👋🏾 Hi friends!

I’ve been taking a bit of time over the last few weeks to hone my (pretty basic!) sketching skills in preparation for the shift in focus for Off Balance from the New Year.

As with everything in life, writing this newsletter has taught me a bunch of things, not least that there is not easy route to building an audience!

It’s always difficult to see all the ‘success’ stories on social media without feeling a bit like whatever I’m doing isn’t hitting the mark. But then I just remind myself that all we see on socials is the outcome, never the journey 💪 

(p.s. anyone who wants to give me some lessons in sketching, I would be very open to it 😂 ).

Now let’s get down to business…

In this weeks Off Balance, I’ll be chatting about:

🧑‍⚕️ Mentorship vs Coaching
📉 Down rounds and recapitalisations

Also, in this week’s Nothing Ventured, I spoke to Antonio Avitabile, MD of Sony Corporation Ventures for Europe 🔥 We talked about Sony’s move from building it’s own tech to investing off balance sheet into interesting companies to finally setting up its own fund investing in entertainment, fintech, image sensors and other forms of deeptech 💻️ 

As always, our Primer episode gives you a bit of background on how he got to where he is today 💪 

Also, if you have any feedback, or if there’s something you’re desperate to see me include, just reply to this mail or ping me online - I’m very open to conversations.

If you like what I’m putting out, do give me a follow on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

(If you are trying to connect with me on LinkedIn, maybe read this post I wrote and make sure to start your request with “Off Balance” and, more importantly, tell me why you’d like to connect 💪🏾)

Don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe to Nothing Ventured on Apple, Spotify or YouTube, it really helps more people see what we’re doing - you can find links to these (and more including my Office Hours) right here!

Now let’s get into it.

How can did I add value?

Last week I took another step to further my desire to add value to the tech and venture ecosystem by applying to be a mentor at Techstars.

As well as this, I had a long conversation with a coach last week at the 9Others Winter Party and I thought it would be valuable to explore the value, and difference, between the two.

Firstly, I think it’s worth saying that I have been fortunate enough to benefit from a lot of informal mentoring throughout my life.

This has come from a variety of places; from those I’ve worked with, industry leaders and people within my wider network - investors, founders and subject matter experts.

One could argue that a lot of the conversations I have on the podcast borders on informal mentoring - the topics we discuss and the strategies many of my guests talk about helps me inform what I may (or may not) do in the future.

I’ve only really had a coach once in my life, in the uncertain period when I moved from Melbourne back to the UK, and had some great results.

So let’s understand a bit more about mentorship and coaching, shall we?

Mentoring
A mentor is someone that uses their experiences and knowledge to guide someone (the mentee) through their journey.

They provide advice, share expierences and assist their mentee to navigate them through their career or business challenges and goals.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve benefitted from informal mentorship - a less structured and defined process but I have also mentored in a more formal way - specifically as part of the Virgin Startup programme where loan recipients have to commit to a period of mentoring as part of the terms of receiving the loan.

In a formal mentorship relationship, the mentor and mentee will often set up a broad framework to follow, discussing what it is that the mentee wants to achieve and then going through a process to help them get to where they want to get to. Even then, the way the relationship works is still quite loose and rarely follows any strict protocol.

Coaching

Coaching, on the other hand, is a much more structured process where the coach helps an individual achieve specific personal or professional goals.

Typically, coaching is far more focussed on specific issues and is more often than not time-bound with coaches employing a variety of techniques and methodologies to help an individual unlock their own potential.

It tends to be much more formal and goal oriented and often revolves around developing a particular skill or overcoming a specific challenge.

Comparing and Contrasting
People often conflate the two, assuming that coaches are mentors and vice versa. In reality, coaching is a much more formal, business like relationship whilst mentorship is far less formal and structured.

I have often had the difference described to me as follows:

Mentors tell you what you should do based on their experience, whilst a coach will help you to figure out what you should do yourself, essentially holding a mirror up to yourself.

From that perspective, coaches don’t necessarily need domain expertise in the area you’re trying to resolve, as they use their tools and knowledge to draw the answers out of yourself, whilst mentors almost always will have had specific experience in the problem space that allows them to give you the benefit of that experience to navigate the problem.

Essentially mentorship is a more organic relationship whilst coaching is far more structured albeit that broadly speaking they attempt to achieve similar outcomes - the furthering of someone’s progress towards achieving a desired outcome.

You may be asking yourselves why I’m talking about this given it’s a general discussion about the two disciplines rather than a specific example, but in reality, this is a distillation of many conversations I’ve had with people struggling how to take things forward.

In some instances, I can help them directly because of the specific experience I’ve had (i.e. mentoring), whilst in others, they would benefit greatly from someone that can guide them through a process and unlock their own abilities along the way (coaching).

One thing is for sure, I have rarely met a single person that couldn’t benefit from either a coach or a mentor (or both) at various points of their life and journey - whether personal or business - and if you’ve never experienced how useful they can be, I highly recommend you find one!

As always, my office hours are open, if you’d like to chat about this or anything else, just grab some time 😊.