The Beermat Entrepreneur reckons every startup entrepreneur should have a mentor. So do many TV programs about business, from Dragon’s Den to the Apprentice. The Prince’s Trust, a British charity that helps young people start businesses, will only fund a business that works with one of their mentors.

I ran my own computer games company for more than a decade. Since I sold it in 2000, I have been approached by eight or nine people to be their mentor. I helped one company for three years. I was also a mentor to two Prince’s Trust businesses. This post is based on the experience of being asked, rather than the experience of asking.

DOs

1. Remember that you are asking a favour. Generally people want two to four days a month of my time. Unpaid. This time isn’t free to me. Usually it means giving up my free time to do it. One or two people seem to expert 24/7 phone and email support plus an instant, passionate commitment to their company. Uh oh!
2. Have a business plan. Even if it is one or two sides of paper. I need to know that you have spent more than five minutes thinking about your business. I’m not a VC - it doesn’t have to be perfect or complete. I can help with that. It’s not a mentor’s job to come up with a business plan for you.
3. Have a plausible business. It’s good if you can show some kind of product, website, demand or sales. At the very least, be serious about starting your business. Several people have come to me while still in full-time employment and virtually asked me to start their business for them before they would quit. This isn’t a mentor’s role.
4. Show me a reason to do it. It doesn’t have to be money. In fact, I never received a penny from the three businesses I did mentor. But the product has to be interesting, the journey promising, perhaps there’s a possibility of equity or fees down the line. In one case, I mentored a personal training company and we time swapped: training for mentoring. If I’d charged them a full commercial rate for my time, it would have been unfair but swapping one hour of my time for one hour of their time seemed fair without being expensive.
5. Make contact by introduction or recommendation, if possible. An email out of the blue is less likely to get a hearing than an introduction from a mutual friend.
6. Do your homework on your would-be mentor. It’s more like a seduction than a recruitment exercise. Find out what your person is interested in, what is likely to motivate them, who they know and what they might be able to contribute. Use that information when you’re making your approach.
7. Do ask someone who has something to offer. Uncle Tom may be a good chap, but you need a mentor who has been through the process of starting a business themselves.

DON’Ts

1. Don’t be late for meetings. More than any other business relationship, the mentor relationship depends on trust and respect. Being flaky, especially when you are courting a mentor, is a recipe for disaster.
2. Don’t expect your mentor to run your business. A mentor isn’t a manager or a director. If you want a manager, hire one. If you need a lawyer or an accountant, hire them.
3. Don’t take them too seriously. It’s your business, not their’s. You have to make the decisions and even I have been known to make the occasional mistake.
4. Don’t ignore their advice. I quit mentoring one firm because they simply would not listen to the key point I was making: the reason that they were not growing or making a profit was because they did no marketing at all. No customers, no revenues. The entrepreneur was happy building a better mousetrap but figured that people would come to him by telepathy. The main reason to have a mentor is to see a bigger picture. Ignore it at your peril.
5. Don’t confuse investors with mentors. I have spoken to several successful businessmen who have taken on angel investment because they really liked the person with the money and thought they would be good mentors. In two cases, the relationship soured quickly and the investor became a thorn in the flesh and, in both cases, ended up driving the original entrepreneur out of the business.
6. Always ask before using their name. Another mentoree added my name to all his websites and correspondence, naming me as a non-executive director of the company (I wasn’t). Not good.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, mentor, Prince’s Trust, Beermat

This never happens to me. A chap in Russia deposited some money in an ATM and instead of crediting his account with 2,000 roubles, he got over 2 billion. He kept doing it until he had 70 billion. As reported on the English Russia blog (by way of the Risks Forum Digest email) I would have a bit more confidence in the yarn if we were given an original source, such as a newspaper, or the name of the lucky victim. Still, it’s a nice story.

