Why Mentable exists
The conversation that changes
your direction is usually an accident.
Somebody answers an email. A professor makes an introduction. A manager takes an interest. Half an hour later a person understands something about their own field that no amount of reading was going to give them, and almost none of it was arranged.
The problem
What luck
actually looks like.
- A professor notices your work and makes an introduction.
- Someone in your family already knows the person you need to meet.
- An alum answers, out of the thirty you wrote to.
- A manager decides to take an interest in you specifically.
- You are in the right room, at an event you nearly skipped.
Every one of those is a good thing happening. Someone is being generous with their time, and it works. The trouble is that not one of them can be arranged, repeated or asked for, so who gets that half hour comes down largely to where a person was standing.
We are not claiming to fix that, and we are not proposing a replacement for the way these relationships already form. The narrower thing worth building is another route: a way for people who are willing to teach and people who are ready to learn to find each other on purpose, and to keep going after the first conversation.
A note from the founder
When I started college I did not know how any of the paths I was interested in actually worked. What changed that was a small number of people who were willing to explain it. What the work involved on an ordinary day. Which decisions mattered and which ones I was overthinking. What I was getting wrong.
None of it was arranged. I met those people through some asking, some timing, and a lot of other people being generous for no particular reason. It worked out, and that is the part that stayed with me. The conversations that made the difference were not scarce. They were just unevenly distributed, and I happened to end up on the right side of that.
So the question was not whether mentorship works. It plainly does. The question was why something that consequential is left almost entirely to chance, and whether any of it could be made deliberate without ruining what makes it work.
I do not have that fully answered. Mentable is the attempt.
Abel Gessesse
Founder · UNC-Chapel Hill ’28
The name
What Mentable means
mentable
/men-tə-bəl/adjective
Teachable. Coachable. Ready to grow.
A mentorship needs two people to show up for it. One of them has to be willing to teach. The other has to be ready to learn, which is a real thing that a person can be more or less of, and which nobody usually names.
Being mentable means arriving with a question rather than an opening in your calendar. Listening to the answer instead of waiting to explain why you already considered it. Doing something with it. Coming back having moved, including when what you found was that the advice did not fit.
What it does not mean
It does not mean junior, deferential, or short of opinions. A student who does everything they are told is not mentable. They are just quiet.
The point of good advice is that the person receiving it ends up with better judgment, not a longer list of instructions. Someone who never pushes back has not been taught anything. They have been directed, and they will need directing again next time.
What we think
Four things we are fairly sure about.
- 01
A mentor shortens the curve. The student still walks it.
Mentorship is not a substitute for ability, preparation or persistence, and anybody selling it that way is selling something else. What a good mentor can do is cut the time it takes to learn what actually matters, which is worth a great deal and is not the same as doing it for you.
- 02
Advice should end in judgment, not dependence.
The measure of a mentorship is whether the student eventually works things out without asking. A relationship that produces someone who needs to check before every decision has gone wrong, however pleasant it was.
- 03
The structure is not the relationship.
Mentable keeps track of what was agreed, what is outstanding and where a conversation left off. It cannot make either person good at this, and it should never take up more of the relationship than the relationship does.
- 04
Better to be small and say so.
It is easy to make an early company look established, and it costs nothing until someone checks. We would rather describe this accurately now and be believed later.
Where this is
Early, and saying so.
Mentable is early. The product is live and it is still being built, and those two things are true at the same time. We would rather tell you which parts are which than let you work it out.
The mentors named across this site are real people, and their backgrounds come from verified information. The product views you see on the mentee and mentor pages are composed rather than captured: they are built from fields the software genuinely has, using demo accounts rather than anyone’s real mentorship, and each one is marked as an example where it appears.
There are no usage numbers on this site because there are none worth quoting yet. When there are, they will be real ones.
Less of it left to chance.
Mentable is being built so that finding someone willing to teach, and becoming someone worth teaching, depends a little less on who happened to be standing nearby.