Launch HN: PlatoHQ (YC W16) – Mentorship for Engineers

1) Mentors who are already doing that or always wanted to do that, and what we provide them is:

- No time spent on scheduling / rescheduling. We take care of this for them

- We do a thorough work of qualification of the problem before so the mentee and mentors can jump right into the problem/challenge and spend 30 very efficient minutes

- A perfect matching so they spend time with only people they can actually help

- A product that ensures the follow-up, mentors don't want to give their time and receive 0 news from the mentee about how it evolved

2) For mentors who need to be convinced (although they already are very interested in the beginning, you can't convince someone who doesn't want to give their time), their feedback have been that:

(i)They good to give back/help

(ii)They learn a lot doing that, being confronted to so many different challenges every week challenges you

(iii)We offer our best mentors to be speakers on our monthly meet-up (we organized 4 so far, we gathered ~200 Engineering Leaders each time). Next one: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/plato-event-4-building-an-engin...

Hiring (good people) is a dev manager's/director's biggest pain.

1) The heavy process of recruiting the mentors (we talk to each single one of them to gather some stories)

2) The engineers that are working on the matching algorithme so mentors and mentees enjoy the calls

3) The manual task of scheduling and rescheduling the calls with mentors and mentees (and that's a cumbersome)

4) The engineers/designers that are working on the real product that is helping the mentor and mentee to build a long, lasting relationship that will be more efficient than just networking and having coffee.

About your second point, I agree that is the main challenge. This is how we'll tackle this:

1) For each new mentor, we assess their experience by gathering stories (examples of stories here stories.platohq.com)

2) So each mentor has some specific domain of expertise / things they like to talk about

3) You're not generally good or bad, but you can help on specific things by giving advice, or at least just sharing your experience on how you approached things (and that helps)

I hope that makes sense.

The idea of this service seems to be to very easily connect you with high calibre people that are willing to spend time helping you. If you have access to such people on a daily basis already then you probably don't need this service.

Seems worth it as a perk for a company to offer to their employees - would be much more work for them to have to reach out and find mentors for their employees manually.

For an individual, probably doesn't make sense.

For a company as an employee perk, seems to make a lot of sense.

Any feedback about the product? Did you have some actionable and good advice from the mentors?

Everyone has their own incentives. Even though it can be linked to Koan, I guess that it's alwasy a combination of many factors. His words :"i've been lucky enough to have an exec coach for the past couple years and he's great. I aspire to be better at it over time"