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Mentor Requirements and Outline

Overview

Mentor Requirements:
  • Telluride regional resident or has a tangential relationship to the region
  • Available to meet in person for mentor meetings and events
  • Has a strong interest to help build and diversity the local community
  • Puts the needs of the mentee first
  • Must be comfortable with keeping self and mentees accountable
Mentor Qualifications:
  • Mentor teams consist of 3-5 mentors
  • Mentor meetings are 90 minutes
  • Mentors should plan to commit to 1-2 mentoring sessions per month and attend a monthly mentor meeting
  • Mentors can mentor up to five ventures

Goal of TVN Mentorship Program

TVN’s mission: diversify the regional economy by fostering a robust entrepreneurial
ecosystem that supports entrepreneurs through acceleration bootcamps, mentorship, and
investment.

What can I expect?

TVN’s Mentorship Program is powered by volunteer mentors who are interested and excited to share their expertise to help ventures in the region innovate and problem-solve. Mentors will be supported by the Managing Director of the Telluride Venture Network. Relationships between mentors and mentees will be based on needs of the venture, identified by the founder(s), and the interest and availability of the mentor.
Each venture will be assigned a team of mentors (determined during monthly mentor
meetings) with a lead mentor. The TVN’s Managing Director will train all new mentors
and provide a structured meeting framework to make sure all individual mentor
sessions are successful and ventures are held accountable

TVN Mentor Manifesto

  • Be Socratic
  • Expect nothing in return (you’ll be delighted with what you do get back).
  • Be authentic / practice what you preach
  • Be direct. Tell the truth, however hard.
  • Listen too.
  • The best mentor relationships eventually become two-way.
  • Be responsive.
  • Adopt at least one company every single year. Experience counts.
  • Clearly separate opinion from fact.
  • Hold information in confidence.
  • Clearly commit to mentor or do not. Either is fine.
  • Know what you don’t know. Say I don’t know when you don’t know. “I don’t know”
    is preferable to bravado.
  • Guide, don’t control. Teams must make their own decisions. Guide but never tell
    them what to do. Understand that it’s their company, not yours.
  • Accept and communicate with other mentors that get involved.
  • Be optimistic.
  • Provide specific actionable advice, don’t be vague.
  • Be challenging/robust but never destructive.
  • Have empathy. Remember that startups are hard.
To apply to be a mentor, please visit: TVN’s Mentor Application