Every founder has heard the stories. The visionary who built a billion-dollar company by sheer force of will. The lone genius coding at 2am. The CEO who never asked for help. But the truth? No founder does it alone. Behind every great company is a crew of mentors, advisors, and peers who made the impossible a little easier, a little faster, a little less lonely.
Startup mentorship isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the cheat code. At Startmate, we’ve built an Accelerator where mentorship isn’t just an occasional coffee chat but the backbone of the program. Here’s what real startup mentorship looks like, how it works, and why it can change your company’s trajectory.
🏔 Why mentorship matters more than ever
Money is important. Customers are essential. But mentorship? That’s direction.
Great mentors save you from repeating mistakes they’ve already made, they push you to ask the hard questions you’ve been avoiding, they fast-track decisions that might take months of second-guessing and open doors to investors, customers and hires you’d never reach alone.
In the earliest stages of a startup, you’re moving fast, breaking things, and learning on the fly. That’s exactly when the right mentor can collapse time — turning a year of trial-and-error into a single conversation.
💫 Meet some of our Mentors
Our founders are world-class. They have defied all odds and achieved wildly impressive success. But what makes our founders so unique and powerful is their mateship and the attitude of paying it forward. Mike Cannon-Brooks, Atlassian was a founding mentor and investor of the Accelerator, mentoring Mike Baukes, Upguard, and Casey Ellis, Bugcrowd in our early cohorts.
Kate Morris, Adore Beauty, mentored Andy Miller, Heaps Normal, who payed it forward, mentoring many D2C companies. Cliff Obrecht, Canva, mentored Rory San Miguel, Propeller, who mentored Hartley Pike, Sitemate. Michael de Nil, Morse Micro, was our first ever hardware investment in 2016 and triggered a whole new wave of great hardware investments, like 5B, Great Wrap, Uluu and Sicona to name a few, who all came back to mentor the latest cohorts.
And the circle of mentorship continues.
🏆 The Startmate Mentorship Model
Most accelerators talk about mentors. But not all mentorship is created equal.
Here’s what makes Startmate’s approach different:
1. Three Partner Mentors (handpicked for you)
Each startup in the Accelerator is matched with 3 Partner Mentors, carefully chosen based on your stage, sector, and business model. Think:
- A B2B sales operator who’s scaled from zero to millions.
- A CTO who’s architected world-class products.
- A founder who’s already walked the exact road you’re on.
Together, they cover your blind spots.
2. Skin in the game
Our mentors aren’t just volunteers. They invest in the cohort fund. Your success = their success. That changes the dynamic. It’s not advice for the sake of advice. It’s partnership.
3. The Advisor Army
Beyond your Partner Mentors, you get access to 120+ advisors - specialists from Atlassian, Notion, Xero, Leonardo.AI, Amazon, Culture Amp and more. These are people who’ve built iconic companies and can help you with the gnarly, specific problems that come up in the trenches.
Need a warm intro to a customer? They’ll open the door.
Need a deep technical teardown? They’ll get on the call.
Need advice on hiring your first Head of Sales? They’ve done it before.
💭 What mentorship actually looks like
Forget the glossy image of “advisory boards.” Real mentorship is gritty. It’s in the trenches with you.
At Startmate, it looks like:
- A mentor challenging your pricing assumptions, pushing you to double prices (and discovering customers still pay).
- A CTO advisor helping you rebuild your onboarding flow so churn drops overnight.
- A sales mentor role-playing your cold calls until you stop rambling and start closing.
- A network contact making the intro that lands your first enterprise pilot.
It’s not abstract strategy. It’s action.
🌊 How to get the most out of mentors
Whether you join an accelerator or not, here’s how to make mentorship work:
- Be coachable, not passive. Good mentors don’t want disciples — they want sparring partners. Push back. Debate. Take advice seriously, but make your own calls.
- Come prepared. Don’t waste time with “what should I do?” Bring data, hypotheses, and specific asks.
- Follow through. Mentorship only compounds if you actually test what’s discussed and bring back learnings.
- Build relationships, not transactions. The best mentor-founder bonds last years, not weeks.
🔥 The multiplier effect
One great mentor can change the trajectory of your company. Three aligned Partner Mentors, plus a network of 120+ advisors? That’s not just leverage — it’s a multiplier.
Mentorship accelerates everything: customer discovery, fundraising, hiring, product validation. It gives you confidence when you’re second-guessing. And sometimes, it gives you belief when you’re running on fumes.
🪐 Why this matters for you
If you’re building in Australia or New Zealand, you don’t have to do it alone. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You don’t need to be the lone wolf founder.
With the right mentors, you can shortcut the hard stuff, double down on your spikes, and get to traction faster.
That’s why the Startmate Accelerator exists: to give you mentors who don’t just give advice - they invest, they partner, they co-pilot.
Apply to the Startmate Accelerator
