Peer Mentoring (Founder-to-Founder)
Why it matters:
Peer mentoring – founders mentoring fellow founders – can be a powerful accelerant for growth. Entrepreneurial peers understand your journey firsthand and can offer empathy, accountability, and relevant support. Importantly, peer mentorship is reciprocal by nature: today you might help a peer with your expertise in one area, tomorrow they’ll help you with theirs.
Peer mentoring best practices
| Best Practice | Example in Practice |
|---|---|
| Create a Safe, Trusted Space – Confidentiality and psychological safety are the foundation. | Two co-founders schedule a private weekly Zoom where they agree nothing leaves the room, allowing honest talk about team conflicts and personal stress. |
| Celebrate and Encourage – Small wins matter. Recognition sustains momentum. | A peer mentoring group kicks off each session with a “what went well” round to build positive energy. |
| Practice Empathy and Active Listening– Understand before being understood. | When one founder vents about investor pressure, their peer listens fully before offering feedback or solutions, then mirrors back what they heard. |
| Give First and Pay It Forward – Generosity builds trust and strengthens bonds. | A founder shares their pitch deck and connections without being asked, simply to help another startup in their cohort succeed. |
| Be Action-Oriented – Focus on outcomes. Define questions and next steps. | End each session with 2–3 concrete to-dos, such as “Let’s both interview 5 customers using the script we developed together. (Customized as necessary) by next week”. |
| Hold Each Other Accountable – Recap commitments and check in regularly. | A founder reminds their partner about their goal to follow up with a potential customer, or investor or hire, and asks what happened when they meet again. |
7 Conversation Starters:
- “Tell us about a recent win or lesson learned. What’s one insight you gained that others might benefit from?”
- “What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing this week, and how can I help break it down or think it out?”
- “Is there a part of your work where you might be making assumptions – or where you’d like a second set of eyes to spot anything you might be missing?”
- “What’s one ambitious goal you have for this quarter?”
- “What experience, knowledge or skill would you most like to gain now? (Let’s brainstorm how you might attain it)”
- “What’s one mistake you made early on—and how would you do it differently now?”
- “What’s one challenge you’ve already faced or place you got stuck— and how did you overcome it?”
See
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
Peer Mentoring (Founder-to-Founder)
Here’s the surprise for today: aren’t we all possible mentors? Throughout this session you’ve all been helping each other, which answers the question of where you go for mentors.
My favorite mentors are peers. They’re not the rock stars or the superstars, who are usually out of touch with what I’m doing. Where else can you get better mentorship than from your co-founder, or from other people who are starting companies? The iLab is full of it. We’re incredibly lucky at Harvard to have this incredible resource across all the schools, hundreds of you in this lab working on these problems together. Please take advantage of it and go form peer relationships. If you liked any of the answers you heard from people tonight, go talk to them.
There’s a wonderful thing about peer mentorship, which by this point won’t surprise you: these people asking all the same questions as you are great mentors, precisely because they’re asking the questions that will help you think too. So go find people on every level, and ask the kinds of questions you’re doing, and that very much includes your peers.
On the question of how to develop a relationship with someone who inspires you but isn’t very accessible: there are different kinds of mentors in life and they all have value. Peer value is important, and so is the inspiring mentor. Take the Warren Buffett story: he met Benjamin Graham, who was his teacher, and they developed a mentorship. How do you do that? You have to offer value; start the relationship in service to the other person, and slowly you get value back too. If you start by asking questions and being annoying, it’s difficult for busy people to take you on. But go back to a firm principle: mentorship is a gift. Even if you’re approaching Warren Buffett, those people are just people too, and they need in some form to feel rewarded in how they give. So no matter how lofty they are, approach it by recognizing that and saying, “Would you find it valuable to give this gift of mentorship? I’m excited about receiving it.” You’d be shocked how many people say yes, no matter how brilliant, lofty, successful, or famous they are.
And if it’s hard to develop a relationship only by email, don’t do it only by email. Find a way to get to them that’s not just email. Nothing’s impossible if you believe it; don’t make it impossible for yourself to approach that person. What’s the worst that could happen? You might fail, and then you’ll learn that was the wrong person for you, or you did the wrong thing, and you try again. There’s no such thing as failure here.
One more piece of peer wisdom for two people with diverse viewpoints who see things differently: you two might make awesome coaches to each other. Meet and talk about who you picked as mentors and why, and what you could learn from each other. It might not be comfortable initially, but that’s exactly the value.