This article is contributed by multiple Startup founders from different fields.
The journey of an entrepreneur is filled with excitement, hard work, and a great lot of patience. In this journey, while building up your dream from the scratch, can sometimes feel exhausting. At this point, you need someone who you can look up to when there is a necessity. Those people not only have more experience than you, but they will also advise you and teach you new strategies and tactics to handle your business. These are the people who will give you ideas regarding your current situation and they are called Mentors.
In this article, we will find out, when an aspiring entrepreneur should look for a mentor. Some of the successful entrepreneurs presented their take on this topic. Let’s take a look.
Manav Shah | Founder, Eduvacancy
For me, a mentor is someone who I can look up to as a role model. I wanted to always find a mentor with whom I could discuss, share and debate about the obstacles, I am facing in my startup. When I started building Eduvacancy, I realized in the preliminary months that I needed a role model or mentor to guide me and prepare me for the various difficult decisions I’d have to make. When we began working on building the platform and implementation of the technical aspects, I thought of finding an ideal mentor who would be a strong guiding force and pillar of strength for me. Therefore, before I began full-fledged platform operations, I felt the need of finding the right mentor who would guide, hear and teach me to sail through the difficult phases of building a startup.
Kunal Ahirwar | CEO & Co-Founder, Earnvestt Technologies
Mentorship is an integral part of the entrepreneurial community. For the Earnvestt team, the biggest reason we needed mentors was when we were running our first beta test and we were not getting sufficient sign-ups from the users that we had personally spoken to, which indicated that our product and user flow was not good enough.
Neha Indoria | Co-Founder, Boingg!
It was an organic process that originated from us trying to find answers to problems that presented themselves as we tried to navigate the process of setting up a business by ourselves. Some advise seemed needless and, in some cases, the insights made us re-think our strategy entirely, and slowly we were able to identify the areas in which we will need continued guidance.
Utkarsh Gupta | Managing Director, Ramagya Mart
When I was pondering over a business idea, which finally culminated in the formation of Ramagya Mart, I wasn’t very sure if I should rely on the mentoring acumen prevalent in abundance in my family, or should I seek professional mentoring. As destiny would have it, I was at this crucial stage when I decided to look for a mentor who could professionally guide and personally navigate me to take the right direction.
There was never a defining moment in my life when I felt like I needed a mentor. It just happened organically through inspiring people who came into my life through my student and professional life. No one really wakes one day and says, ‘hey, I need a mentor’. You just feel the impact and connection with someone and reach out to them from time to time.
Ritesh Ujjwal | CEO & Co-Founder, Kofluence
As Sir Isaac Newton famously said in his 1675 letter, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”, in my opinion, most of us need guidance for clarity of thoughts/ directions through individuals who have chartered similar paths earlier or for a fresh perspective. Thankfully, I realized the value of mentors right during my engineering days and I was fortunate enough to be able to find amazing folks across academic, industry leaders as well as a couple of batchmates in front of whom I could be absolutely transparent and leverage their insights. I have been continuing the same ever since and the ‘mentors’ circle has expanded with amazing new folks from different spectrums of life especially during the last 3 years of building Kofluence.
Conclusion
The need for a mentor can arise anytime. Maybe, at a time when just an idea for a startup is peeking inside your head or in the middle of launching a new product for your startup. You should definitely go for a mentor whenever you feel for one.
This article is contributed by multiple Startup founders from different fields.
Most of the time having a mentor really is a benefit for many entrepreneurs. the main job of a mentor is to guide, motivate and inspire you and will you out to find a way from any kind of challenging situation. Amongst millions of people, it can be a challenge to find the perfect mentor for yourself.
In this article, we will find out how to find a perfect mentor. Some of the successful entrepreneurs shared their views on this topic.
Kunal Ahirwar | CEO & Co-Founder, Earnvestt Technologies
We needed someone with experience and expertise and hence we decided to go through an incubation program. We found great mentors like Tanul, Kruti, and others along our journey through Afthonia.
Utkarsh Gupta | Managing Director, Ramagya Mart
This was a challenging task indeed! My office was given the task to identify a mentor for me who could assist me in taking the right decisions. After engaging with professional mentors, management gurus, and consulting organizations that were either recommended by references or identified by research, I finally found a perfect mentor that followed his organization’s philosophy to the tee- “I know that I don’t know”! I loved the philosophy the second I heard it!
The trait I liked the best about this mentor was that in our initial engagements, there was no mention about his 25 years of cross-industry experience, never failing to achieve a target ever, 100% success as a brand strategy consultant and in fact, I never got a feeling that he was a know-it-all guy! His confidence, his energy, and the way he emulates his consulting practice were just unconventional and incomparable to the rest, like a doctor that never prescribes a treatment unless the symptoms are thoroughly analyzed.
Neha Indoria | Co-Founder, Boingg!
A perfect mentor doesn’t exist. Just like a perfect business doesn’t. We essentially earmarked the areas where we needed help and identified 2-3 people we could trust to get advice from. Slowly this network of individuals helped us create a veritable sounding board for our areas of concern.
