The Mentor You Actually Need Probably Has No Idea Your Industry Exists

There's a kind of tunnel vision that comes with deep expertise. The longer you've worked in a space, the more you start to see every problem through the lens of how that space has always solved it. That's useful. It's also quietly limiting in ways that are hard to notice from the inside.

This is why some of the most useful conversations founders have don't happen at industry conferences or in niche Slack groups. They happen at a dinner party with someone who runs a completely different kind of business. Or in a mentorship session with a retired executive from a field that seems totally unrelated. Or in a random coffee chat that starts with "I have no idea what you do, but tell me about it."

Cross-industry insight isn't a nice-to-have. For a lot of founders, it's the thing that finally cracks open a problem they've been staring at too long.

Why Insiders Can't Always See What You Need

When you spend years inside an industry, you absorb its assumptions. You learn what's been tried. You develop intuitions about what works and what doesn't. All of that is genuinely valuable—but it also means you've inherited the industry's blind spots along with its wisdom.

Think about how long it took the taxi industry to see ride-sharing coming. Or how newspaper executives kept trying to save print instead of rethinking distribution. These weren't unintelligent people. They were experts—and that expertise made it harder, not easier, to imagine a different model.

For early-stage founders, this plays out in subtler ways. You might be building a B2B SaaS tool and spending all your time talking to other SaaS founders about churn and pricing tiers. Meanwhile, a founder who built a successful franchise operation—a world away from your space—might have figured out customer retention techniques that map perfectly onto your problem, because the underlying human behavior is the same.

The solution to a retention problem in software isn't always found in software. Sometimes it's found in hospitality, or healthcare, or logistics, or somewhere else entirely.

The Surprising Places Good Frameworks Come From

Some of the most widely used startup frameworks didn't originate in tech. The lean methodology that's now standard in Silicon Valley was adapted from Toyota's manufacturing process. The idea of customer discovery that underpins most modern product thinking was heavily influenced by anthropological research methods. Jobs-to-be-done theory came partly from studying why people buy milkshakes.

Good frameworks travel. The question is whether you're open to receiving them from unexpected sources.

A founder building a mental health app might learn something profound from talking to someone who runs a CrossFit gym about community building and accountability. A founder launching a marketplace might get more traction from a conversation with a real estate broker—who's been navigating two-sided markets for decades—than from another marketplace startup founder who's still figuring it out alongside them.

The outsider doesn't carry your industry's baggage. They ask questions that feel naive but are actually clarifying. They suggest things that "nobody does" in your space, which is sometimes exactly the point.

How to Actually Find These People

This sounds great in theory, but founders often get stuck on the practical side. Where do you find mentors from adjacent fields? How do you make the ask without it feeling weird?

A few approaches that actually work:

Reframe what you're asking for. Instead of asking someone to be your mentor—which carries a lot of implied commitment—ask for a 30-minute conversation about a specific problem. Most people are willing to talk about their own expertise for half an hour. Start there.

Use LinkedIn differently. Instead of searching for people in your industry, search for people with titles or backgrounds that map to functions you're struggling with. If you're trying to figure out how to build a sales process, look for VP of Sales profiles at companies in completely different verticals. Message them with a specific question, not a generic pitch.

Show up where other industries gather. SCORE, the SBA's mentorship network, has advisors from all kinds of backgrounds. Local Chamber of Commerce events pull in business owners from every sector. YPO chapters and EO forums mix industries by design. These aren't glamorous venues, but they're full of people who've solved problems you haven't faced yet.

Tell people you're looking for outside perspective. Explicitly. When you're at an event or in a conversation, say: "I'm actually trying to connect with people outside my industry—I think I've been too in my own head about this." That framing invites exactly the kind of person you're looking for to raise their hand.

Making the Most of the Conversation

When you do get in front of someone from a different field, resist the urge to spend the whole time explaining your industry to them. Their outsider status is the asset. Let them ask dumb questions. Answer them seriously. Their confusion about why things work the way they do in your space might be pointing at something worth questioning.

Come with a specific problem, not a general one. "How do I grow my startup" is too broad for anyone to help with. "We're struggling to convert free users to paid and I can't figure out if it's a pricing problem or a product problem" is something a smart person from almost any background can engage with meaningfully.

And take notes. Not because you'll implement everything they say—you won't—but because the act of writing down an outside perspective forces you to process it rather than dismiss it.

The Trap of Only Talking to People Who Get It

There's a comfort in surrounding yourself with people who already understand your world. They validate your assumptions, speak your language, and share your frustrations. That community is genuinely valuable.

But it can also become an echo chamber that reinforces the same blind spots over and over.

The founders who tend to find unconventional solutions are often the ones who've made a habit of seeking out people who don't get it—and staying curious long enough to find out what those people know that they don't. That's not a rejection of domain expertise. It's a complement to it.

Your best idea might already be out there, living in a completely different industry, waiting for someone to borrow it. Go find the person who has it.