When you start a company, you are usually in one of two camps: a veteran who has worked at multiple startups and knows the monster challenge you're up against OR a first timer who has limited startup experience but an abundance of passion for the idea you want to solve. In both cases, there's always a lot to learn, but for the strength and vitality of an ecosystem, it's particularly important how we handle educating the first timers. 

When you're starting a company there are a million things to be done and often as a first timer you don't even know where to begin. Further complicating your uphill battle, there's a reasonable question as to how to prioritize the many things you *could* work on.  Even "founder heroics" can only take your startup so far. 

So how do we give them a chance to succeed? We must educate them. Here's how:

1) Mentorship

Whether you're 1 step ahead of someone or been in the startup game for decades, there's a tremendous opportunity to help other entrepreneurs through the act of mentorship. Thanks to today's technology, it can be via skype, chat, email or the traditional face to face meeting. Talking to someone who has dealt with the issues you're facing can be the quickest way to level up. 

While I was at oneforty, founder Laura Fitton insisted I talk with Dan Martell every month or two as a customer development mentor. Every time we spoke I felt like 2-3 weeks of learning was crammed into a 30-60 minute call. I cannot put a price on the value of those learnings on both my career and what I was able to accomplish for oneforty because of it.

In Boston, we have some great programs to help make mentorship more efficient beyond natural meetings that may occur: 

• Accelerator programs with an emphasis on mentorship - TechStars, MassChallenge and Summer at Highland.
• Online Mentorship Matching - Founder Mentors
• Mentorship focused Events - DartDinners, RubyRiot, various Sector Dinnersand the unConference

2) Educational Events

Unfortunately, mentorship doesn't always scale ideally. There are many more startups than industry experts and startup veterans. The best way to scale their knowledge is then by sharing it with an audience - aka an educational startup event. When done properly, an attendee will learn multiple lessons that improve their skills and give them knowledge they can take back to their startup and team.

As a bonus to these educational events is that it self-selects the best people; no "wannabepreneurs" attend because it's not fun to sit in a classroom like environment to learn this stuff unless you're neck deep in building a company.  And that other person next to you desperately hoping to learn? Yup, he's probably a great peer to compare notes with and learn what is working for him and what's not. It's ecosystem collaboration at its best.

In Boston, we have some great programs to help educate entrepreneurs like this:

• Regular Events: Lean Startup Circle and many Developer groups
• Big Events: RamenCamp, the Momentum Summit, Lean Startup Machine & Startup Weekend
• One time events: Founder Mentor's Customer Acquisition Event, Eric Ries and other Lean experts guest speak and the Paul English Hiring event

Frankly, this is an area we could improve significantly upon. Instead of another panel discussing fundraising...having an expert talk about a specific startup challenge is tremendously valuable (hiring, marketing, sales, team management, design, cross-disciplinary communication, etc). 

3) Online Content - Blogs, Videos, Slideshare, etc

So the final way people can learn is through the one way mediums of the web; you can read blog posts, watch videos, skim slideshare presentations and more. The challenge is that except for some amazing posts from the David Skok and Ben Horowitz of the world, most only cover a small piece of a topic, lacking the depth or breadth of a quality presentation.  Slideshares can be great, but you miss much of the commentary around a presentation, which is especially important if the presentation is done in the Dharmesh Shah - style format of only images with very little text in their presentations.

Watching a video of a presentation brings you very close to an event-like situation, but it's still only one-way; you don't get to connect with peers also interested in the subject and there's no way to ask questions in the moment. If you have a specific, narrow problem though these can be the perfect answer at just the right time (ie- see Quora). 

So why does this matter?

Otto Von Bismarck said it best:

It is said that only a fool learns from his own mistakes, a wise man from the mistakes of others.

More first time entrepreneurs will succeed if they have learned key lessons without having to make those mistakes themselves. This can only come from a combination of mentorship (for advice specific to your startup) and educational events (for the nuts and bolts you didn't learn in school). 

Without this education, not only will first time entrepreneurs be more likely to fail, but when they do, they won't have learned enough from their startup to be potential startup employees for the startups that do survive and grow.  If that happens, the first time entrepreneur is likely to end up taking a horrible corporate job and leave the startup ecosystem forever.

Wish there was more opportunities to learn? What would you like to learn? 

RamenCamp is an example of 4 friends (Josh Bob, Kabir Hemrajani, Jeff Seibert and I), who decided they wanted to learn more about bootstrapping skills for building a business. We asked ourselves what we wanted to learn and then organized an event to bring in experts to talk about it. 200 people learned what we may have been able to partially learn just ourselves. Sharing the workload and leveraging our networks made it an easy side project for us to accomplish together, which is why we'll be doing it again this year.

What do you want to learn about? Can you help better educate our ecosystem?