Technorati Tags: ATM, risks, bank, error, Russia

• Garrett Dimon uses flickr to keep a collection of micro-screenshots of different websites to use as inspiration for future designs. The collection is pretty cool, as is his own site.
• Merlin’s list of five things. Some very funny, as in ‘Five things that I’ll bet can be hard for pirates.”

I’ve just finished reading Don Norman’s spirited and well-argued defence of PowerPoint. In his view it is not PowerPoint that corrupts but bad arguments, bad speeches and poor preparation. He takes issue with Edward Tufte’s arguments against PowerPoint (e.g. here in a Wired article: PowerPoint is evil):

Finally, let me review Tufte’s complaint about the presentation of data during the NASA Columbia incident. Here, Tufte points to a complex slide with 19 lines of text, with six different levels of hierarchy, displaying eleven sentences. The complaint, of course, is that the analyses failed to predict the actual damage that had occurred to the wing tiles when they had been struck by foam. Tufte goes on at excessive length to indicate why the slide is so poor and why it obscures information that might have led to a different conclusion. PowerPoint is bad, he concludes.

I differ most strongly with this assessment. Yes, the slide is very bad. Yes, it is almost incomprehensible. But in my opinion, the slide should have had less information on it—Tufte wants more information. He demonstrates this by showing how many words are on a page of a textbook. “So what?” I say. We read textbooks very differently than we listen to talks.

It’s easy for me to have my cake and eat it on this argument. I have argued both sides of the PowerPoint problem.

I’ve posted previously about the value of visual evidence and the way in which PowerPoint condenses thoughts into bullet points. Certainly, I use PowerPoint when I give speeches, but almost always use images and sometimes a few words per slide. Darren Strange has some good advice about making presentations and so does Guy Kawasaki.

I also respect the arguments from Presentation Zen that PowerPoint may have contributed to poor thinking in advance of the last Gulf War. And I’m a huge admirer of Tufte’s. I love the title of his new book: Beautiful Evidence.

In the end, blaming PowerPoint for bad presentations is like blaming Word for bad writing. At worst its an accomplice to a crime, not the criminal.

Technorati Tags: Presentations, PowerPoint, Tufte, Presentation Zen, Kawasaki

I’ve been reading a very interesting history of Electronic Arts on BusinessWeek and another on Wikipedia. I sold my first game, Imperium, to EA back in 1989 and continued working with them until I left the games business in 2000. It’s like that bit of history that falls between what you read about in the school textbooks and the bit of history that you experience in your life.

Today is a bank holiday in England. This means that it rains all day, people have fights with their family and no shops are open.  It’s nice to see the country sticking to its traditions.

• Amazing 3D scene capture technology. I spent several years of my life organising the digital capture of 3D terrain on golf courses for video games. This technology would have nailed it in an afternoon from the back of a golf buggy.
• How to name a planet from Collision Detection.
• Gorgeous pictures of libraries from around the world.

A rare bottle of wine can cost thousands of pounds.  Your own personal Picasso will run to millions.  Even lunch at The Fat Duck (probably the best restaurant in the world) costs more than 100 Big Macs.

But the collected works of Shakespeare or a PG Wodehouse novel or the latest issue of The New Yorker costs you the same as it costs the Duke of Westminster.  How cool is that?

Technorati Tags: Luxury, The Fat Duck, Shakespeare, PG Wodehouse, writing

Great article on IBM’s website about the use of language in computer programs. The basic theme is:

Clarity is important. Inexplicably, programmers who are otherwise quite obviously capable of precision in describing exactly what they want a computer to do in a dozen programming languages often cannot manage to describe clearly what it is about to do when using English.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about an incomprehensible error message I saw recently. I also wrote a post about Google’s smart use of language to appear more trustworthy and understandable (Not the usual yada yada).

Technorati Tags: Programming, dialog, language, writing, IBM, Google

Slate have got an online version of the  The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón.  This may be one of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words.  Check it out.

Technorati Tags: 9/11, Slate