Building Your Kitchen Cabinet
Mentors don't give you answers, they give you access to better mistakes. Your "kitchen cabinet" (informal advisory board) builds itself through demonstrated need and wreckage, not networking.
I used to think mentors were like cheat codes. Find the right person, ask the right questions, skip all the mistakes. That’s not how it works.
Fahim Saleh didn’t give me answers. He gave me access. When I showed him “IsTomorrowHartal?”, a joke website that went viral during the 2013 hartals, he didn’t say “great idea, here’s what to do next.” He said, “Come work with me.” Then he let me fail. Ten projects. Nine crashes. He watched me burn through ideas like matches, said nothing, let me learn.
That’s what good mentors do. They don’t save you from mistakes. They make sure you’re making mistakes worth learning from.
How to Actually Find These People
You don’t find your kitchen cabinet at networking events. You find them in the wreckage.
I met our first real advisor, the lawyer who saved us during the fundraising crisis, through desperation. We’d raised money but couldn’t access it for four months because Bangladesh had no clear understanding of how international capital can flow into Bangladeshi legal structure. I was calling everyone. Banks, law firms, random expats who might know someone. One call led to another. Someone said, “Try this guy, he did something with remittances once.”
That’s how it works. You don’t LinkedIn message successful people asking to “pick their brain over coffee.” You solve a problem publicly, and people who’ve survived that problem find you. Or you’re so deep in chaos that you have to find them.
When we were struggling with our first layoffs, I didn’t know any founders who’d done it before. So I asked our investors for intros. “Who in your portfolio has cut 50% of their team and survived?” Got three names. Two never responded. One got on a call, spent an hour walking me through the mechanics, the communication, the aftermath. He’s still in my cabinet.
The pattern: solve real problems, ask specific questions, follow referrals from people who’ve seen your work. Your kitchen cabinet builds itself through demonstrated need, not ambition.
What the Best Founders Actually Did
Jobs didn’t build Apple alone. He had Mike Markkula, an early Intel employee who’d retired at 32. Markkula didn’t just invest $250,000. He taught Jobs how to write a business plan, how to think about margins, how to present to investors. Jobs was a visionary. Markkula was a veteran. That combination built the foundation.
Zuckerberg’s kitchen cabinet was Sean Parker and Peter Thiel. Parker had built Napster, knew how viral products scaled and how to navigate Silicon Valley politics. Thiel had sold PayPal, understood venture dynamics and board management. Zuckerberg was 20. They’d already made millions and lost companies. That mismatch was the point.
Bezos surrounded himself with people from Wall Street, not tech. His kitchen cabinet included David Shaw, his former boss at D.E. Shaw. While other internet founders were chasing growth, Bezos was learning financial modeling and long-term capital allocation from people who’d managed billions. Different mentors, different company.
The pattern: founders pick kitchen cabinets that fill their blind spots. Jobs needed business discipline. Zuckerberg needed Silicon Valley fluency. Bezos needed financial sophistication. None of them picked mentors who looked like them. They picked mentors who’d survived what they were about to face.
When to Listen, When to Ignore
Here’s the framework I use: advisors get a vote, not a veto.
When we were deciding whether to expand to food delivery, our kitchen cabinet split. Half said focus on logistics, don’t dilute. Half said food delivery was the obvious next move, market was ready. Both sides had good arguments. Both had been right before.
I listened to everyone, then made the call myself. We expanded. It worked. But if it hadn’t, that would’ve been on me.
The decision matrix is simple:
Listen when: They’ve made your exact mistake in your exact market. A founder who’s raised in Bangladesh knows things a Silicon Valley founder doesn’t. Specificity matters.
Ignore when: Their experience is outdated or context-mismatched. Someone who built a company in 2005 doesn’t know how growth works in 2024. Someone who scaled in the US doesn’t know Dhaka’s regulatory maze.
Debate when: Two advisors you trust give opposite advice. That means the answer isn’t obvious. Get both perspectives, understand the reasoning, then decide.
The best advice I ever got came from someone who wasn’t even formally an advisor. Just a founder I met at a conference who’d sold his company. I told him about our growth. He said, “Growth without unit economics is just expensive dying.” It stung. It was also true.
Your kitchen cabinet should sting sometimes. If it doesn’t, it’s not working.
Because their job isn’t to make you feel good. It’s to show you what doesn’t work before it kills you.