A bunch of accelerators and mentorship programs rely on volunteer mentors. There are a couple of reasons I hate this:

1.) If you’re a for-profit company benefitting from the value of folks’ knowledge, pay for it. You think that experience isn’t worth any money? You think the mentors will benefit through “exposure”? I get that the draw is supposed to be “leads” for these mentors to get a jump on investing, but that’s like saying artists are fairly compensated through exposure.

2.) It biases the kinds of mentors you get, to those that are financially secure, and likely have *always* been financially secure. Which means your mentors are going to be heavily steeped in survivor bias. But what kind of advice and perspective are most of your people going to encounter? Failure and struggle. And while almost all of the “survivors” encountered failure and struggle and then succeeded, there are *far more* people who encountered failure and struggle and then didn’t. But their advice isn’t less valuable or meaningful, and for a lot of underrepresented communities, probably contains more helpful, more relevant information for their experience – struggles that a lot of homogenous “winners” at startups *literally never experienced*.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work with an accelerator that paid a fair rate for mentors, and would happily do so again. But I’m not interested in donating my time to a for-profit structure that will rely on my good will so they can make money.