Build your personal board of advisors: An entrepreneur explains the importance of mentors

“I always had a burning desire to build a business that had a mission and actually did good. From a very early age, I was lucky enough to have some mentors who came into my life and I realized the value of being mentored.”

Mentoring has long been part of everyday business life, from both sides of the table, for Rishi Khosla – co-founder (with Joel Perlman) and CEO of UK-based OakNorth Bank.

“From then, all the way through to today, it's almost been like having a panel of advisors and mentors, which has been an incredibly helpful dynamic within my life,” he explains.

Here, in conversation with Linda Lacina at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting for a Meet the Leader podcast, Khosla shares tips on how to think about the mentoring process to get the most from their experience.

OakNorth is a fintech company which helps businesses grow quickly. It has so far delivered almost $13 billion in financing to UK entrepreneurs, helping to create 40,000 new jobs and over 29,000 new homes as a result, it says.

Khosla describes OakNorth as “a digital commercial bank focused on helping scale up companies with between $1 million and $100 million in revenue, getting them access to financing and all the banking services. And our reason, specifically, is because we feel that community is significantly underserved and overlooked by the traditional banking world,” he says.

Alongside furthering innovation, having benefited hugely from being a mentee, Khosla is also passionate about inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs. Two years ago, OakNorth set up a Mentorpreneurship programme with the London School of Economics – the alma mater of its two founders.

But what makes a good mentor and how do you go about finding one? Khosla outlines three key areas of focus:

“Mentoring is sometimes a label, but essentially it's just getting advice. We often get advice, from our siblings, from our friends, our parents, etc,” he says.

“It's really about understanding that if you're open to being mentored, if you're open to listening, then you can get mentored from all different angles and from many different people, not necessarily someone who's like an icon within your world.

“There’s also been a clear realization that a mentor doesn't have to be someone … in the area that you're interested in.”

“What makes a good mentor, it's really someone who provides an opinion, but doesn't impose their perspective. They help someone think through the thought, the question, the dynamic. And through that actually just helping work the thought process with the mentee.

“If a mentor is strong with their own views, I think it's a vice, a narrow view. Think about what makes a good board member if you want diversity in opinion. You don't want a board with a single voice, right? In the same way, you don't want a mentor to have a strong single voice.”

“Entrepreneurial thinking is, in our view, all about that growth mindset, all about the mindset that you can do more,” Khosla says.

“I mean, obviously here at Davos, your mind gets widened in an incredible way. All the conversations about GenAI here at the moment, and you just think about all the applications and how this revolution can materially change our lives in a period of years – whether that's 5 years, 10 years, or the like.

“And being able to therefore think through those types of dynamics requires that entrepreneurial mindset – as I say, that growth mindset. So the combining of mentoring and entrepreneurship, is actually bringing those two things together, ie, mentoring with a growth mindset.”

While Khosla is clear on the significance of listening to and learning from others, he says the most valuable piece of advice from a mentor so far has been to learn to trust himself.

“If you have a conviction on something that maybe everyone around you may be saying, ‘What are you doing?’, ‘This isn't the right thing’, or ‘It's not going to work’, etc, staying the course and having that grit and hunger to keep on driving – it's just so, so important.”