There’s a tenuous balance between telling someone what to do and giving advice. It’s especially difficult as a mentor, especially if you’ve previously been a CEO and are used to being “the decider.” As a mentor, you aren’t the decider. The CEO you are mentoring is the decider. This dynamic is also true for many board […]

Two mentors in one of the Techstars programs were both people who I knew well. They hated each other as a result of being co-founders of companies that had been bitter rivals. Each company was successful, but their paths ended up being very different. These two co-founders hadn’t interacted with each other, but the CEOs of […]

Last month I took two weeks completely off the grid. As part of it, I spent some time working on my next book, Give First. As part of that, I finished up the sections on Deconstructing the Techstars Mentor Manifesto. While I wrote a draft of this post over a month ago, It felt appropriate […]