Founding cohort
We’re looking for the first students to build this with us.
Mentable is early. Rather than open a mentor marketplace that isn’t full yet, we’re starting with a small group of students and the mentors who agree to work with them.
You don’t need a good résumé to apply. You need something you actually want to understand, and the willingness to prepare for the conversation.
Apply to the founding cohortWhat Mentable is
A place to find someone a few steps ahead of you, and a set of tools for making that relationship work once you have it: shared goals, a record of what you each said you’d do, and help preparing before you talk.
Good mentorship mostly depends on luck right now — on knowing someone, or on being the kind of person who finds it easy to ask. We’re trying to make it depend on that a little less. More about the idea.
Why we’re starting small
A mentorship platform with more students than mentors is worse than no platform at all: requests go unanswered, and everybody concludes the whole idea doesn’t work. We’d rather have a small number of relationships that are real.
Starting small also means we get to watch closely. Where mentorship works, where it stalls, and what a student actually needs between conversations are things we can only learn from the first few relationships, and what we learn from you is what the product gets built around.
Who it’s for
Students who are curious about something specific, willing to prepare, open to being told they’re wrong, and likely to follow through on what they said they’d do.
What we are not selecting on: your school, your GPA, or your internships. You don't need to already know how to find mentors, build a network, or navigate professional spaces. That's part of what we're building Mentable to help with.
What joining does and doesn’t mean
It does not guarantee
- a particular mentor
- an internship or a job
- an introduction to anyone
- admission anywhere
- a professional outcome of any kind
Mentable creates the structure for a relationship. The relationship is still something two people have to build, and the work is still yours.
What we ask of you
- Fill in your profile properly, so a mentor knows who they are talking to.
- Turn up to conversations having done a bit of thinking first.
- Respect the times a mentor makes available, and say so early if you can’t make one.
- Do the thing you said you’d do between conversations, or say why you didn’t.
- Tell us honestly when the product is confusing or broken. That is half the point of a first cohort.
What you get
- Early access to Mentable, and a say in what gets built next.
- The ability to request time with the mentors taking part.
- Tools for preparing before a conversation and following through after it.
- A direct line to the two people building this. You will not be talking to a support queue.
Apply
Seven short questions. Only the first one is required, and there are no right answers — we’re trying to understand how you think about this, not test you.
We read every application ourselves, so give us a few days to reply.
Not a student?
If you’re a few years further along and willing to help someone coming up behind you, that’s the other half of this.
Become a founding mentor