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Advisor, mentor, tracker or consultant: who a startup should call
Articles about these roles usually explain one term each. A founder needs something else: to know whom to call for a specific problem. Below are the four roles compared on three things — who is accountable for the result, whether the person follows a method, and who ends up doing the work.
Four roles in one table
| Role | What they do | Accountable for | How they are paid | When to call |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mentor | Talks with the founder regularly, shares experience, looks at decisions from the outside | Formally nothing: it is a voluntary relationship | Often free, through incubator programmes, sometimes for equity | When you need a senior person to think out loud with |
| Tracker | Runs a method: a goal for the quarter, a list of hypotheses, a weekly meeting to check what was done and what was not | Shares responsibility for the quarter’s result with the team | Monthly fee or an accelerator programme | When the team lacks pace and the discipline to test hypotheses |
| Advisor | Answers specific questions in their field, opens doors to people, sometimes takes part in deals | The quality of advice in their field | Options, hourly or monthly fee | When you need industry experience and access to people |
| Consultant | Delivers a project: research, a report, recommendations, sometimes implementation by their own team | The project result under a contract | Per project or per day | When you need a document for investors or the board, or a team to implement |
“Tracker” is a role common in Russian-speaking accelerators and rare elsewhere; the closest English equivalents are a growth coach or an accelerator programme manager. The definition I find most precise comes from an accelerator: a tracker gives no ready answers, asks questions and shares responsibility for the result with the team. An advisor, in the same source, is a professional with industry experience who advises on their subject and makes introductions.
Three questions that settle the choice
- Do you need a document? If the result has to land on an investor’s or the board’s table, you need a consultant. The other three roles work through conversation.
- Who will do the work? A mentor, a tracker and an advisor leave it to you; a consultant does it only when they bring an implementation team. If nobody is there to do the work, advice will not help: hire the doers first.
- What exactly is not working? A specific question — “which channels to try”, “how to organise releases” — is what an advisor closes. Hypotheses get invented but never tested — you need a tracker. You want to think out loud once a month with someone more experienced — a mentor.
How many advisors a startup can take
There is a well-known Habr post titled “What should a startup do when it has too many advisers?”, and on Hacker News the most discussed advisor question is how much equity to give them. Both are about the same thing: an advisor is taken on without a specific question, and then nobody knows what to do with them or what they are worth. A working rule: one person per question. When two advisors disagree, the founder decides by the numbers of their own business, not by whose CV is longer.
Where I sit in this grid
I am a practising CPO and CCO at a large bank and help startups in the time left from my main job. The closest word for what I do is “advisor”, with two caveats. I have no method with weekly homework: if you need pace, look for a tracker. I also have no hundred-page reports: you get a list of steps and a way to evaluate each one, in a conversation or a short deck. What I do have is an answer to a specific question from what I have done myself, and a rule to say on the first call if my experience does not fit you. Formats and the questions people bring are on the home page.