When we were building Sēkr, everybody wanted to help.
That's the thing about raising money and building something with momentum: people show up. Experienced operators, successful founders, investors who aren't on your cap table, friends of friends who built something adjacent once. They want to offer perspective. They want to pass along what they learned. Some of them are genuinely trying to help. All of them have opinions.
There's an old line in venture: if you want investment, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for investment. The idea is that investors shift into advisory mode when you're not asking them for money — and back into investor mode the moment you are. What nobody says out loud is the corollary: most startup advice works the same way. The moment you ask for it, you've already shaped the conversation. You've decided what to surface, how to frame the problem, and what to leave out. The advice comes back shaped by those decisions.
And here's what I learned the hard way: the problem isn't the mentors. The problem is what happens when you collect enough of them.
The Opinion Management Problem
Mentor advice is almost always context-dependent. It's based on the advisor's experience in their company, in their market, at their stage, with their team. When they tell you what worked for them, they're telling you what worked in a specific set of conditions that may or may not resemble yours.
The challenge is that they can't know your conditions as well as you do. They're not in your business. They're visiting it, briefly, usually through the lens of whatever problem you've chosen to surface in a 45-minute conversation. Their advice is genuine. It's also necessarily incomplete.
Here's the part that's even harder to see: the advice you get is only as good as the information you share. And founders, consciously or not, are always curating what they bring into those conversations. You lead with the version of the problem that feels most manageable, or most urgent, or least embarrassing. The advisor responds to that version. The gap between what you shared and what's actually happening is exactly where the advice becomes least useful — and it's a gap the advisor can't see, because you didn't show it to them. You can't get perspective-full advice from someone who only has your perspective.
Collect five mentors and you'll get five perspectives. Some will align. Many will conflict. Now you have a new job: synthesizing conflicting inputs from people who don't share context, don't talk to each other, and each believe they're pointing you in the right direction. That synthesis work falls entirely to you. And it takes time and energy you could be spending on actually building.
At some point, managing your mentors becomes its own full-time job. And that's not why you started a company.
The Difference Between a Mentor and an Embedded Advisor
I want to be careful here, because I'm not arguing against all outside input. I'm a Techstars mentor. I believe in knowledge transfer. I've seen early-stage founders benefit enormously from the right guidance at the right time.
The distinction I'm drawing is between someone who knows your business and someone who knows about your business.
A mentor who meets with you quarterly — or infrequently, as most do — and hears updates is giving you advice based on a summary. An embedded advisor who's actually inside the problem, who knows your team, your metrics, your constraints, your customers, is giving you advice based on evidence. These are categorically different things, and conflating them is how founders end up acting on input that isn't actually informed by their reality.
Before I started SOM Aesthetics, I worked as what one client called "the CEO whisperer": embedded with CEO scientists at regulated biotech and pharma companies, helping them communicate to their investors, their medical teams, their patient communities. My advice was useful to those clients not because I was experienced, but because I was inside. I knew the pipeline. I knew the stakeholders. I knew what the CEO was afraid to say and why. That context is what makes guidance actionable rather than abstract.
What Actually Works: The Experimental Mindset
Here's the thing about conflicting mentor advice: it's actually telling you something useful. When experienced people disagree about what you should do, it often means the answer is genuinely uncertain. The only way to find out is to run the experiment.
This is where a scientific mindset is more valuable than a consensus-seeking one. You don't need everyone to agree on the right answer before you act. You need to design a reasonable test, run it with appropriate controls, monitor what happens, and update based on what the data actually shows, not what you expected, and not what your most persuasive mentor predicted.
The founders who navigate this well share a few characteristics. They treat advice as data, not direction. They take it in, consider it in context, but don't act on it until they've stress-tested it against their own understanding of their business. They stay open to being surprised by what works, because the things that work are often not the things anyone predicted. And they monitor obsessively, watching what's happening, tracking patterns, adjusting in real time.
What to Actually Look for in an Advisor
If you're going to bring someone into your orbit to help guide your decisions, here's what I'd look for:
They've actually built what you're trying to build: not something adjacent, not something in a different era or market, but something close enough that their experience maps to your constraints.
They're willing to get into the details: not just the thirty-thousand-foot perspective, but actually engage with your specific situation. The best advisors ask hard questions about things you haven't thought through yet. They're not just validating your strategy; they're stress-testing it.
They'll tell you what they don't know. The advisors who pretend to have certainty about everything are the ones to be most cautious with. The ones who say "I don't know enough about your market to say" and then help you figure out how to find out. Those are the ones worth your time.
Their availability matches your needs. A monthly check-in is better than nothing, but it's not the same as someone who's actually available when the decision needs to be made. Know what you're getting before you start depending on it.
The Bottom Line
Mentorship has real value. But the way the startup ecosystem has packaged it — collect as many mentors as possible, absorb as much advice as you can, build out your advisory roster — creates a version of the problem it's trying to solve. You end up with too many inputs, too little context behind each one, and the cognitive overhead of synthesizing them all while also trying to run a company.
Be selective. Prioritize depth over breadth. Look for people who will get inside your business rather than comment on it from the outside. And remember that no advisor, no matter how experienced, knows your situation better than you do. Their job is to sharpen your thinking, not replace it.
The experiment is still yours to run. Stay alert. Track what happens. Let results have the final word.