FAHA: Pretending to Mentor a Team

[Ken Leung]

I remember when the Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers grants for mentoring rookie teams first came out, a lot of teams signed up to help mentor rookie teams. There was limited success, until KPCB clearly defined the what the mentoring teams' responsibilities are, and teams started to take mentoring seriously. Is awards and grants good motivation to get teams to help out others? It depends, if the teams are willing to take their responsibilies seriously, then yes. Otherwise, the grants/awards aren't working the way they should. Let's take a look at this story from a rookie team member who believe their "mentoring team" didn't do as much as they should've:


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I was on a FIRST team in high school and decided to found another team when I went to college. When I met my old team leader for the kickoff in New Hampshire he offered to have phone conversations every now and then during the build season. He'd help my team out with the types of things he had experience with and we'd help him out with the types of things we were good at (strategy, electronics, programming, etc) I was very grateful for the offer and we talked about 3 times over the six weeks. Usually our calls were brief and very friendly. Today I got a copy of his teams chairman's award entry and noticed that in the entry they had claimed to be mentoring us. My team felt a little taken advantage of because we had never agreed, or been asked to be mentored. Yes, I had a couple of informal phone conversations with their teams leader and I asked him for advice on a few issues, but I was the only person on my team that talked to anyone on their team and we also asked advice of several different team leaders on various occasions.

We feel a little taken advantage of because this team used us to further their chairmans award prospects without talking to us first. If they had asked I'm sure we would have said "OK" but we were never asked. I'm beginning to suspect that this guy only talked to me in order to put our teams name down on their chairmans application and I think thats pretty sleazy. Obviously I can't prove that (which is why I'm posting anonymously and not mentioning the team name) but I wonder - are there teams out there that pretend to be mentoring other teams in order to boost their chairmans award applications? Does three phone calls count as mentoring even if we didn't know we were being "mentored?" I've emailed the team member who put together the award for clarification.