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For a founder, this means picking a single adviser who can inform your thinking, rather than someone who makes decisions for you. I've been incredibly fortunat

For a founder, this means picking a single adviser who can inform your thinking, rather than someone who makes decisions for you. I've been incredibly fortunate to have met someone locally who has the same level of tech and business expertise as I do. And appreciates the value and insight from multitude of industries. I really don't get along with many people at that deep of a level, so this was extremely rare. Truthfully I have never had anyone I would call mentor nearly my entire life. I've always figured everything out myself since that's just how I was raised. We're both mentors to each other, he has a difficult outlier upbringing like I have had, different but similar. I've never really realized what my true weaknesses were until the 5+ hour talks we have discussing everything from how youtube should learn UX from a pornsite, how to run a political campaign, psychology theories, neuroscience, chemistry, frontend development, leadership issues, project management, world education, dealing with nonprofit leaders, making money playing video games as kids. The talks vary with a really big open degree of openness, and changes every couple of minutes. I don't see eye to eye on his visions for the future, but I understand where he's coming from though. So I appreciate the value he has. I tend to think extremely short term and grab the "lowest hanging fruit" is what he tells me, but his visions are all about "planting seeds" which I don't really bother doing but should be All his skills complement mine in some weird backwards way and its nice to know that there's someone out there. I tend to think tech first before anything and he tends to think business first so its a nice mix of skills. I tend to be extremely assertive about my solutions since I've had to do hard sales pitches but his is more gradual and methodical. I don't know how well we work coding together though that might be a different story but we do see eye to eye on many management practice principles, I met him while doing nonprofit project management. Anyways, I just wanted to mention this because I find most if not all the advice I get is really not helpful. Unless you understand the logic behind why I am doing something before you say something "Seek to understand before commenting", then its hard for me to appreciate the value of input given. I appreciate the sentinment and thought process though.

akharris 8y ago
How did the two of you originally connect?
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  I went to my local techmeetup to volunteer and do some nonprofit work. There were 8 nonprofit companies that presented technical challenges they were facing. They wanted local devs to contribute to their missions as volunteer work. I met him there, said pleasantries and exchanges / what not. Didn't really learn much about him then The week after I had to attend a strategy meetup to actually do a mini "hackathon" of sorts for projects. Again the 8 companies would do their spiel, I immediately identified which projects were worth taking and which were not. Some were just beyond my skillsets others were too much in infancy, etc. I ended up finding the same guy at the meeting, we were talking silently about all our opinions about these nonprofits. How competent were they, how far along were they, etc He ended up picking the same 2 projects as I did before I knew about it. We split in groups, I noticed immediately all he did starting off was setting 8 seperate slack channels. He immediately knew communication was vital and capitalized on it. His company also does a lot of webdev / wordpress dev for nonprofits so it makes sense for him to do things this way. I got to learn and see his leadership and management skills in action. In many ways, they mirrored me own, but were different. While I think tech first and the solution at hand, his focus was more business oriented. I tend to have a blunder of just tossing the solution on a plate without getting all the requirements, and he recognized this instantly and kept things from going off topic. We started to hit it off and met up a few times on a 1:1 talking about life. He would have all these extremely absurd visions about how he wanted to build a social enterprise and making future impacts, but I couldn't see the motivation. Later as I got to know him better he told me of his hardships growing up (not going go into detail here), but they closely resembled my own. I have a debilitating hidden disability growing up that I have not really told anyone because I never wanted to be treated differently. He has terminal cancer and probably may or may not have a long lifespan. He hadn't really told anyone but a handful of people including me. I have never met someone so intelligent in my life in so many fields. He's been homeless at one point, worked in politics and legal / litigation, is a great developer, and is one of the best leaders and managers I have seen. I have pretty low expectations of people and rarely give compliments like this if that means anything. For the longest time in my life I've always wondered if I would meet a person like me. I didn't think it would happen because (1) I would probably never know enough about the person to know (2) my background experiences and hardships are a really far outlier that I think maybe one in a million people have experienced. The chances of meeting someone like me is almost next to impossible

akharris 8y ago

How did the two of you originally connect?

Kagerjay 8y ago
I went to my local techmeetup to volunteer and do some nonprofit work. There were 8 nonprofit companies that presented technical challenges they were facing. They wanted local devs to contribute to their missions as volunteer work. I met him there, said pleasantries and exchanges / what not. Didn't really learn much about him then The week after I had to attend a strategy meetup to actually do a mini "hackathon" of sorts for projects. Again the 8 companies would do their spiel, I immediately identified which projects were worth taking and which were not. Some were just beyond my skillsets others were too much in infancy, etc. I ended up finding the same guy at the meeting, we were talking silently about all our opinions about these nonprofits. How competent were they, how far along were they, etc He ended up picking the same 2 projects as I did before I knew about it. We split in groups, I noticed immediately all he did starting off was setting 8 seperate slack channels. He immediately knew communication was vital and capitalized on it. His company also does a lot of webdev / wordpress dev for nonprofits so it makes sense for him to do things this way. I got to learn and see his leadership and management skills in action. In many ways, they mirrored me own, but were different. While I think tech first and the solution at hand, his focus was more business oriented. I tend to have a blunder of just tossing the solution on a plate without getting all the requirements, and he recognized this instantly and kept things from going off topic. We started to hit it off and met up a few times on a 1:1 talking about life. He would have all these extremely absurd visions about how he wanted to build a social enterprise and making future impacts, but I couldn't see the motivation. Later as I got to know him better he told me of his hardships growing up (not going go into detail here), but they closely resembled my own. I have a debilitating hidden disability growing up that I have not really told anyone because I never wanted to be treated differently. He has terminal cancer and probably may or may not have a long lifespan. He hadn't really told anyone but a handful of people including me. I have never met someone so intelligent in my life in so many fields. He's been homeless at one point, worked in politics and legal / litigation, is a great developer, and is one of the best leaders and managers I have seen. I have pretty low expectations of people and rarely give compliments like this if that means anything. For the longest time in my life I've always wondered if I would meet a person like me. I didn't think it would happen because (1) I would probably never know enough about the person to know (2) my background experiences and hardships are a really far outlier that I think maybe one in a million people have experienced. The chances of meeting someone like me is almost next to impossible