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.

I'm originally from Seattle and now live in SF. I agree there are a lot of people in SF building silly "toys" and there are investors foolish or desperate enough to give them money. I know it can be annoying but I just try to ignore that noise because it has no real impact on my projects.

I don't think the poser situation is necessarily much better in Seattle. There are definitely a lot of posers as well who are working on a startup because it's a cool thing to do. They go around talking about it without much to show. They just aren't successful in raising millions because there is not an abundance of VC money up there.

You run into posers more often in SF simply because a huge portion of the population is in tech. If there majority are posers, it's likely you'll run into a poser. In Seattle, a small portion of the population is in tech, and usually they'll be someone who works at Microsoft or Amazon. The portion who are in tech startups is super small. Despite SF having this culture of applauding people building silly things on product hunt, there definitely are a lot of people building real things of value and their numbers dwarf those in Seattle simply because again, the population in tech in SF is way larger.