Team's Mentoring Guide

What are Mentoring Sessions?

As a Seedcamp finalist your startup team gets to participate in mentoring sessions with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, product experts and developers. They are the core of Seedcamp Week and you should aim to get as much out of these sessions as possible.

Each mentoring session lasts approximately an hour and will contain your team and around 4 mentors. This is a perfect size to have an interactive discussion focusing on your product and business strategy.

How to Run a Mentoring Session

As a team you should take charge of the mentoring session to ensure that you get as much out of it as possible.

Before the mentoring session ensure that you know who you are meeting with and their expertise – the event Lookbook will contain details on most of the mentors and Linkedin/Google should help to fill in gaps. Also have a brief pitch practiced which clearly demonstrates what your company does.

You should start with a two minute pitch/demo of what your company does followed by laying out the type of feedback/questions you would like to cover with the mentors. Ensure that in each session you are covering an important but different set of questions/feedback. Listen and ask... it's a 2-way discussion. Don't be defensive but try to understand and incorporate the feedback to help you. Ultimately, it's your business so some of the feedback you will take and some of it you will not.

Try to keep control of the mentoring session by guiding the converation and ensuring that all the mentors are able to contribute their expertise.

After the Session

If you connected with a mentor be sure to follow up! Drop them an email saying how much you enjoyed the session, this keeps the door open for future meetings and queries. A lot of teams don't do this and regret it later when 6 months down the road they need to talk to a mentor they didn't think they would have to. Again, it's your decision about which mentors to keep close with but do drop a thank you note to most.