I don’t have a neat mentorship story. No wise elder who took me under their wing at twenty-two and guided me through every career inflection point. That narrative exists for some people, and I’m genuinely glad for them. My version is messier — a handful of people, spread across different countries and different phases of my life, who each changed something specific about how I think or operate.
Most of them probably don’t know the impact they had. Some of them I’ve lost touch with entirely. But the things they taught me are embedded in how I work every day, and I think it’s worth being specific about that. Not as a gratitude exercise, though gratitude is part of it. More as a map of where my instincts actually came from.
The Boss Who Taught Me to Write
My first real boss after university was a woman named Catherine who ran a small consulting firm. She was in her fifties, had spent two decades in management consulting, and had the sharpest editorial eye of anyone I’ve ever worked with.
The first report I submitted to her came back so marked up with red ink that the original text was barely visible. Not corrections to grammar or spelling — corrections to thinking. She’d circle a paragraph and write: “What are you actually trying to say here? Say that.” She’d draw an arrow from my conclusion to my opening and write: “Start here. Everything before this is throat-clearing.”
It was brutal. I’d spend hours on a document and she’d dismantle it in ten minutes. For the first few weeks, I thought she was impossible to please. Then I started to realize she was impossible to fool. She could spot the difference between a sentence that communicated something and a sentence that sounded like it communicated something.
She taught me that writing is not decoration. It’s not a skill you add on top of thinking. It is the thinking. If you can’t write it clearly, you don’t understand it clearly. And no amount of business jargon or elaborate sentence structure will disguise that gap.
I write every day now. Every brand guide, every strategy document, every important email — I write it myself, at least the first draft. And every time I catch myself using a phrase that sounds impressive but says nothing, I hear Catherine’s voice: “What are you actually trying to say here?”
She wasn’t trying to be my mentor. She was trying to get a usable deliverable. But the standard she held me to rewired how I think about communication permanently.
The Traveler Who Taught Me to Listen
In 2018, I was on a long bus ride from Hanoi to Ninh Binh. The woman in the seat next to me was a retired schoolteacher from New Zealand who’d been traveling solo through Asia for four months. Her name was Margaret, and she was seventy-one years old.
We talked for the entire four-hour ride. Or rather, she asked questions and I talked, and then at some point I noticed that she’d somehow gotten me to tell her things I don’t normally share with strangers — about my ambitions, my doubts, about a business idea I was turning over in my head that I hadn’t told anyone about yet.
When I asked her how she did that — how she got people to open up — she laughed and said something I’ve never forgotten: “I just leave space. Most people are so busy thinking about what they’re going to say next that they never hear what the other person is actually trying to tell them. If you just leave space, people fill it with truth.”
It was such a simple observation that I almost dismissed it. But I started paying attention after that. In meetings, in conversations, in interviews. I started deliberately leaving silence where I’d normally jump in with a response. And Margaret was right — the space changed everything. People said more honest things when they weren’t being immediately responded to. They corrected themselves, clarified, went deeper.
This became one of the most important skills in my professional life. In client discovery calls, I ask a question and then I wait. Not a performative wait — a genuine one. I’m actually interested in what comes after the initial polished answer. The real insight is usually in the second or third thing someone says, after the rehearsed response runs out.
Margaret and I exchanged emails for about a year. She sent me photos from her travels — Cambodia, Myanmar, Japan. Then the emails stopped. I hope she’s well. She probably has no idea that a four-hour bus ride changed how I conduct every important conversation.
The Founder Who Showed Me What Conviction Looks Like
In the early days of PipelineRoad, before Bruno and I had more than a handful of clients, I met a founder at a co-working space in Lisbon who was building a climate tech company. He was about my age, had been working on the same product for three years, and had been turned down by over forty investors.
I asked him — with genuine curiosity, not skepticism — how he kept going. His answer was the opposite of the motivational hustle-culture platitudes I’d expected.
He said: “I’m not persisting because I’m tough. I’m persisting because I’ve seen enough evidence that this works to know the market hasn’t caught up yet. If I saw evidence that it didn’t work, I’d quit tomorrow. Conviction isn’t stubbornness. Conviction is a conclusion you’ve earned through data.”