Manav Shah | Founder, Eduvacancy
I am an avid networker and I love meeting new people. The sole idea behind meeting new people is to learn about their life stories, habits, and personality. I found my perfect mentor by continuously networking and meeting different people from various walks of life. I would go into detail and understand the life learnings of the people I met. This helped me in understanding the characteristics and leadership styles of people with who I interacted. I would also chalk down my future plans and try to understand from different people’s experiences if anyone would add substantial value in my growth journey. However, it was a continuous process of networking at events, conferences, social media platforms that led me to find the right mentor for myself.
I wanted a mentor who was extremely disciplined and focused in their life journey. Besides that, I wanted someone who has experience in building/scaling and investing in different startup ventures. When one invests in different ventures, they start evaluating companies extremely critically. For me, it was necessary to focus on every small problem in the business and do anything to fix it. I wanted a mentor who personally had faced a lot of challenges in their phase of building up. This would really help me in evaluating and overcoming the challenges and mistakes that would come my way. More importantly, I wanted a mentor who would also sharpen my leadership skills and make me more efficient to scale my startup.
There was no wishlist, as such. But some of the most inspiring mentors have been the ones who have helped me see the bigger picture, have faith in myself, and call a spade, a spade. Professionally, most founders also seek out the investor community, including myself. I don’t come from a business family, I just had a vision for SuperBottoms. It was Kunal (Bahl) who was the north star in terms of bringing the vision alive and breathing life into SuperBottoms.
Ritesh Ujjwal | CEO & Co-Founder, Kofluence
Mentor mentee relationship is extremely important and it needs to be nurtured over time to understand each other’s and corresponding personality traits and thought processes. While nurturing this relationship is mostly conscious and the way is largely defined wherein you understand the strengths and weaknesses, one can also find a mentor in a serendipitous manner. In my case, it has been a mix of academic as well as professional life.
Conclusion
Mentors are the guide that will give you a clear picture of your situation and will be beside you when you need them. One needs to be careful while looking for a perfect mentor because in the long they are going to be your trusted confidante.
The role of startup accelerators is increasing in startup communities throughout the world. A startup accelerator is also known as a seed accelerator. It is a business program that supports startup companiesthroughfinancing, mentorship and education. The accelerators have the potential to improve the outcomes of startups and to spill these benefits into the wider startup community. You must be wondering like What is an accelerator? How do startup accelerators work? How do startup accelerators make money? etc. Don’t worry, we are going to answer all these questions in this article.
Y Combinator was the first independent startup accelerator that was started in Cambridge in 2005. Later, Paul Graham moved this into Silicon Valley. After its success, startup accelerator programs started to grow swiftly across Europe and the United States. It includes Seedcamp (2007), Techstars (2006), Startupbootcamp (2010), Tech Wildcatters (2011), and Boomtown Boulder (2014).
The popularity of startup accelerator programs increased in the US and Europe. Seedcamp, Startup Bootcamp, and Startup Wise Guys are the top-rated accelerator programs in Europe. In April 2012, Forbes presented an analysis of startup accelerators. According to that, there was a significant growth of corporate accelerator programs since 2010. Around one-third of startups received accelerator funding models through the accelerator program by 2015. Some large corporations have created their own accelerator programs. They focus on specific categories, but it follows similar principles.
With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, many accelerators such as Y Combinator, SOSV’s family of accelerators and BEAMSTART have shifted their approaches by running most of the programs and Demo Days online.
Startups need to submit an application to join an accelerator. Once the application is approved, the accelerator will give services and resources such as advising hours, shared coworking space, guest speakers, and a negotiated amount of capital. The average term period of a startup accelerator model is 3-4months. Also, the ownership of the startup should be around 3-8%. The help of an accelerator ends with a demo day or graduation after startups present their work and move forward independently.
Startup Accelerator Business Model
Biotech, tech hardware, and AI are the popular sectors of the startup accelerator business model. Also, so many brands have got support from accelerators. Play Tech Center and the Silicon Valley accelerator Plug have assisted PayPal, Google, and Zoosk to convert their ideas into businesses. Y Combinator is another popular accelerator. They released Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit. A startup accelerator named Techstars has sponsored more than 21 startups.
Characteristics of An Accelerator Program
Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. These are the 4 factors that make accelerators unique from other startup institutions such as incubators, seed-stage venture capitalists and angel investors.Accelerators can give useful resources to organizationsat all stages of development. But most accelerator programs are focusing on pre-revenue. To qualify as an accelerator requires a number of characteristics. The characteristics of a startup accelerator are given below.
1. It is a fixed-term business program with a start and an end.
2. It is a cohort of startups.
3. It includes a group of advisors to support the startup.
4. It is an educational program for the transferring of acquired knowledge.
5. It is a selection process, so the cohort of startups is considered the best.
Accelerators provide two types of knowledge where mentors pass the tacit knowledge from what they have learned over the years and the acquired knowledge is transferred through training sessions, workshops, and other structured education. Startup accelerators offer acquired and tacit knowledge through the combination of structured education and mentors. It has efficiency for the transferring of the value it creates by forming a group of startups.
