HOW MENTORSHIP MAKES THE DIFFERENCE FOR STARTUP FOUNDERS
When you think of a startup founder, you might envision a lone entrepreneur starting a business in a garage and slowly rising to solo prominence. The reality, however, is that founders are a lot more successful when they have a strong support network, and mentorship plays a critical role in this. It’s generally accepted that behind every great leader are great mentors, and the facts back it up: according to a study by UPS, 70% of small businesses that receive mentoring survive five years or more, double the rate of those who do not receive mentoring, and 88% of business owners with a mentor say that having one is invaluable. It’s clear that receiving guidance from experienced mentors during the seed-stage (and beyond) can make the difference for founders as they grow, scale, and set the stage for their venture’s long term success.
At The Idea Village, our work supporting startups would not be possible without the incredible network of mentors who provide guidance, advice, and lasting support to founders in New Orleans. Over the last two decades, we’ve had the opportunity to cultivate a diverse network of mentors made up of experienced entrepreneurs, investors, corporate partners, CEOs, and industry experts from New Orleans and all over the country. To date, this network has supported founders with over 94,220 direct mentor hours, and we’re sharing some of these stories here.
HOW MENTORSHIP WORKS
Brad Feld, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author of Startup Communities and co-founder of Techstars defines a mentor as an experienced entrepreneur or investor who actively contributes time, energy, and wisdom to startups. Their own entrepreneurial journeys- including highs, lows, pitfalls, pivots, challenges, and successes- give them unique insight into a founder’s experience. Their special understanding of what it takes for a startup to succeed allows them to support founders through help in setting goals, working strategies, providing fresh perspectives, offering advice, asking questions, offering personal anecdotes, and bringing a sense of community to founders at a critical phase in their journey.
“Mentorship, when done correctly, is magical,” Brad Feld says in his book Startup Communities, and in our experience, he’s right. In order to unlock that magic potential, we built our accelerator programming to incorporate our values, including having a Village mindset, an opt-in culture, a love for New Orleans, and a celebration of resourcefulness, in addition to drawing inspiration from the mentorship ideologies of many leaders in the startup industry, including Feld’s Mentor Manifesto. We share the belief that effective mentors should be authentic, direct, empathetic, optimistic, challenging but never destructive, and open to learning from founders as much as founders learn from them, (among other things) and we instill these values into the culture of our VILLAGEx program, where one-on-one mentoring is a cornerstone of the founder experience.
THE POWER OF OPTING IN
When Josh Johnston joined our VILLAGEx cohort in 2019, he was a busy co-founder launching his tech startup, TrayAway, and he was eager to form relationships with experienced mentors in the program to take Trayaway to the next level. During a cohort dinner, Josh connected with Scott Wolfe, founder and CEO of Levelset, a SaaS company headquartered in New Orleans. Scott went through our accelerator program in 2013, and went on to raise over $47M from national investors. Now, he pays it forward to the next generation of founders by being a VILLAGEx mentor.
Scott’s game-changing advice to Josh was to “go all in and sign up for everything. Everything that’s available--do it,” because he recognized that TrayAway was at a pivotal point of growth, similar to where Levelset was when the startup went through the accelerator program 5 years prior. Josh locked in on that advice and stuck to the commitment, signing up for every available opportunity during the accelerator, he opted in and made time for each and every one-on-one mentor meeting, despite his busy schedule.
That turned out to be extremely important advice. Josh says that each mentor meeting he signed up for, even the ones with mentors with backgrounds in areas he didn’t initially think would be beneficial, never failed to help him. “I always left a one-on-one mentor meeting thinking ‘Wow!’ There would be at least 1 , 2 or 3 things that would be a takeaway that would essentially change our trajectory overall. ”
Oftentimes, more than one mentor will work with teams, giving founders a plethora of ideas, perspectives, and expertise. Josh expressed gratitude for his relationship with David Dart, a mentor and Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR), Josh says, “David ended up being a pivotal component to helping us with our first round of financing. He still guides us and we work with him on a weekly basis.” In fact, many of our alumni find that the relationships they build with mentors last beyond the program itself.
BUILDING LASTING RELATIONSHIPS
One benefit of our accelerator program is the opportunity to build lasting relationships with mentors who are seasoned serial entrepreneurs and industry executives. Lydia Winkler and Marco Nelson, founders of RentCheck, experienced this first-hand during VILLAGEx, and the mentorship they received from Soumitra Sengupta and Mike Katz propelled the growth of their tech startup. “Working with Soumitra has been a huge highlight,” says Marco, “he followed us along our journey, and even now he checks in with us and helps out. That continued relationship has been really valuable.”
As one of our lead mentors, Soumitra brings to VILLAGEx 25 years of experience in business development, sales, data analytics, design, fundraising, management, market research, and software programming. He’s a strong believer in the importance of sustained mentorship, which is a driving force behind why he stays in touch with and continues to support accelerator alumni like RentCheck: “It comes to a core belief that anything worth doing is worth doing long term. Companies evolve, founders evolve, and the way you look at a problem today is not the same way you’ll look at it later.” As a startup grows, scales, and faces new challenges, accessing the support systems that helped them get to its current position can be an invaluable tool for founders.
Mentor-founder relationships often extend beyond the scope of our 4-month accelerator. Part of our mission at VILLAGEx is to facilitate these deeper connections between mentors and founders, because sustained connections are not only what help startups grow, but they also contribute to the overall sustained vitality of our startup community. “The idea is to build an ecosystem, and it has to be built over a period of time in a sustained effort,” Soumitra says, “Maybe I’ll do this for several years and then hand it off to someone new who comes along.” As new founders enter the ecosystem, connections are formed and relationships grow, and founders often find ways to pay forward the support that they received--thus the ecosystem as a whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
PAYING IT FORWARD & PAVING THE WAY
Vignesh Krishnan, founder and VILLAGEx 2019 alumni, is a testament to this power of connection and support in our startup ecosystem here in New Orleans. His journey toward entrepreneurship began while working at Lucid, one of the fastest growing companies to emerge out of the Greater New Orleans area. As an early employee of the company, Vignesh was constantly encouraged to seek innovative solutions to problems he identified in his line of work, which is what ultimately led him to launch Samplechain.
Thinking back on his time in VILLAGEx, he reflects on the impact that the built-in community support from mentors and other leaders had on his journey: “It’s more than just learning about entrepreneurship. My highlight was the fact that any time I put in the effort, or looked at a new project, or a new angle, there was always someone there to help with that-- whether it was someone from The Idea Village, a mentor, or my fellow entrepreneurs.”
And now? He takes the support he received and pays it forward to the next generation of founders by being a mentor in our program himself: “New Orleans is a small city, and we’re all trying to expand the pie, because there’s much more value in expanding it than taking pieces of it.”
THE FLYWHEEL EFFECT IN OUR ECOSYSTEM
A strong startup community is one where founders are supported, encouraged, and challenged to level up--and oftentimes, like Vignesh, and the founders of RentCheck and Trayayway, they are inspired to become mentors themselves. In fact, this past year over 20% of our mentors were alumni from our accelerator programs, demonstrating a flywheel effect where founders pay it forward and support the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs, creating an ever-growing network of individuals working to bolster the startup ecosystem in New Orleans.
You can learn more about our diverse community of mentors here. If you’re interested in becoming part of our mentor network, fill out this form and we’ll get in touch! If you’re a founder looking to scale your startup with the help of our seasoned mentors, learn more and apply to VILLAGEx here. Applications close this Thursday 11/19 at 11:59 PM.