Mentors or manipulators? Founder’s dilemma

And yet, in the founder’s world, mentorship is never that simple. It can be rocket fuel or dead weight, a compass or a chain.

If Part 1 set the stage for how mentorship evolves across life, Part 2 leans into the founder’s crucible — where stakes are compressed, the timelines unforgiving, and the wrong guidance can cost not just a career but a company’s survival.

The bigger question is whether early mentorship gives you an enduring advantage as a founder.

Do the seeds planted by parents, teachers, or community figures translate into resilience in the boardroom? The answer seems to be yes — but only if those seeds are tested in fire.

Many founders discover that the values instilled in childhood — integrity, discipline, empathy — become scaffolding later, but it is often the crucibles of failures, betrayals, and high-pressure immersions that turn scaffolding into steel. Looking back, the fire that once felt destructive becomes the reason you can withstand today’s storms.

Personally, I found that my default style of mentorship was through fire.

At Seven Seas Technologies and later at Ponea.tech, I often placed people in situations with no manuals, no easy answers, only the hard pressure of figuring it out an idea that I had and had to execute.

At the time, many found it brutal, even unfair. Some broke under the strain because they did not yet have the entrepreneurial temperament. But years later, many of those same people told me how much they valued the experience when they went on to start their own companies.

That baptism by fire stripped away illusions and forced them to discover resilience they didn’t know they had. It forged some into extraordinary leaders, prepared to weather storms where comfort would have left them weak.

Over time, as I too was mentored by others and became more seasoned, this approach evolved. I came to see that the human mind has immense capacity — but only if it is stretched. My philosophy became simple: don’t protect people from the deep end, help them build the confidence to swim.

And now, there is a new layer to mentorship. We were taught that illiteracy meant you couldn’t read or write. But today, there is a new kind of illiteracy, and it is far more dangerous. If you can’t use digital tools, if you don’t know how to navigate platforms, if new systems confuse you to the point of paralysis — then you are functionally illiterate in this age.

Opportunities are no longer announced in newspapers, they are on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), and WhatsApp groups. Jobs are no longer about paperwork; they live on portals, apps, and platforms that expect digital fluency.

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Even money itself has outrun the analogue world — M-Pesa, PayPal, Wise, mobile banking. And yet many are still proud to say: “Me, I’m not into technology.” That is like proudly saying you couldn’t read in 1970.

Digital literacy is not coding. It is not about becoming a hacker. It is the basics: can you use AI tools to speed up your work? Can you market yourself online without begging for “exposure”? Can you adapt to new platforms the way you once adapted to typing on a smartphone keyboard?

The painful truth is this: being left behind today is not about lack of effort, it is about lack of adaptation. And the world does not slow down for those who refuse to learn.

Mentorship, therefore, cannot only be about resilience in the marketplace; it must also prepare founders and teams to adapt digitally.

For me, this is where my immersion-based style of coaching meets the future. The same way I once threw people into operational fires, I now challenge mentees to rethink how they will adopt and apply AI in their work. Because the frontier of mentorship is no longer just about strategy and resilience — it is about digital survival.

So, dear founder, as you walk this journey, may your compass not be the loudest voice in the room but the truest one within. And may you embrace both fire and AI — for mentorship today is not only a hand that lifts but also a challenge to adapt. Those who walk through both emerge not just stronger, but free.

And perhaps the lingering question for all of us is this: in an age where artificial intelligence promises personalised coaching, predictive feedback, and even simulated boardrooms, will AI ever truly mentor? Or will it shift the variables entirely, forcing us to redefine what wisdom, trust, and guidance mean in the founder’s journey? The answer, perhaps, will shape the next battlefield.

The voices from Episode 10 underscored this paradox. Peter Ndiang’ui, who helped build OLX into a household name in Kenya, spoke of the trust found in peer-to-peer mentorship — because only another founder knows the feeling of staring at payroll you can’t meet.

Bobby Gadhia reflected on his duality: once a mentee, now a mentor, he warned about those who weaponise guidance to serve themselves.

Valentine Njoroge cautioned that when you are young and undercapitalised, the line between mentorship and manipulation is razor thin. Each story reminded me that mentorship is not neutral; it can liberate or it can enslave.

So, what do we do with this paradox? First, we destigmatise it by sharing openly. When founders admit both the power and the pain of mentorship, we break the silence that has left too many to learn in isolation. Second, we build systems.

Platforms like Founders’ Battlefield exist to democratise access, making mentorship not a lottery for the lucky but a curriculum for the many.

And finally, we remember that the best mentorship points us back to ourselves — not as clones of others, but as sharpened, resilient, adaptive humans.

Perhaps that is the essence of this debate: the true mentor does not create dependence but independence.

They do not hand you answers; they help you hear your own. Sometimes they let you burn, knowing fire is the only teacher strong enough to prepare you. And sometimes they push you to embrace the tools of tomorrow, knowing adaptation is the new literacy.

Michael Anthony Macharia is a serial entrepreneur, founder of Seven Seas Technologies and Ponea Health