How to Prepare for a Meeting with a Mentor

I do a lot of networking with folks looking for advice and trying to figure out their careers. Here are the top things I wish folks would do when engaging with me: 1. Do your homework in advance. If your ask could've been done without talking to me, it should've been done beforehand. A LOT of people ask me for help with finding a job at NVIDIA yet they have not identified any specific role at NVIDIA relevant to them. You can browse NVIDIA's open roles before talking to me. If you haven't at least taken this step, I don't see value in giving you my time. 2. Make it easy for me. If I give you my time to meet, send me a calendar invite ASAP (surprisingly a lot of people don't do this). Be flexible with your schedule when scheduling with me. If there are wide swaths of time during which you can't meet with me, meeting with me is probably not that important to you. If it's not important to you, then why should it be important to me? 3. Do the work. Be specific. Go deep. If you have an ask, make sure you've put some thought and work into it. There is a decent amount of content about me and my company online. Understanding this and looking into it beforehand helps you and I get the most leverage out of our interactions. 4. What's in it for me? Good interactions are 2 way exchanges. People who very one-sidedly ask me for anything clearly do not understand this. A lot of the great mentors I had understood that I had a perspective into a world they weren't plugged into. They would ask and I would volunteer whatever insights were relevant to them. This made it worth their time. 5. Build relationships, not LinkedIn connections. Adding somebody on LinkedIn is easy. Therefore, it isn't differentiated and is thus low value. Sending somebody a LinkedIn connection request with a message is still easy, but it's actually much harder than without a message. And because of that, it's actually differentiated. But building a legitimate and genuine relationship with someone is truly different and challenging. And because of that, it's more likely to get a desirable outcome. The bulk of great relationship building does not happen on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a tool, not a destination. Understand this and know how to use it. 6. Know when to reach out. The absolute worst time to engage with me is after I have a LinkedIn post that gets a lot of traction. That's when everyone is reaching out to me. And given the volume, I am least likely to engage with someone whom I don't already know. The patient person realizes this. And remembers to engage me once things have settled down. This takes more effort, which is why it's so rare. These are just a few of my observations and advice for folks trying to network in general and on LinkedIn. It's doable, but it takes effort to do something different and unique. The more thoughtful you are and the more effort you put in, the more likely you are to become an Ace networker!

Networking advice for students and new attorneys: do your due diligence before a conversation. When someone reaches out to me to schedule a call, I appreciate when they’ve taken a few minutes to google me so they know a bit about what I do at The Legal Accountability Project. I’m always happy to speak with Williams College and Washington University in St. Louis students and alumni seeking career advice, because alums were helpful to me when I was starting out (and still are). However, if you’re initiating the call, it’s important to be prepared. Here’s why (and how): 1. As an entrepreneur, I pitch LAP every day. I don’t always have the bandwidth to regurgitate publicly accessible information. I suspect I’m not the only entrepreneur who values boundary-setting. 2. Doing research in advance shows respect for the other person’s limited time. When I’m the one initiating the meeting, I always do my due diligence, so I appreciate when others extend me the same courtesy. 3. It also shows that you understand the point of the meeting and have an interest in speaking with me in particular. 4. I would much rather spend a call offering career advice, reflecting on what I’ve learned, and suggesting next steps and additional connections, rather than reciting the information on LAP’s website. 5. Be prepared with questions! 6. Have concrete asks. I’m happy to brainstorm, but delineating what you need shows that you are goal-oriented and career-focused. What jumps out at me in a message is a concrete reason for interest - perhaps an article I wrote, an interview I did, or an event I spoke at. What I remember from a meeting - and what will make me think of someone when career opportunities arise - is a person who did their homework. A career is a marathon, not a sprint. You should always be honing your networking skills and growing your personal and professional networks. You never know when someone might be helpful to you. #entrepreneurship #legalprofession #networking #careers #nonprofits

This one habit has sparked some of the best conversations of my career. (And most people skip it.) Let me explain. Before every introductory meeting, I scan someone’s LinkedIn and any other information I can find on their organization, their mission, and more. But I’m not looking for the obvious stuff. I’m hunting for the anomalies. → Someone who used to work in gaming that is now working in National Security → Another DePaul grad → A shared connection to Seattle That’s where the real conversation begins. Those little surprises? They build trust fast. And in my experience, the best connections don’t come from agenda-driven meetings. They start from something much simpler: → Curiosity → A little prep → And an unexpected bridge The more I automate what I do, the more I ask myself: How do we build systems without losing the human connection? Because let’s be honest—scaling is great. But what if we can also scale trust? That’s where the real power is. I try to walk into every call with three end goals in mind: → What will be the next steps of this conversation? → One concrete way I can help → One connection to make So I’m curious: → How do you prep for conversations? → What helps you go from small talk to something meaningful? Drop your thoughts below. Let’s swap notes.