[valhallarecords]

I've had various mentors through formal and informal channels such as my university, my workplace, and through friends.

I've found that the mentors I've found informally have been the most valuable.

I've found the app Weave to be actually pretty useful in meeting interesting people. I wouldn't have the mindset of finding a mentor but rather one of sharing ideas with interesting people. A mentor implies a one-way value exchange, whereas my best mentor relationships have been those where we've learned from each other. For example, one person might have first hand experience in raising money while I would have experience in building apps in the current mobile app ecosystem.

My former workplace had a mentor program where senior marketers can be paired with junior marketers. From my experience these formal programs are a bit flakey and I didn't get too much out of it. Same goes for the mentor program at my university.

I've also found going to hackathons to be a good place to find mentors. My background is marketing but I build mobile apps now. I learned a significant amount of my practical programming skills by working with new teammates at hackathons.