Thoughts about mentoring experiences, on The Next Web.

Startup Weekend Mobile, Jan 2012, New York, NY

Ask a successful person if they have a mentor, and invariably they will tell you about deep, personal, long-running relationships that helped inspire and support them throughout their career. But beyond these deep mentoring relationships, there are many types of short-term mentoring experiences. How can one maximize a mentoring experience?

My post on The Next Web yesterday, How to be a great mentor (and a great mentee):

This past weekend I participated in Startup Weekend Mobile as a mentor, offering strategic advice to the teams of entrepreneurs sharing ideas and building companies in the mobile industry. In my daily job as a venture capitalist, I spend much of my time listening to entrepreneurs, helping them think about their ideas, challenges, and plans for their companies. But Startup Weekend (and other similar time-limited incubators, hackathons and programs) presents a unique challenge for mentors, as the limited-time and limited-scope structure of the event forces one to approach the mentoring process a little differently.

Here’s how to be a great mentor (and a great mentee) at an event like Startup Weekend.

More after the hop.

+

And yet, I feel like so few of us make the time to formally develop these relationships: hard to create, hard measure, and hard to sustain. And so the gap persists. That’s why movements like /mentoring are important; that’s why professional organizations emphasize their mentoring programs; that’s why incubators and accelerators often emphasize their mentor networks; they bring people together to share relevant ideas and advice in safe place. Sharing, to connection, to trust.

Here’s to an upcoming year of investing into those relationships.