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

39 points by qhoang09 9y ago

Hi HN! We are the cofounders of PlatoHQ (https://www.platohq.com https://www.platohq.com) and we come from an Engineering Background. After having graduated from college, with two of my engineers friends, we decided to build our own company (the name of our company was Birdly). We made a lot of mistakes along the way; and one of the biggest was to hire too soon a bunch of engineers. We were all three technical cofounders so we could have built the MVP ourselves. But instead of that, we decided that two cofounders over three would do the “Product management” and “Marketing", and that we should hire 3 engineers (including 2 interns) to code the product for us. That was before YC. YC could have prevented us from making that mistake. And this had been our worst mistake. We transitioned from “Individual Contributor” to “Engineering Managers”. We happened to spend more time doing “management” than building the product and optimizing for product-market fit. We were doing the rookie mistakes most first-time engineering managers do. Among some rookie mistakes: - We hired our engineers focusing only on their technical capabilities - We didn’t make one-on-ones, but rather two-on-ones, and we focused on performance and operational - We micromanaged them, and even time-boxed them sometimes - And many more mistakes… But at the time, those mistakes were unknown unknowns. In other words, we didn’t even know we were doing the bad things. We don’t all need to do all those mistakes, or at least, when we do, we should know it, figure it out and fix it. That’s why we’re building Plato, a platform to find your perfect mentor to help you become a better Engineering Leader. Mentors of the community come from top tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Trello, Netflix, Spotify, Digital Ocean, Segment, Uber… They want to help you avoid the common pitfalls they learned the hard way. Among our mentors, we have the - First Engineer at Box (Going from 10 to 1200 employees), - the VP Engineering at Lyft (and founder of Google Street View), - Cofounder of Pagerduty, - VP Engineering at Segment, - Director of Engineering at Box, - CTO/Cofounder of Jive Software… - And more... It's real, you can really talk to them and receive advice. Mentors are not paid that is why we can provide an affordable price of $199 per month for an access to all the mentors and an unlimited number of calls with them. Mentors do this for other incentives, happy to discuss more if you're interested. Also, I know many of you already have learned the hard way many lessons like us. I’m sure many of you would be amazing mentors. Feel free to let us know if you want to become a mentor. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to become a mentor. Looking forward to having your feedback on our new product, Thanks, HN community!

tabeth 9y ago
I'm curious to how this is priced. For less than $200 you could buy a coffee for yourself and someone else and meet with them in person every day. I do see how a small start-up could benefit from this, though. However, unlike most things this probably would become worse as more people use it as there's a fixed amount of good mentors and a fixed amount of time with them. Unlimited time with them means waiting, which would eventually make the product itself unusable. I don't see a solution to this problem. Education has the same problem, yet to be solved.
- qhoang09 9y ago
  What we price is: 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.
- arikr 9y ago
  > I'm curious to how this is priced. For less than $200 you could buy a coffee for yourself and someone else and meet with them in person every day. 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.
  - qhoang09 9y ago

39 points by qhoang09 9y ago

tabeth 9y ago

I'm curious to how this is priced. For less than $200 you could buy a coffee for yourself and someone else and meet with them in person every day. I do see how a small start-up could benefit from this, though. However, unlike most things this probably would become worse as more people use it as there's a fixed amount of good mentors and a fixed amount of time with them. Unlimited time with them means waiting, which would eventually make the product itself unusable. I don't see a solution to this problem. Education has the same problem, yet to be solved.

qhoang09 9y ago
What we price is: 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.
arikr 9y ago
> I'm curious to how this is priced. For less than $200 you could buy a coffee for yourself and someone else and meet with them in person every day. 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.
- qhoang09 9y ago