Tuesday night we had our mentor mixer to officially kick off the 2013 Techstars Seattle class. The mentor mixer is a meet and greet between the mentors and the founders of the Techstars companies. Last year we held a free-for-all cocktail hour where teams and mentors were supposed to meet each other and figure out who they wanted to work with. It didn't work very well, so this year we switched things up and set up a mentor speed dating session. It went as follows:
Mentors were set up in stations through out the building with a bottle of booze, some mixers, and ice. We had the teams rotate from station to station every six minutes and speak with the mentors during that time. There was a ton jammed into a short amount of time. The teams had to pitch their business to the mentors and the mentors had to get a feel for the teams and their ideas during this six minutes. This went on for about an hour and half. It was crazy, but in the end, everyone seemed to feel like they got a fair shake of the mentors and the teams. Afterwords everyone descended into talking over each other in The Easy. We were told that this way of doing things was better than last year but that more time would have been appreciated. I respectfully respond to those critiques the the Techstars mantra of Do More Faster!!!!
A huge thank you to the mentors, the teams, and everyone who helped make the mentor mixer a great success! It's going to be a great class!
-Andy
An example of the stations where teams and mentors chatted
