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Key Takeaways

Mentoring sharpens leadership by forcing founders to explain and refine the “why” behind their decisions, leading to clearer thinking and better judgment.

Investing in young people helped me stay adaptable and people-focused

Entrepreneurs are always looking for leverage. We look for the strategy that unlocks growth, the hire that changes a company’s trajectory, or the system that makes the business run better. Most of us assume the next breakthrough will come from somewhere inside the company.

For a long time, I believed that too. Then one of the most meaningful shifts in my leadership came from outside the business entirely. It came from mentoring young people . I started doing it to give back, not because I thought it would make me a better founder. But it did.…