Startup mentors are experienced professionals and investors. But founders often leave mentoring more confused than they started. And they often miss the best advice.

So we did some research. We found the mentors that made the biggest difference to the startups in the world’s top accelerators. And we asked them how they do it.

Buy the book

Andy Young

EIR @ 500 Startups

"A must-read for anyone involved in helping startups. All accelerators and startup programmes should have this as required reading."

Eze Vidra

Founder of Google Campus

"Sal is able to anticipate the challenges startups will encounter during the life cycle of their products."

Samantha Hosea

Creative Coach

"Stuff that isn't out there yet. Nice and comprehensive, to the point. It helped me see what it useful for startups."

About Mentor Impact

Our research approach focused on top performers. We started with the world’s top-performing startup accelerators, focusing on the two that were designed around a mentor network - Techstars and Seedcamp.

There we looked at their most successful startups, the ones that carried the performance of the overall portfolio, and asked them which mentors had made the biggest difference. These were the top performing mentors of the top-performing startups in the top-performing accelerators.

What they told us was surprising – it contradicted a lot of common knowledge.

So we dug deeper. Over a 3-month deep research process, we interviewed these mentors until we had thorough coverage of their approaches.

This was turned into a mentor training workshop, which was iterated in 5 accelerators over another 6 months until it was quickly actionable.

The result, Mentor Impact, guides you through their different approaches, so you can find what works best for you personally:

• ways to calibrate your advice, to make sure it’s actionable to startups
• different approaches to knowledge transfer
• tips on practicalities
• examples of unconventional mentoring approaches that work

This guide is very useful if you’re new to startup mentoring, and has a number of new approaches for the experienced.

We want to help you meet startups where they stand and offer substantial, actionable help (not just opinions and advice).

You’re giving your valuable time and priceless expertise to help young founders - Mentor Impact will help you make it count.

Workshops

Mentor Impact was originally designed as workshop, so mentors can exchange techniques, and reflect together about what works. Mentor Impact workshops inject some of the world’s best mentorship thinking into your community, and reveal the best mentoring approaches that work in your industry and culture.

Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss.

Table of contents

• The Source Institute Research Process
• Good mentoring is just…
  • What separates great mentors from the rest
  • Is there a single way to be a good mentor?
  • Styles of mentoring
  • Wielding Authority
  • Inclusiveness
• The Conversation
• Calibration
  • Learning their ambitions
  • Figuring Out What The Product Actually Is
  • Hearing the pitch
  • Learning What Stage They’re At
  • Finding Their Problems
  • Mental State
  • Team Dynamics
  • Customer Understanding
  • Constraints
  • The power of calibration
  • Concluding Calibration
• Knowledge Transfer
  • Tell Stories Instead Of Giving Advice
  • Bring the industry numbers
  • Do It With Them
  • Simulate It
  • Be Socratic
  • Create Visuals
  • Physical Artifacts
  • A Kick In The Ass
  • Be Enthusiastic!
  • How To Help When They’re Already Winning
  • Concluding Knowledge Transfer
• Next Steps
  • The Insta-Intro
  • The Conditional Intro
  • Homework
  • The Reading List
  • Ask For Updates
  • Ask For Another Meeting
  • Becoming An Advisor
• How Mentoring Goes Wrong
• Picking Your Style
• Getting Better

About the author

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Salim Virani works to empower startup founders on their own terms - from Roma people, to African engineers - even, as crazy as it may sound, Europeans.

He is the creator of Source Institute - an organisation that’s making startup education better - mainly by pioneering peer to peer techniques.

Salim’s work includes The Africa Prize For Engineering Innovation, which produces top-tier clean water, sanitation, education and agriculture startups across the continent, and The Sources, an online course where African founders share their most relevant experiences and advice. Salim founded Leancamp, which created the first evolutions of Lean Startup to include Business Models, UX, and Enterprise Lean Startup. And Founder Centric, which developed and delivered startup education for Seedcamp, Techstars, ClimateKIC, and around 30 more accelerators and universities.

Source Institute believes that what works there doesn’t always work here. We’ve found that in fast-changing environments, people improve faster when they learn from each other. Source Institute now spans 4 continents, involves 40 leaders operating 5 projects, educating thousands of founders.

Salim’s also taught at a few smarty-pants universities like Oxford and UCL. Prior to that, Salim was the founder of 5 startups in ecommerce, email and IT services, as well as Digital Media Director at JWT, a major marketing agency.

Though in his parents eyes, he topped out at age 16, when we he was in the local newspaper for starting a computer store.