You Don’t Need Better Advice. You Need a Room.
This year, serving as an Innovation Labs mentor 2026, I found myself reflecting on a moment that perfectly captured what mentoring is really about.
The moment I keep coming back to isn’t a demo day, or a whiteboard, or a pitch deck. It’s a corridor in Bucharest, minutes before a sixteen-year-old walked into a room with more than eighty people in it to explain something he had built.
Codrin came out of Fondatori din viitor. He built Architects PC. He is sixteen. And he was about to do the thing that most adults I know would find a reason to avoid: stand in front of a room of strangers, many of them older, more credentialed, more experienced, and say, here is my idea, and here is why it matters.
I remember thinking, very clearly: nothing I say in the next four minutes is going to make his product better. That work was already done. What I could do was smaller and, it turns out, more useful. I could remind him that the room was not an exam. That the people in it wanted him to do well. That he already knew more about his own project than anyone sitting in those chairs.
He pitched. It went well. And somewhere in that corridor, I understood what I had actually signed up for.
I didn’t become a mentor because I had answers.
I should be honest about where I started, because I think the honesty is the useful part.
I am not a technical founder. My day job is QA. My instincts are in communication, in community, in the unglamorous discipline of asking how we would know this is broken.
When I first said yes to mentoring at Innovation Labs, a quiet voice asked the obvious question: what exactly do you think you’re going to tell a room full of engineering students?
The answer, which took me a full season to learn, is: almost nothing about the code.
What I could offer was the thing nobody had offered me when I was starting. Not expertise. Attention. A person who would sit down, take the project seriously, ask the uncomfortable question, and then stay in the conversation afterward.
That is a much lower bar to clear than “expert.” It is also, I now believe, more valuable at the earliest stage.
What the hackathons taught me
I mentored at the Innovation Labs hackathons in Iași, at UAIC and at Asachi, and then traveled to Bucharest for the Hackathon Days. Forty-one teams went through to the next stage from that weekend.
Here is what I noticed almost immediately, and what I did not expect: the projects that were struggling were rarely struggling for technical reasons. The code was fine. The code was often impressive. What was missing was a person.
Team after team could describe an architecture in beautiful detail and could not describe a single human being who would use it. Not a category — “students,” “small businesses,” “young people” — but one actual person, with a name, who had said out loud that this thing would help them.
So I stopped trying to evaluate projects and started asking questions instead. Who is this for? Who have you spoken to who confirmed it matters, and what exactly did they say? If you could only build one slice by Friday, which slice proves the most? What are you deliberately not building?
That last one changed more conversations than anything else I did all season. Something happens when a team says out loud what they are choosing to leave out. The project stops being a fantasy and becomes a thing with edges.
I also learned to work alongside other mentors, which was its own education. In a good mentoring room, you find your lane fast. When two mentors are already deep in the technical weeds, the most valuable contribution is not a third technical opinion — it’s the person pulling the conversation back to who, and how will you know it worked.
Mentoring is a team sport more than I expected, and knowing what you are not the right person to answer is a skill.
Coaching is a different animal entirely
Hackathons are intense and short. Coaching is long and quiet.
I coached two Iasi projects into the Innovation Labs 2026 cohort: FridgeBox and Cova. Every week, a stand-up. What did you get done? What’s stuck. What do you need from me?
Nobody prepares you for how ordinary this is. There is no cinematic breakthrough moment. There is a Tuesday, a tired team, a thing that didn’t get finished, and a conversation about why. Then another Tuesday.
What I learned is that the weekly rhythm is the intervention. Not the advice inside it. The rhythm. A founder who knows that someone is going to ask them on Tuesday what they committed to last Tuesday behaves differently all week. Accountability isn’t a personality trait you either have or lack. It’s a structure you can build around someone until they no longer need it.
Cova reached Demo Day. I am proud of that, and I want to be precise about my share of it: they built it. Every line, every decision, every late night. What I did was show up on Tuesdays and refuse to let the important question go unasked.
That’s the job. It is less heroic and more consistent than I imagined.
What surprised me
How much of mentoring is emotional, not strategic. I came in expecting to talk about scope, positioning, and validation. I spent at least as much time on confidence, on the fear of pitching, on the specific paralysis that hits a team in week three when the thing they built doesn’t work and they quietly start believing it’s because they aren’t good enough.
Nobody warns you that a large part of the role is being the person who says this is normal, keep going, and means it.
How young they are, and how little that matters. Codrin is sixteen. I watched him hold a room. The idea that you need a certain number of years before you’re allowed to build something is a story we tell ourselves, and this ecosystem is quietly dismantling it.
How much I learned about my own work. Sitting in the partner office days — at Adobe Romania, at eMAG — I found myself listening as a builder, not a visitor. Watching how people who ship at scale talk about tradeoffs recalibrated my own standards. I went to give and came back with more than I brought.
How badly I would have needed this. Every session, some part of me was talking to the version of myself who started without any of it.
Why early-stage founders need communities more than advice
This is the conviction I hold most strongly now, and it’s the reason I’m writing any of this down.
Advice is abundant. It is on every podcast, in every thread, in every book. If advice were the bottleneck, we would have solved early-stage failure a decade ago.
What’s scarce is a room. A place where you say your half-formed idea out loud and nobody laughs. Where the person next to you is stuck on something similar, and you realize your problem is not a personal failing but a stage. Where someone says you should talk to this person, and means it, and makes the introduction.
Advice tells you what to do. A community changes what you believe is possible for you — which is upstream of everything.
The highest-leverage ten minutes of any session I ran were never the ten minutes where I was cleverest. They were the ten minutes spent naming connections: who should talk to whom, which resource fits which project, who I could introduce. My network was worth more than my opinions. That was humbling, and it was the single most useful thing I figured out.
This is also why I think continuous education has to reach into schools, not wait until university. Codrin didn’t arrive from nowhere. He arrived from a program that got to him early and told him he was allowed to build. That’s the whole mechanism. Someone tells you early enough that you’re allowed.
Why I keep showing up
Because the ecosystem in Iași, and in Romania, is at the stage where individual people still make a visible difference. That is a rare and temporary window. In ten years there will be infrastructure, capital, dense networks, and my presence in a room will matter less. Right now it still matters, and I would rather spend that window well.
Because I get more out of it than I put in, this is not modesty. Mentoring made me a sharper thinker about my own work, a better communicator, and considerably more honest about the difference between a real problem and an interesting one.
Being an innovation labs mentor 2026 reminded me of something simple but important: I’m here because someone once did the same for me. The only sensible response is to pay it forward.
If you’ve ever thought, “I’m not qualified to mentor,” you’re probably hearing the very same voice that tells founders they’re not ready to build.
The truth is, mentoring isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about asking a better question than the one already on the table, sharing your experience honestly, and staying in the room after everyone else has left.
That’s it.
That’s the whole job.