Here's a conundrum I've been discussing with potential business mentors as we try to find ground where we might meet.
Being the advanced oddity that I am -- that is, an independent scholar and entrepreneur on my own evolving path -- when I seek out specific help from established/establishment entities, I meet resistance to my very own realities.
I told the regional head of a national businesswomen's organization recently that my combination of being way out ahead in my thinking and operations yet a fledgling in business seems not to compute for most organizations with resources.
I may be a startup but I've got 25 years of professional and personal experience. I'm the age of people with established businesses but I don't particularly want to backtrack to become resonant with them, or adopt dying practices or conventions in the process of being disrupted.
So, receiving training on how to be professional or being moved by perks like "can bring your dog to the office" or recognizing myself in the accelerator organization's language of f-bombs or "join the movement, dude" (which is what international digital agency Unison.net's career page used to say), are not really in alignment with the kind of support I need.
On the other hand, more mature cultures of support I gravitate toward often ask for benchmarks I am nowhere near, like "$2M in revenue" and don't yet value (to judge from their own operations) many operational strengths I bring, nor necessarily grasp my outsider, international perspective.
And I note other rock and hard place factors I'm dealing with. I'll go into them more deeply another day but here are big ones: working around and with tech but not offering a "tech solution"; and being global in focus but not considering "global = somewhere outside America".