The Mentor You Need Is Not the One You're Choosing

Every founder I have worked with wants the same thing from a mentor: someone who has already done it. Built something. Survived the hard years. Emerged with a track record, a network, and the kind of credibility that can open a door or reassure an investor. This makes complete sense. When you are building something from nothing, you want to learn from someone who has navigated what you are navigating.

The question our research asked — and the one I want to explore here — is not whether that kind of mentoring is valuable. It is. The question is what gets left out when it is the only kind of mentoring a founder seeks.

In interviews with ten early-stage founders across Asia, the Middle East, Australia and Africa, we found a consistent pattern: founders chose mentors primarily for their business expertise and network access. The emotional and psychological dimensions of the mentoring relationship were rarely named, rarely sought, and rarely offered. And this is not a minor gap. It may be one of the most significant unaddressed needs in the startup development ecosystem.

Three roles, one almost always missing

The academic literature on entrepreneurial mentoring identifies three distinct functions a mentor can serve. The first is the advisor: someone who gives concrete guidance on management, marketing, product, fundraising. The second is the role model and connector: an experienced entrepreneur who demonstrates what success looks like and opens doors to networks that would otherwise be inaccessible. The third is the psychosocial supporter: a mentor who works on the founder's sense of competence, identity, and effectiveness in their leadership role — providing acceptance, emotional grounding, and the kind of honest reflection that builds genuine self-awareness.

Both the first and second functions are well-represented in startup ecosystems worldwide. Accelerators, incubators, angel networks, founder communities — all of these provide advisors and role models in relative abundance. The third function is treated, at best, as a nice-to-have. In most cases, it is not treated at all.

"I ask advice mostly on the business aspect or doing sales or startup. But it's not like directly asking about leadership or how to lead. Mostly just from my observation of how they did it with their own company."

This quote from one of our interviewees is precise and worth sitting with. The founder is describing a form of learning that is real and genuinely useful: observational, vicarious, aspirational. But it is not psychosocial mentoring. It does not build self-knowledge. It does not help a founder understand their own emotional patterns, their relational blind spots, the leadership behaviours they default to under pressure. It gives them a model to imitate. It does not give them a deeper understanding of themselves.

The informal workaround, and why it is not enough

When we probed further, most founders described a patchwork of informal support: a co-founder who was slightly older and more experienced, a peer group of other founders who met occasionally, a life partner who absorbed the emotional weight of the difficult weeks. Some founders described relying heavily on these relationships as a substitute for formal mentoring — and in fact, more than half said they were simply too busy for a formal program.

There is real value in peer support and informal mentoring. The relationships our founders described were often characterised by genuine warmth, trust, and mutual respect built over years. But informality has limits. It is not systematically designed to build self-awareness. It does not reliably challenge the founder's self-perception or invite them to examine their assumptions about their own leadership. And it tends to focus, as one founder put it, on the question: "How is it going?" — not on "Who are you becoming?"

The distinction between those two questions is the distinction between mentoring that supports a founder's current trajectory and mentoring that genuinely develops them.

A note on gender

Something small but important appeared in our data. Women founders were more open than their male counterparts to discussing emotional challenges in mentoring conversations — stress, overwhelm, the tension between personal and professional demands. Male founders more often suppressed or deflected these conversations, or described bringing them to friends rather than mentors.

This is not a judgment. It is a pattern that reflects broader cultural conditioning around how men and women are socialised to relate to emotional experience. But it has practical implications. The founder who cannot name their emotional state cannot work on it. And unexamined emotional states do not disappear — they surface in decision-making, in the culture they build, in the way their team experiences them.

A psychosocial mentor creates the conditions for that examination to happen — safely, purposefully, and as a genuine professional development priority rather than an afterthought.

What this means in practice

In my work at Navigating Transformation, I have seen the turning point in founder development happen in a very specific moment. It is not when a founder receives a better piece of business advice. It is when they shift from asking "what should I do?" to asking "who am I being, and is that who I need to be right now?"

That shift requires a particular kind of support. It requires someone who is focused on the founder as a person, not only on the venture as a project. Someone who holds the space for honest self-examination without judgment, and who understands that the founder's inner development and the startup's outer success are not separate tracks — they are the same one.

The mentor you need may not be the most successful entrepreneur you know. It may be the one who helps you understand yourself well enough to lead.

Research Foundation :This blog draws on empirical research with 10 early-stage startup founders exploring psychosocial mentorship and founder leadership. Co-authored with Ivan Yong Wei Kit, Nanyang Angelz. Referencing Kram (1983, 1985), Sullivan (2000), Cope & Watts (2000), St-Jean & Mathieu (2015), and Chakravarthy (2011) on the distinction between coaching and mentoring.

If you are a founder who has never consciously sought psychosocial mentoring — and you're curious about what it would look like to work on your leadership identity in a structured way — I'd welcome the conversation..NavigatingTransformation@amfortas.eu                                                                                   — Dr. Eleftheria Egel, NavigatingTransformation