![]() What was that secret sauce? We all wondered. What did they have in common? Many people said the experience had changed their careers. Observing this, and hoping to get even better, we wanted to understand what distinguished the most successful mentor-mentee pairs from the pack. Since then, she’s run two more, each one larger and more popular than the last - totaling 100 matches across all three (with a fourth launching this month). The feedback was effusively positive, with high demand for another round. To measure effectiveness, she ran surveys and polled not only what mentees learned, but how they were applying it in their everyday work. To kindle rapport, she assigned mentees to mentors based on their interests and areas of expertise. To improve content of conversations, she charged mentees with developing thoughtful agendas for their meetings and sharing them with their mentors in advance. To address informality, she required mentor-mentee pairs to meet every other week for one quarter (leaving the option open for them to continue), totaling 6 meetings. Then it was up to her to diagnose why mentorship usually goes sideways and design something different: After putting out a call for both mentees (at First Round companies) and mentors selected from tech’s most talented operators, she was overwhelmed by the response on both sides (eventually accepting exactly 50/50 female and male mentees). The task went to Whitnie Low Narcisse, who leads all of First Round’s advisory programs and more. ![]() But everyone said they believed in mentorship’s transformative power. Their older counterparts said they weren’t sure if their advice truly mattered. Younger people said it was intimidating and difficult to find a mentor. ![]() We’d heard from a number of people in our community that mentorship remained an elusive, missing piece in their careers. When First Round launched its Mentorship Program in 2016, we didn’t know what to expect.
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