That reframing hit me hard. At the time, I was dealing with my own doubts about PipelineRoad. We were small, struggling to find clients, and I was starting to wonder if the agency model was the right path. I was confusing doubt with data.
His distinction — earned conviction vs. blind stubbornness — gave me a framework for evaluating my own persistence. Am I holding on because I’ve seen enough signal to justify it? Or am I holding on because letting go feels like failure? Those are very different situations, and they require very different responses.
He eventually got funded, by the way. Series A, about fourteen months after that conversation. I followed his company’s trajectory from afar with something close to pride, which is a strange thing to feel about someone you met once in a co-working space.
The Client Who Taught Me Humility
About two years into PipelineRoad, I had a client who was a seasoned CMO — twenty-plus years in B2B marketing, had built and scaled marketing teams at three different companies. He hired us for a specific content and demand generation engagement.
I came in with the confidence of someone who’d had a string of successful client outcomes and was starting to believe his own narrative. I presented a strategy that I thought was airtight. He listened patiently and then, very calmly, dismantled it.
Not rudely. With precision. He pointed out three assumptions I’d made about his buyer that were wrong. He showed me data from his last two companies that contradicted a framework I’d been using with every client. He asked me a question about his competitive landscape that I should have known the answer to but didn’t.
I felt embarrassed. And then I felt grateful.
He wasn’t trying to put me in my place. He was trying to get the best work out of me. And the way he did it — by holding me to a standard rather than accepting my first draft — was exactly what I needed at that point in my career.
He taught me that confidence without preparation is arrogance. That every client engagement requires starting from zero on your assumptions, regardless of how many similar clients you’ve worked with. And that the best clients aren’t the ones who defer to your expertise — they’re the ones who challenge it.
We reworked the strategy together. It was significantly better than what I’d originally proposed. And I never again walked into a client meeting without doing the depth of homework that situation required.
The Accidental Mentors
Not everyone who shapes you does it in a dramatic, lesson-laden moment. Some of the most important influences in my life were people who simply modeled a way of being that I absorbed over time.
Bruno, my co-founder, taught me the value of steadiness. I’m naturally inclined toward intensity — big pushes, late nights, rapid iteration. Bruno operates at a consistent, sustainable pace. He’s the same person at 9 AM on Monday as he is at 5 PM on Friday. Watching him over years, I’ve learned that consistency outperforms intensity almost every time. The tortoise thing is a cliche because it’s true.
A friend from my early traveling years — a photographer from Berlin — taught me about seeing. Not photographically, though he was a talented photographer. He taught me to actually look at the places I was in instead of rushing through them to get to the next one. He’d spend thirty minutes watching light move across a building facade while I was checking my phone. His attention to the present moment made me realize how much I was missing by always looking ahead.
A college professor whose name I won’t use taught me that intellectual rigor and warmth are not opposites. He held the highest standards of any teacher I’d had, but he held them with such genuine care for his students that you wanted to meet them. He made you feel like doing excellent work was a form of respect — for the material, for your audience, for yourself. I try to bring that same combination of high standards and genuine care to how I manage my team.
What I’ve Learned About Mentorship
The common thread across all of these people isn’t wisdom or experience or even generosity. It’s specificity. Each of them changed one specific thing about how I operate. Catherine taught me to write clearly. Margaret taught me to listen. The climate tech founder taught me the difference between conviction and stubbornness. The CMO taught me humility in client work.
The best mentorship isn’t comprehensive. It’s precise. One person doesn’t need to teach you everything. You need enough people, at the right moments, who each give you one thing you didn’t have before.
And often, you don’t realize what they’ve given you until years later. That’s the nature of it. The lessons that actually stick tend to be the ones that absorb slowly, through experience, rather than the ones delivered in a single conversation.
I don’t have a mentor in the traditional sense. I have a constellation of people — some close, some distant, some completely unaware of their impact — who collectively built the operating system I run on.
If I ever have the chance to be that person for someone else — the one who changes one specific thing at one specific moment — I hope I have the presence to recognize the opportunity. Because the people who shaped me weren’t trying to be mentors. They were just being themselves, at a moment when I was ready to learn.
That’s the whole secret, I think. Be good at what you do, be honest about what you know, and trust that the right people are paying attention. The mentorship takes care of itself.