Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II (Part 13)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Basil: Finding good mentors it is something that you can do that’ll make a big difference in your success. I would go even further – and I think it’s a natural law. I have for more than ten years been going out looking for successful entrepreneurs who do not have mentors.

I often will be in front of several hundred people in an audience and I’ll be giving a talk and I’ll say, If anybody ever finds an entrepreneur who has been very successful but did not have a mentor, send her to me because I would like to know if there are any exceptions to the rule.

A couple times I thought I had found somebody who was entrepreneur who did not have a mentor. But when I dug deeper, what I found was he may not have even known it himself, but there was somebody.

It might have been an uncle with whom he had dinner every Sunday at his mom’s house, and he may have ended up outside talking on the porch about business. Or it may have been a teacher. It often comes from places that are not obvious but I believe that, effectively, all successful entrepreneurs have good mentors.

It’s never easy to find the good mentors because the good ones are always in demand, they’re busy. I think of myself as a fairly intelligent fellow, but I’m embarrassed by how many times in my life it has taken me decades to figure something out.

And mentors is one of those things that I’m embarrassed by because when my cofounder and I were running the company, we would regularly go away from the company and into a restaurant for lunch.

One thing we used to do was bitch and complain about our angel investors. We would say that they were meddling in their company and we didn’t them to help us. We wanted to figure it out for ourselves, like all entrepreneurs. That’s one of the characteristics of entrepreneurs.

Too often they want to figure it out for themselves. Our angel investors insisted on what we called meddling. Now I understand what they were actually doing was they were preventing us from blowing the company up, which without them we would have done at least half a dozen times.

At the time, I couldn’t see it. I didn’t have enough experience to understand why they were doing what they were doing, but now at a later stage in my career, I can see times where I have saved specific companies. I have saved them myself, personally, from certain failure sometimes six or twelve times in one company.

That might sound like an arrogant statement but when I say that and somebody says, Well, how do you know? I can point to some companies where I know that if I hadn’t worked very, very hard for three weekends in a row, they would not have made payroll.

Not making payroll is one of those things that very quickly leads to corporate death. Almost certainly. Many times in individual companies, I’ve saved the same company – literally saved – from certain failure more than once. It’s just because if you’ve done it enough times, if you’ve seen the same situation ten or twelve times, even if you’re just average smart, you’ll start to recognize the patterns. And that’s what mentors do for entrepreneurs.

They just add the experience that there is no way to get from a book or a blog or from a university class. At this point, we don’t understand entrepreneurship well enough to write it down and to have anything other than that actual smart person working with you. There’s no substitute for that mentoring in my opinion.

This segment is part 13 in the series : Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Basil Peters, CEO and Fund Manager, Fundamental Technologies II
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15