Does a young founder develop more through a single mentor or through a broad peer network?

Sam Altman · Apr 15, 2024

Learning a little from each of many different founders and investors is a better strategy than learning deeply from one mentor.

It worked for him with investors and has worked the same way with founders

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Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

Young people should create their own luck by meeting as many peers as possible rather than seeking a single mentor, since different people are experts in different things

One person is an expert at growth, another at fundraising, another at life — you get different things from different people

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Kathryn Minshew · Sep 2, 2016

The primary value of Y Combinator is the peer cohort rather than the partners or speakers, and every founder benefits from such a cohort whether or not they do an accelerator

Being alongside 100-plus founders going through the same stage is the number one advantage, and it persists after graduation

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Josh Browder · May 18, 2026

The biggest benefit of the Thiel Fellowship is the peer group — 19 other young people facing the same entrepreneurial problems that college friends cannot help with

His Stanford dormmates couldn't advise him on things like convincing a 60-year-old ML engineer to join his company because they were dealing with college problems instead

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Brad Feld · Jul 27, 2020

The best mentorship relationships are peer mentorships, where both people become mentors to each other over time rather than remaining in a one-way mentor/mentee dynamic

In his experience relationships evolve that way and both parties end up learning enormous amounts from each other, as with his 25-year relationship with Jerry Colonna

39:50 Mentorship becomes mutual peer to peer over time

Eran Zinman · Mar 2, 2026

CEO peer groups are of limited use because people don't expose their emotions to each other

Confidence comes from doing and changing, not from peer reassurance; he relies on Roy and the leadership team instead

49:30 Ceo peer groups add little rely on your own leadership team

Tom Blomfield · May 13, 2024

YC should heavily curate peer groups for founders rather than leave networking to them, because founders won't self-organise

An experiment matching groups of six to eight founders for dinner showed it was astonishingly hard to get eight founders to organise anything themselves, yet meeting peer groups was the most valuable thing he experienced as a founder in London

38:23 Curated peer groups must be actively organized since founders wont self organize