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

[qhoang09]

Hi HN!

We are the cofounders of PlatoHQ (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!

[daxorid]

Mentors do this for other incentives

Can you please elaborate on this? It seems like your list of mentors is rather vast, and I'm curious what you've offered them.

[qhoang09]

There are two categories of mentors:

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...

[rficcaglia]

Perhaps it is simply access to a curated pipeline of motivated and introspective potential candidates.

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

[HenriNext]

Though, if the mentors poach mentees, then the company of the mentee won't be happy paying for the service.

[arikr]

My guess: giving back

[_m8fo]

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]

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.

[Grustaf]

> you could buy a coffee for yourself and someone else and meet with them in person every day

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.

[arikr]

> 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]

Agreed! We have a bunch of CTOs/cofounders and small startups, but we have also Lyft, TuneIn, Betterment, Scality, Telmate as customers.

Some individual paying from their own pocket to invest in their career, but it's more rare ;)

[tln]

I used Plato at a previous gig (now I'm back to a small startup). My (previous) company was happy to invest in training for managers. Given the unique challenges of managing sw engineers, getting such specific mentorship was very valuable.

[qhoang09]

I think I know who you are, T. :)

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

[HenriNext]

The idea seems extremely useful for the mentees.

However, i'm curious how you convinced YC, as this seems to be against what YC normally wants:

- Your market seems very small: only software engineers, and only at specific career stage.

- Your mentor side doesn't seem scaleble: top mentors won't be willing to handle unlimited number of calls as the number of mentees grows, the number potential high caliber mentors is very limited, and if you get lower caliber mentors then the service won't be that valuable.

[sandGorgon]

quick nitpick - on https://www.platohq.com/our_mentors.html , you should make company name searchable. for example, ctrl-f and searching for "facebook" doesnt work, because you have used icons everywhere.

[jkarneges]

> CTO/Cofounder of Jive Software

Matt's a great guy, and it's fitting that he'd be involved with Plato given that his next startup is a tool for managers (https://koan.co/).

[qhoang09]

Indeed, Matt is great. He's one of our most appreciated mentor ;)

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"

[Danilka]

Good idea. Signed up for a call.