- Having advisors or a network of people to help is crucial for early stage founders, especially first time founders.
- Finding advisors who are a few years ahead in the same industry can provide valuable insights and advice.
- Advisors who have recently experienced similar challenges can share relevant anecdotes and strategies.
- Advisors who are further along in their careers are better for strategic thinking and brainstorming ideas.
- It is important to have a broad set of advisors and seek advice from multiple sources.
- Incorporating advice and experiences from advisors into decision making is necessary.
- Offering compensation, such as equity grants, to advisors is common.
- Setting up regular meetings or calls with advisors can ensure consistent support and guidance.
- Overall, it is important for startup CEOs to have advisors and mentors to navigate the challenges of building a startup.

Pebble Watch founder and Y Combinator partner Eric Migicovsky on how he found startup advisors, how his advisors helped Pebble, and how he compensated his advisors with equity.

https://twitter.com/ericmigi

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year. 

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Bringing on advisors or creating a network of people who can help you is critical for an early stage founder, especially a first time founder.

I had ups and downs in the process, but that's just like every other part of building a startup.

So I had really good success finding advisors that were about 3 to 5 years ahead of me in the same domain that I was working on.

So I started a hardware consumer electronics company.

What I did was I reached out to several other CEOs that had created moderately to successful consumer electronics companies but were about 3 years ahead of me in in the kind of life cycle of doing this startup.

The advisors that I started working with were amazing because the experiences that they had were still really fresh.

So they could share anecdotally like, I had this problem, I tried doing this, it didn't work, so I tried that and it worked.

And the experiences that they had were still relevant because the time frame was relatively close.

They could actually remember and look back at emails and things to see what they actually did.

I had other advisors and mentors who were kind of later in the stage.

So these were people that I would go to to say like, hey, could I just like sit down and throw some ideas around and get your feedback on these things.

They were less useful for like, I need to hire someone in this domain, like, could you recommend 4 people that I could talk to?

It's important to have a broad set of advisors.

This is kind of 1 of the tough things about being a CEO and really is the 1 job that a CEO has, which is at the end of the day, the buck stops with you.

You can't outsource all your decision making to someone else.

So this happens to be something that you'll need to attack with your advisors as well.

You need to incorporate their advice or their experiences into your own mind and make decisions that draw from them.

Everyone has tons of different experiences that they've gone through.

Some people think that they will be able to apply their experiences directly into your company.

That probably won't happen all the time and it's your job to Incorporate these pieces of advice and figure out how they apply into your situation It's pretty common to offer advisors Especially ones that are going to be helping you over a longer period of time some sort of compensation A pretty common setup is to do a startup advisor option grant of around a quarter of a percent to maybe 3 quarters of a percent, vesting monthly over 2 years.

Sometimes you can have a cliff, but more often than not, it's just a 2 year path to that equity.

I also like to have, for some advisors that I'm granting equity to, I like to actually make them work for it.

For example, I set up a weekly call with my marketing mentor.

8.30 every Monday, we'd pick up the phone and we'd chat with each other for about 15-20 minutes.

I thought that was a pretty good cadence for someone who was really there to help me out.

So in conclusion, I think it's really important for startup CEOs to get advisors and mentors who can help them in their journey.


Speaker 0: Bringing on advisors or creating a network of people who can help you is critical for an early stage founder, especially a first time founder. I did it myself. I had ups and downs in the process, but that's just like every other part of building a startup. You just have to kind of embrace that. So I had really good success finding advisors that were about 3 to 5 years ahead of me in the same domain that I was working on.

So I started a hardware consumer electronics company. What I did was I reached out to several other CEOs that had created moderately to successful consumer electronics companies but were about 3 years ahead of me in in the kind of life cycle of doing this startup. The advisors that I started working with were amazing because the experiences that they had were still really fresh. So they could share anecdotally like, I had this problem, I tried doing this, it didn't work, so I tried that and it worked. And the experiences that they had were still relevant because the time frame was relatively close.

They could actually remember and look back at emails and things to see what they actually did. I had other advisors and mentors who were kind of later in the stage. They were better for strategic thinking. So these were people that I would go to to say like, hey, could I just like sit down and throw some ideas around and get your feedback on these things. They were less useful for like, I need to hire someone in this domain, like, could you recommend 4 people that I could talk to?

It's important to have a broad set of advisors. This is kind of 1 of the tough things about being a CEO and really is the 1 job that a CEO has, which is at the end of the day, the buck stops with you. You can't outsource all your decision making to someone else. So this happens to be something that you'll need to attack with your advisors as well. You can't go to 1 person.

You need to go to multiple people. You need to incorporate their advice or their experiences into your own mind and make decisions that draw from them. Everyone loves giving advice. Everyone has tons of different experiences that they've gone through. Some people think that they will be able to apply their experiences directly into your company.

That probably won't happen all the time and it's your job to Incorporate these pieces of advice and figure out how they apply into your situation It's pretty common to offer advisors Especially ones that are going to be helping you over a longer period of time some sort of compensation A pretty common setup is to do a startup advisor option grant of around a quarter of a percent to maybe 3 quarters of a percent, vesting monthly over 2 years. Sometimes you can have a cliff, but more often than not, it's just a 2 year path to that equity. I also like to have, for some advisors that I'm granting equity to, I like to actually make them work for it. For example, I set up a weekly call with my marketing mentor. 8.30 every Monday, we'd pick up the phone and we'd chat with each other for about 15-20 minutes.

I thought that was a pretty good cadence for someone who was really there to help me out. So in conclusion, I think it's really important for startup CEOs to get advisors and mentors who can help them in their journey. It's a tough road. You

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Startup Advisor Equity? - Pebble Watch Founder Eric Migicovsky