Mentee

Last week I was accepted into the Spring 2020 cohort of the MIT Enterprise Forum Mentor Program. On Wednesday the organization hosted a virtual Meet-n-Greet mixer, which was like a fast-paced, online speed dating experience—15+ entrepreneurs and 45+ mentors were all trying to suss each other out and get to know one another better (and do that very quickly).

That experience alone was great practice on refining my elevator pitch—both for my company and for myself!

Every entrepreneur (mentee) and mentor ranks their top 3 choices and the MIT EF will pair mentors with entrepreneurs—based on their rankings as well as other factors considering each other’s fit and needs. I’m looking forward to being paired up on May 15th.

In the meantime, I’ve reached out to dozens of people in my network, and have received so many thoughtful responses—people have already been kind enough to dedicate their time thinking about my business and how to help me get it off the ground.

While I have experience building a software LOB from scratch, hardware is a different beast, and these are the questions I’ve been asking people:

• How is fundraising different for a hardware startup?

• What should be my IP strategy, now that I’m starting to get PoC’s together?

• Am I developing medical devices that will need FDA approval?

• I’m blind to unknown unknowns in this space — what should I be thinking about but am not yet aware of?

Again, I’m grateful to all the folks who have been helping me understand these questions, working through some viable answers, as well as connecting me to other people and making introductions.