Interesting, I totally agree with you. I considered my dad my Mentor too early on. But as one grows and our world view changes we probably start looking out for other people to look up to and learn from. Have you connected successfully with a Mentor after your dad?
I've had (and have) many mentors over the years. The way I found most of them was I'd have a question on something I couldn't get answered. I'd go to IR and ask the question. Whether anyone knew the answer or not, I'd hang out for a while answering other folks questions or just chatting. It was never anything formal, but eventually there would be people I considered experts who didn't mind an email with questions. Thing is, it goes both ways a lot of times now. People who I would consider mentors for some things would likely consider me a mentor for others.
My advice would be to not look for a mentor, but instead put yourself in situations where there are knowledgable people to meet.
It is totally up to the Mentor to decide on the level of engagement with a given Protege. The type of engagement is usually determined by the problem the Protege is trying to solve OR a plan/goal he is trying to validate. It could be one time or a periodic affair. The end justifies the means in a Mentor-Protege relationship. A long-lasting synergistic relationship is the ideal case scenario and we would love to enable that.
I think the author is talking about business method software patents. If the business method implementation needs patentable technology to implement, then it may not be such a bad idea.
But again I feel that for an early stage company, filing a patent just helps mitigate the risks in the VC's head more than anything else. Forget about enforcing your patent. If you are successful and you have a lot of money and you feel like bullying your competition, we all know how some successful companies go about it.
Social News is one of the features as I mentioned and for some users it might qualify as just a Social News site based on the way they adopt it but for others the Social News feature might be one of the features they will end up using. Our problem is how do we identify the least common denominator without having to do extensive A/B testing?
