How to Find Mentors and Advisors for Your Startup

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When pitching your company, are you pitching it to mentors and advisors or are you just pitching it to random people at Starbucks? I think that one piece of advice that Justin Kahn gives that I really like is aggressively practice pitching friends, colleagues, existing investors before you go out. "I get asked five times a day, can I be a mentor to a company that I would consider?" he says.

Michael Seibel is a Partner and the CEO of YC.

He cofounded Justin.tv, which was in the Winter 2007 batch and Socialcam, which was in the Winter 2012 batch.

For this episode we took questions from the internet. If you have questions for a future office hours episode, just tweet them our way.

Read the transcript here.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

We're accepting applications from startups for the Winter 2019 funding cycle. Apply here.

Questions

00:25 - Why is YC worth 7% of your company?

6:25 - Generating leverage when fundraising

12:07 - Youssef asks - How did you validate your product market fit?

15:00 - LC Carrier asks - How does YC feel about companies who don't want to raise VC after the program?

17:05 - Edmilson Rodrigues asks - Do companies need to be incorporated already to participate in YC?

18:50 - Alex Rodriguez asks - What do you look for in startups that haven't had good growth but continue to push through (e.g. AirBnB) that makes you accept them?

26:50 - Fedor Paretsky asks - Do you have techniques you encourage to make pitches sound more exciting?

35:05 - David Chen asks - How to find mentors and advisors?

39:25 - building EatNeat asks - What if anything are you specifically looking for in a startup that wants to be a part of the Startup School 2018?

40:00 - Ryan Carl Mercer asks - What's your preferred way organizing your time?

41:05 - John Rigler asks - Can intrapreneurship be effective? I recently returned to IBM, have a patent, and yet have only vague ideas about how to signal and organize other like-minded folks. Could this path sabotage my dreams?

41:55 - Horacio Chávez asks - How would you approach an investor who says "I won't invest unless you have a patent"?

42:35 - Yahya Elamrani asks - Why does it feel like entrepreneurs aren’t marriage material? Should an entrepreneur look for an entrepreneurial spouse?

44:15 - Yahya Elamrani asks - How intense do you really have to be to found a startup?

48:50 - Is there a particular stage of company that's best served by Startup School?

50:35 - How do you get the most out of Startup School?