Mentoring Online

Selecting Mentors

The mentor selection and outreach process remains the same for Startup Week online. Be sure to invite mentors from a variety of backgrounds: marketing, technical, design, co-founders, product managers. Balancing diversity and gender along with skillsets is also extremely helpful. 

Mentor sessions can be hosted in breakout rooms or through other online meeting tools. Read through our tools section to make sure the tools you pick are capable of hosting mentor sessions. 

Communicate the details of the mentor sessions with mentors and make sure that each mentor knows how to use the software platform for the meetings. You might want to consider one or two mentor training sessions a week before the event. 

Another feature that works well for online mentor sessions is the ability to have a waiting room, or an option for last-minute mentor session signups. We recommend having one person — your mentors lead, for example — to manage and coordinate this process, with a few volunteers each day for online support.