Advisory5 × Northeastern Venture Mentoring Network

I started showing up at Northeastern’s Charlotte campus in 2024. Attended events, met faculty, explored what a collaboration might look like. Nothing formal came of it. But Leslie Sykes, who was Director of Strategic Partnerships at the time, noticed what I was building and introduced me to Katrina Brink. Katrina runs the Venture Mentoring Network across all 14 Northeastern campuses. She was working on the exact thing I had been pitching to the school.

Katrina had hundreds of mentors in her network. Former executives, investors, operators. Some were doing great work, especially when matched to a specific founder who had a clear ask. But a good number wanted to do more than they were getting to do. Some were not getting any engagement at all. They signed up to help, waited, and heard nothing.

A few of those mentors kept bringing up the same idea. They had done team mentoring at MIT, at accelerators, at other programs. They wanted it here. Not one-off introductions. Structured teams working with a founder over months, with real accountability built in.

“Katrina had the demand and the mentor pool. She did not have the infrastructure to run it. I had both.”

I had the method and the platform. Katrina had the mentors and the institution. She knew which approvals a pilot needed to survive. I wanted to start building.

The Pilot

We launched in December 2025. Five ventures, nine founders, ten mentors. Northeastern named me Visiting Innovator at VMN. I still hold the title.

VMN was also going through structural changes and renewal. She convened a group of mentors with team mentoring expertise and found a wealth of capacity and expertise. We put together a one-pager that described team mentoring the way founders think about it: like having your own advisory board, meeting monthly, with people who stay long enough to know your business.

I facilitated the monthly mentor meetings and ran sessions through Traction5. Northeastern brought the mentor network and the institutional weight. Founders applied. Mentors selected the ventures they wanted to work with. Founders approved their teams. Then we got to work.

At the end of April, a Northeastern graduate researcher interviewed founders and mentors independently. The pattern was consistent. Multiple mentors in the room changed the conversation. Founders heard from several people at once, each bringing a different lens, and when three mentors independently landed on the same point, it was hard to explain away. Mentors built on each other instead of working in isolation. Every person interviewed said the team model created a deeper experience than one-on-one mentoring.

“A lot of mentorship I’ve had in the past has been very surface level. This takes it beyond that.”

As part of the pilot, interviews were conducted with participants. Key Finding: The team mentoring model is working. Both founders and all four mentors confirmed that having multiple mentors in the room creates a qualitatively different — and more valuable — experience than traditional one-on-one mentoring. The model drives deeper, more practical conversations and pushes founders to confront assumptions they might otherwise avoid. Every interviewee described at least one moment where the team dynamic created something a one-on-one couldn’t — whether it was “collective convincing,” mentors “playing off each other,” or founders receiving challenges from multiple angles simultaneously.