31 Jul Mentorship: The backbone of our success
Bernhard Schmidt, with a decade of mentoring experience, offers his profound insights on guiding healthcare startups. Below, he shares key lessons and strategies for fostering growth and innovation in the field.
I have had the pleasure and honor of mentoring and investing in several healthcare startups. Here are some insights from my journey:
Empowering Visionaries: Being a mentor for healthcare startups is like being a lighthouse. I guide passionate entrepreneurs through the complex healthcare system, sharing lessons from my own experiences, connecting them with the right people, and keeping them focused on solving true patient needs. This helps them navigate towards their vision of transforming healthcare.
Learning and Growing Together: Mentorship is a two-way street. While I share my experience, I also learn from the fresh perspectives and innovative ideas of the healthcare startups. Working with entrepreneurs always inspires and energizes me.
Celebrating Milestones: There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing a team I’ve mentored achieve a major milestone, whether it’s a breakthrough in technology, validation of their idea by customers, or a successful pitch to investors.
Essential Advice for Effective Mentoring
Do’s:
- Encourage Customer-Centricity: Help startups focus on understanding customer problems deeply through empathy work. Encourage them to experiment to reduce the risk of failure, which helps them learn and grow quickly from both successes and failures
- Teach, Don’t Tell: Teaching without telling is a powerful approach that encourages the startups to reflect critically and develop their own problem-solving skills. Strategies I use include asking open-ended questions, guiding through personal examples, and reflecting together after milestones
- Leverage Your Network: Introduce startups to people in your network who can help, whether through advice, sharing specific healthcare knowledge, or potential partnerships.
Don’ts:
- Accept Assumptions: Take a step back from working on the solution with the startup. Challenge them on their assumptions, especially in the beginning or when they are stuck. Ask them to provide evidence.
- Beware Being a Domain Expert: Your domain expertise is your compass in the world that you have honed through years of experience. Maintain objectivity and avoid imposing your own biases. Each startup is unique, and your guidance should be tailored to their specific needs and goals.
- Don’t Manage, Guide and Trust: Give startups the space to make their own decisions and learn from their failures. Your role is to guide, not to manage and control. Trust them to take ownership of their journey.
Mentoring healthcare startups is truly a fulfilling experience. By following these do’s and don’ts, you can make a meaningful impact on the next generation of healthcare entrepreneurs, helping them turn their dreams into reality and shape the future of healthcare.