Interview: From Engineer to CEO — Lessons with Mentor Kofi Mensah

We sat down with Kofi Mensah, a mentor who has guided multiple startups from MVP to acquisition. His background in engineering and product leadership gives him a unique view on rapid scaling, hiring, and culture. In this interview, Kofi shares practical advice for founders and his philosophy on mentoring.

On his origin story

Kofi began as a systems engineer and moved into product management after leading several high-impact features. He founded his first startup at 28, which sold in year three. Since then he has acted as a fractional CTO and mentor for early-stage founders.

Core mentoring principles

Kofi emphasizes three core principles in his mentorship approach:

• Clarity over complexity: Simplify the product to its core value proposition and optimize for the smallest deliverable that proves value.
• Decision hygiene: Use frameworks to avoid analysis paralysis—document decisions, owners, and timelines.
• People-first scaling: Hire for learning ability and culture fit rather than only for immediate skill sets.

'I tell founders to treat their first 100 customers like a research lab: talk to them, measure their ritual, and change your product to fit their real-life workflow.'

Common founder mistakes

Kofi sees repeating patterns: mis-timed hiring, over-optimistic roadmaps, and poor stakeholder communication. He counsels founders to build simple metrics that matter and to create rapid feedback loops with customers and the team.

Advice for new mentees

For first-time mentees, Kofi recommends being brutally honest about constraints and bringing artifacts to the session—code, data, pitch decks—so mentoring time can be concrete and actionable. He favors structured sessions with clear outcomes and follow-up tasks.

On scaling trust and delegation

Kofi believes trust is a function of clarity and competence. Leaders must create systems that make delegation safe: clear definitions of done, reliable metrics, and decision ownership. Without these, scaling becomes chaotic and morale drops.

How mentoring changed him

Mentoring has been two-way for Kofi. Listening to founders has kept him current with emergent business models and forced him to articulate intuition into teachable frameworks. He says mentoring sharpens his own thinking and helps him see patterns across industries.

Closing thoughts

Kofi's final message to aspiring founders: focus on customers, hire slowly, and document decisions. Above all, find mentors who challenge your assumptions and hold you accountable. You can find Kofi's mentoring offerings on TheMentors.store where he runs a four-week founder sprint and office hours for alum.

Interested in Kofi's mentor sessions? Visit his profile on TheMentors.store and book a discovery call.