There are 2 cardinal rules in life: There is no crying in baseball and there is no coaching in startups.
Getting a startup off the ground requires so much energy that none can be spared on the humans — at least in those very early formative times.
This is why startups are usually filled with gap fillers — people with broad capabilities and a will to do anything, anywhere and at anytime. They are simultaneously the canary and the Jack/Jill of all trades. A rare breed of people that thrive under the workload and stress of this stage of a business and require little to no parental supervision with a bias towards action.
The one thing they don’t need is coaching.
For startups, the key to early success is velocity. Everyone needs to be running at the same speed (fast) and in the same direction. When you introduce someone that is not capable of keeping up they become a drain on the rest of the team. Things start to slow down, other team members need to do more work or teach and this stalls progress.
Early stage startups are not a place for learning how to be in a startup. The team that comes together needs to already have the skills and work ethic needed to create progress and not just motion.
Thinking you can teach someone how to operate in a startup while building the startup will kill the startup.