
mentor and entrepreneur. If one individual was laughing the other did
as well, if one individual was serious as was the other.
I’ve
learned from observing several unstructured and spontaneous mentoring
in action, that a similarity in affect creates a social lubricant
creating a safe mental space. Once this safe mental space is created,
the feedback provided by the mentor was usually better received. At
it’s most basic, this observation is simply a factor of how humans
interact and communicate. Let me provide two examples of the same
entrepreneur. In the picture below from Startup Weekend, both the
entrepreneur and mentor were relaxed when the entrepreneur was
receiving feedback on marketing and marketing strategies. After the
meeting, the entrepreneur felt confident, calm, and had a sense of
self-efficacy.
During the follow interaction depicted
in the picture below, the mentor and entrepreneur were both tense.
The mentor was providing feedback on the entrepreneur's product, and
what channels of distribution they're using to reach their customers.
After this interaction, the entrepreneur felt confused and
frustrated. He was unsure about what channel of distribution to
incorporate into his business model and presentation to the judges at
Startup Weekend.
Planned Interactions:
While observing planned mentor
interactions, I discovered four distinct steps that the interaction
followed – an in-depth analysis of these four steps can be readabout in the next section because it lays the foundation for the
Request for Mentoring Form. The part that I will discuss here are the
emotional states I observed when the mentor began probing the
entrepreneur about his business.
I'll pull data from one of the
interactions I observed to serve as an example. The entrepreneur was
asking about when he should raise funds and the terms associated with
raising investment funds. To answer the question about when he should
raise funds, the mentor then began asking questions about how the
entrepreneur had acquired a hospital as a customer. The startup is
building an app for doctors. The mentor followed up with how quickly
the entrepreneur can acquire new hospitals as customers. The mentor
then walked the entrepreneur through a set of scenarios based on
assumptions of how quickly the entrepreneur can acquire new
customers. When the meeting was over, the mentor was telling the
entrepreneur that the business he's starting is valuable and the
business has potential.
There are three distinct emotional
states I noticed in the interaction between the entrepreneur and
mentor. The first emotional state is calm because the entrepreneur is
bringing the mentor up to speed on the current state of his business.
The second emotional state is anxiety because the mentor is pulling
out of the entrepreneur, the information she sees relevant to
answering the question, to provide feedback, and to give strategic
advice. The third emotional state is encouragement because the mentor
provides encouragement to the entrepreneur about the business he's
starting and the problem he's solving. However, there's a limitation
to what I've observed about the third emotional state. During
serendipitous mentoring interactions, the third emotional state went
one of two ways: either no encouragement or encouragement. Since I've
only observed four of these planned meetings, it's possible that it
can also end with no encouragement, and I conjecture that there would
be no closure to the anxiety that surfaces during the second
emotional state.