The accelerator chooses the best startups from a large number of applicantsand brings those startups together in such a way that corporations, investors, and others can meet them. It also chooses and brings a group of mentors who give knowledge, advice, and new contacts to startups for development. The accelerator provides a diverse network with a wide range of experience and knowledge.
This group works as a class at a university that allows delivering one lesson to a group of startups at once instead of delivering lessons to individuals multiple times. It focuses on participants who form an ecosystem around the accelerator and provide an opportunity for them to meet a group of startups at once instead of finding and meeting them all individually.
It is provided to overcome the lack of knowledge and networks of startups. Accelerators aremainly funded by corporations, government agencies, or investors to identify and support new innovations. The startups make returns in the form of investment returns, economic development, and new technologies.
An accelerator program mainly includes 6 processes:
Process of an accelerator program
Apply and Get Accepted
After submitting applications, only 1% to 3% of applicants get acceptedfrom total applications. During this process, the startups can interact with the operator and discover more details about them. Startups don’t have an obligation to join and accept the program until they sign any paperwork.
Get Funded
Money is one of the major reasons that founding teams and entrepreneurs selecting the accelerator path. Accelerators provide seed money to the company that ranges from $10,000 to $120,000. Although some have recently withdrawn the amount of funding they provide, they point to funding as a major obstacle to success as that may affect future fundraising activities.
Focus
A big advantage of this system is that it focuses on entrepreneurs. According to the Harvard Business Review, they are being dragged into the process for 3 to 6 months. This is an intense time, and participants are forced to focus and make progress.
Learn
Learning is a big part of the process. It includes opportunities such asseminars, workshops, and mentorship opportunities wherein it covers topics relevant to starting a venture, pitching practice, and the legal aspect.
Network
Entrepreneurs have ample opportunities to network with potential investors and other industry support providers, during the acceleration period. These connections are very valuable.
Demo Day
The process ends in graduation or on a demo day, where every startup in the cohort presents and pitches. This is the place for proving the time and experience invested by startups. Founders of startups usually include15 to 20 slides on their pitch decks as part of the presentation.
Efficiency of Accelerators
Accelerators bring the various groups of participants around their program and facilitate interactions between them very efficiently. They bring the best startups by running a selection process that includes an open and broad application process. The evaluation is done by respected individuals. The high quality of startup has an important value within the accelerator. It attracts investors.
Another major attraction of accelerators is the mentors. A mentor provides networks and tacit knowledge to the cohort. It makes mentors an important part of accelerators. Failure to ensure that mentors receive appropriate remuneration for giving their knowledge and time can lead to mentors losing interest quickly or failing to engage. The way of gathering startups together into one space and deal with them quickly in a fixed-term program, creating the same efficiency as a university collecting students into classes.
The efficiency of Startup Accelerator
Mentors are able to address all startups simultaneously, so that knowledge is effectively transmitted. Accelerators can provide a way to survey and filter out many innovators, such as startups, academics, or individuals. By choosing the best from the applicants, the accelerator makes a validated cohort of startups that are valued by others, such as investors and mentors.
The accelerator experience is fast, intense, and in-depth educational process aimed at shortening the years of worthwhile learning into a few months and accelerating the life cycle of innovative startup companies. A real accelerator has very specific identifiers. If you can access them, they can give you a lot of benefits. Not everything is created equal. There are so many differences that exist between the successes of the graduates.
Startup accelerators periodically select a batch of companies, usually in the same early stages of their lifecycle. In return for a small portion of equity, they offer advice, investor connections, and mentorship.
Is joining an accelerator worth it?
Most startup accelerators provide seed money in exchange for equity in your startup. So, if you are someone who doesn’t want to dilute the equity at the initial stage, going for an accelerator program will be a bad idea. However, there are few accelerators programs that don’t take any equity in the startups.
How do startup accelerators make money or how do accelerators make money?
The accelerator would charge startups by offering desks for rent. In a way, the accelerator is actually offering similar services to a co-working space. Alternatively, accelerators make money through offerings of training and consultancy services for startups, in exchange for money or equity.
What is a startup accelerator?
A startup accelerator is an organization that offers mentorship, capital, and connections to investors and business partners. It is designed for selected startups with promising MVPs and founders, as a way to rapidly scale growth.
What is the list of the best startup accelerators in India?
The list of best startup accelerators are as follows:-
Cisco Launchpad.
GSF Accelerator.
Microsoft Accelerator.
Indian Angel Network.
iCreate.
Google Launchpad.
Amity Innovation Incubator.
Angel Prime.
How do I start my own accelerator business?
Step 1: Found your own company or at least work at a startup.
Step 2: Participate in the community.
Step 3: Talk about the community.
Step 4: Invite the community in.
Step 5: Create a common space.
Step 6: Keep doing all of that stuff or even more, but faster.
