Daniel Gross: belief

Transcript context

…I don’t think anyone talks to you like you’re a normal human being, but it has nothing to do with the mess in your office. [laughter] One of the things that I’m curious about is, a lot of us are looking for good mentors. What is a good way to figure out if someone will be a good mentor, especially long term? Is there a way to interview for a good mentor? I grew up outside of Silicon Valley, and I was very interested in tech. My father taught computer science for a living. He didn’t really teach me how to code, but he set up a home with a lot of coding books, and that was the only thing to read, so that was what I did. That aside, I remember a time before YouTube. I’m old enough to say that, but I’m also young enough to say that I remember, once YouTube came online, I just never stopped watching content and lectures on it. I find it’s interesting. A lot of people here want the best real-world mentors, but we do have this amazing product that 50 years ago, people could barely dream of, where we have, effectively, an infinite amount of content from the world’s best teachers, investors, mathematicians. For me, when I was running my business, it was actually very helpful in specific ways, like you learned specific tricks. But also, watching very charismatic leaders talk is definitely a great thing to do the night before you have your all hands. I think that the amazing thing about the reality we live in today is yes, you can interview literally millions of mentors on YouTube for free, basically anywhere in the world. I found, for me, that was a huge thing. Silicon Valley in particular — obviously, it’s a very porous place, and people are generally very helpful to each other. You tend to have — I wouldn’t call them mentors, but people who take a step of goodwill. Based on limited information they have on you, they go out of their way to help you, and someone did the same thing to them. In many ways, I wouldn’t be here without someone taking a bet and funding me, and now I’m trying to pay it forward to others. Those things come into your lap. I do worry a little bit when I meet people who are overtly searching for mentors for the sake of finding mentors. I’m wondering, whatever you’re looking for, I don’t think that’s quite going to satisfy it. To the extent one wants just good mental models of like, what does a really good salesperson look like, or what does a really good math professor look like? That’s available online in unlimited fashion. Tyler, I don’t know if you have a different view, but that’s fine. If you want to find good mentors, I would say focus on yourself. Don’t focus too much on finding the mentor. If I’m thinking of someone I might usefully mentor, and they would, in turn, teach me things, I would wonder, “Well, is this person as curious as I am?” Something like that would be a starting point. I do figure they can’t fake that. They can’t even set out to become more curious. There’s something a little forced about that. But if they actually are very curious and just allow that to grow, they will end up in a position where maybe I will end up having a connection with them. For it to happen organically, figure out what your strengths are, and let those blossom, and then just be out there. But again, don’t try to force the mentoring thing too much because potential mentors can sniff that out, and that, to them, is very boring. Someone who wants to be mentored is the most boring thing you can imagine. Someone who wants to learn something can be very interesting, however.…

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