How To Be A Great Startmate Mentor
We get lots of requests from people who want to be Startmate mentors.
We get lots of requests from people who want to be Startmate mentors.
All Startmate mentors invest their own money into Startmate. It’s something we think makes a big difference in how committed and helpful our mentors are to our teams.
For SM17, we asked for “some specific examples of the most valuable things the Startmate mentors did for you”.
Below are some examples of what they said.
1. Alan Downie (Founder, Bugherd) read through each and every one of our 14 day free trial lifecycle emails and gave suggested improvements. He also made me think BIGGER about everything.
2. Niki Scevak (Founder, Startmate/Blackbird Ventures) encouraged us to do ‘whatever we had to’ in order to make progress; ie. guerrilla data collection.
3. Ned Dwyer (Founder, Stealth NewCo) met with me every week. Every week he had pages of feedback for me. He acted like a team member — ‘doing stuff’ as well as suggesting stuff.
4. Holly Cardew (Founder, Pixc) gave me client lists and all her growth hacks to replicate.
5. Matt Allen (AWS) continually inspired me and encouraged me, and hustled to get me connected with devs, pin payments, you feel like his entire network is at your disposal.
6. Chris Raethke (Founder, BugCrowd) helped me drill down into my core biz stats and examine EXACTLY what I needed to track better to be smarter.
7. Mike Baukes (Founder, Upguard) taught me the mindset of how to sell to stay alive and showed me that obstacles in the path means you are going in the right direction.
8. Stuart Argue (Founder, Recovery Record) pinged me with suggestions quite a few times through the program, made me go through some technical whiteboarding (good prep for VC DD), and was generally helpful.
9. Peter Huynh (VC, Qualgro Ventures) helped me 1–1 with managing stress and anxiety, he is a life saver.
10. Samantha Wong (VP Operations, Blackbird Ventures) made MANY excellent introductions. One of those led directly to someone investing in my company.
11. Alfred Lo (Angel Investor) was connected to lots of people I wanted to know and never refused an introduction.
12. Thomas Rice (Angel Investor) pushed for a key intro ridiculously hard.
13. Chris Sharkey (CTO, Autopilot) provided great advice re: devs.
14. Rory San Miguel (Founder, Propeller) really helped at the start of the program with a gameplan for building relationships with investors/mentors.
15. Rayn Ong (Angel Investor) gave an investor’s viewpoint, pitch deck advice, and introductions to investors.
16. Jeremy Cox (Founder, Edrolo) helped me out massively and made killer introductions to investors
17. Nick Pelly (Angel Investor) met with me every week and force fed me the importance of product.
18. Rachael Neumann (Angel Investor) & Jodie Auster (GM, Uber Eats) shared a 20-person strong list of HR executives in SF for us to connect with — that’s quite awesome.
19. Bill Bartee (VC , CSIRO) met with us regularly and guided our fundraising strategy.
This is basically a how-to-be-a-great-mentor guide in 19 quotes.
For anyone wanting to be a Startmate mentor, you now have a playbook for how to be a great one.
For any teams wanting to apply to Startmate, you now know what to expect from our mentor community.
Reminder: You can apply to Startmate right now!
We can help.