Why Many Startup Mentor Programs Fail Founders

If you’ve ever tried to build a mentor network in a developing startup ecosystem, you’ve likely run into the same problem I have: there just aren’t enough experienced mentors to go around. This is why many startup mentor programs fail and the founder and the community fails as well.

It’s not that there aren’t smart, successful businesspeople willing to help. There are plenty of executives, consultants, and seasoned professionals who want to give back. But being a good businessperson and being a good startup mentor are two very different things.

A great mentor for a scaling startup is someone who has lived through the chaos—the uncertainty, the pivoting, the resource constraints, and the constant pressure to figure it out fast. The challenge in nascent ecosystems is that these folks are often in short supply.

So what happens? Well, in an attempt to fill the mentor bench, ecosystem builders start recruiting “good businesspeople” instead. These folks have deep industry knowledge, decades of experience in corporate leadership, or successful small businesses under their belt. But they’ve never raised venture capital, never launched a product into an unknown market, and never had to hire their first 10 employees with only six months of runway left in the bank.

Their advice, while well-intentioned, can be counterproductive in a startup environment. Startups aren’t just smaller versions of big companies (I love this Steve Blank quote.) They operate under completely different rules—rules that experienced startup mentors understand intuitively, but traditional business mentors often don’t.

I’ve seen this play out in community after community. A startup hub launches a mentor program. First thing they do is reach out to their board and/or funders for who to recruit. The list of the handful of high-quality, experienced startup mentors is easy but they are usually busy with their own startups. So they add the well-known local business tycoons. This is OK but the mix is wrong. Then it gets worse. As demand from founders grows, they feel pressure to scale the program. So they lower the bar to entry, adding more “mentors” who have business experience but lack the startup lens.

What happens next is predictable: Founders, eager for guidance, get stuck in mentor whiplash—bogged down by conservative, risk-averse advice that contradicts the reality of scaling a startup. The mentor network starts to lose credibility, and founders stop showing up.

The end result? The very thing we were trying to build—a strong, effective support network for founders—gets diluted to the point of being useless.

If we’re serious about mentorship in developing ecosystems, we need to rethink how we scale:

1. Quality over quantity – More mentors isn’t always better. A small, highly experienced mentor network will always outperform a large, unfocused one.
2. Founder-to-founder mentoring – Encourage successful entrepreneurs (even if they’re just a few steps ahead) to mentor newer founders. Everyone is a mentor with some amount of experience to share.
3. Targeted expertise – Instead of broad mentorship programs, focus on building niche expertise in areas where founders need the most help. You can’t know this answer unless you ask the founders, by-the-way.
4. Train the mentors – If we must include non-startup mentors, we need to educate them on the differences between traditional business and startup dynamics. I recently ran a couple How To Mentor sessions and the feedback was surprising and net/net, the sessions were really critical.
5. Use your out-of-region network – This is easier today than it was pre-COVID. With readily available video chat services and a willingness to acquire knowledge this way, reach out to area alumni and add these mentors to your bench.

Scaling mentorship in a way that actually helps founders is hard. But if we do it right, we avoid the trap of well-meaning, ineffective mentorship that ultimately does more harm than good.

Let’s build better mentor networks—not just bigger ones.