Have you thought about straight up reaching out to people in your network or their connections and asking nicely if they’d be up for mentoring you? I expect 90-95% of the responses would be lukewarm to nonexistent, and you shouldn’t take it personally—but every now and then you might find someone with some extra bandwidth and an altruistic attitude to give a shot at establishing such a relationship. It might help if the people you reach out to, are people you have something in common with: ideally, they would be able to see their past selves in you. (For me personally, that has been a big motivator to start such a relationship.)<p>That’s my take on mentors—and generally, I feel that mentors aren’t people who do this to get paid. Alternatively, if you’re looking for someone to take on the role of a tutor and willing to pay up, you could go on Stanford/MIT’s popular CS classes, find out who were the TAs last semester, and reach out to them offering 2x-3x the pay.