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The EF cohort has now properly settled into their offices on Cannon St, also called ‘The Cannon’, and the thirty of them have been stepping up their progress in the past three weeks. 15 startups, one office, and lots to do. Which is why Edward Wray came in on Friday and told us all about his personal and professional experience when setting up betfair.

So this Friday as part of the Autumn training programme we started off with a bit of betting, before moving seamlessly into the first EF mentor matching session. Amongst many other things, Ed prepped our guys on the pro’s and con’s of the first few months. The advantage of talking to startup veterans is that they provide you with a ton of knowledge they’d have liked to have when they first started off. The downside – it makes you realise that things are going to get rough! As such, he recommended planning ahead – as he put it ‘When climbing a ladder, it hurts a bit to fall off the first rung, but not too much. If you’ve already climbed most of the ladder and fall off then, it will really hurt.’

Later on, we had Laura Fedorciow and Bokani Tshidzu from Vertigo Ventures (VV) prepping the cohort on how to make the most of their mentor relationships. For example, helping the cohort think about:

- Why would someone want to be your mentor? How can you make it a valuable relationship for both the mentor and mentee?

 - What kind of mentor you should you be looking for? Are there any particular skills or networks that you’d like to tap into?

Most importantly, they told the cohort to keep in mind that there are different types of mentors and that each one of them would be most useful at a different phase of their companies. A single mentor might also change his or her role, depending on the relationship the mentees create.

One of EF’s favourite articles on this subject is by Hiten Shah, founder of KISSmetrics, who spoke to the cohort at bootcamp. “Entrepreneurs being mentored have to understand that the individuals guiding them aren’t going to give them a breakdown of how to be successful in a few simple steps. It’s also not a one-way street, which means mentees have to engage as much as their mentors engage with them, if not more” Read more here http://hitenism.com/mentoring/

A big thank you to Ed Wray, Vertigo Ventures and all the mentors that attended our first mentor matching event.