“I was confident that he would someday be the CEO of a large, successful software company,” he recalls. The younger man had no experience, no expertise, and no prospects for immediate funding, but Meresman discerned something special nonetheless.
Meresman found the recent graduate fascinating. Meresman agreed to meet Rozic for 20 minutes over a cup of coffee. Fortunately, a classmate’s father introduced Rozic to Stan Meresman, an executive just leaving Silicon Graphics. His modest goal: to find a high-powered, established player who could teach him the intricacies of strategy and finance-someone who really understood how to build a business from the ground up, preferably someone who’d helped run a billion-dollar business before. He piled all his possessions into his Pathfinder and headed to Silicon Valley. In 1995, Scott Rozic graduated from college with a business degree, a credit card, and an idea for a software company. Mentor capitalists provide seven types of expertise: They also encourage learning by observing for example, by watching an interim president hold a planning session. Their teaching styles vary-from asking probing questions (“What’s the one-liner? What does this company do?”) to suggesting rules of thumb (“Focus, focus, focus”). The best mentor capitalists actively teach-while refusing to make decisions for their protégés. They get deeply involved in the week-to-week refining and testing of business models and product prototypes, attracting top talent and big money and helping entrepreneurs build coherent, efficient organizations.
Mentor capitalists provide real-time, intensive coaching on how to quickly build successful businesses. But they also feel deeply committed to cultivating networks of relationships with fledgling protégés-and giving back to their communities. These cashed-out, highly successful entrepreneurs love the thrill of the start-up game.
How? He drew on a scarce resource essential to creating vital new businesses: mentor capitalists. In just five years, new college grad Scott Rozic went from naive but enterprising Silicon Valley wannabe to CEO of successful software dot-com XMarkstheSpot.
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