On May 12, you can help to shape the direction of one of the most important components of the East Coast startup ecosystem – Mentorship.

That evening, at the Kingswood golf club in Fredericton, Entrevestor will host a dinner at which we will discuss ways to improve two essential ingredients in our community. New Brunswick Innovation Foundation Calvin Milbury will lead a discussion on mentorship, and East Valley Ventures Chairman Gerry Pond will take the podium for a chat about early adopters.  People from throughout the Maritimes have already signed up to come and join these discussions, and we’re looking for more participants.

And let me be clear: we’re not asking people to come and listen to a discussion. We want you to jump in and join the discussion.

We’ll blog about at the discussion on early adopters next week, but today we’d like to take a glance at what we hope to talk about with regard to mentorship.

“There is already a superb network of mentors in the region, but as our startup base grows we need to find ways to improve it,” said Milbury. “What we want to accomplish on May 12 is to find the best ways to improve the mentorship effort in the region.”

Right now the region has several mentorship hubs, so to speak. PropelICT has been nurturing mentors for more than a decade, and other networks are gelling around PlanetHatch in Fredericton, Volta in Halifax and StartupNL in St. John’s. The university entrepreneurship courses have their own groups of mentors.

So the question is: How do we improve it?

Certainly there are challenges in improving mentorship in the region. Ours is a young startup community and we don’t have a lot of people who have launched and developed successful companies. There’s no one in the region that has developed a publicly listed company that has a dominant presence in its global market.  

Our community faces challenges in terms of geographic distances, and we should look at how to overcome them.

We must also examine how to develop better mentors. Should there be training courses for mentors? Should more mentors be told they’re not really helping and asked to step aside? What can be done to train company founders to learn more from mentors?

We’ll meet up on Thursday, May 12, at about 3:45 at Kingswood. We’ll get under way at 4 pm sharp, with a brief summation of the data Entrevestor has collected recently on the startup community. Then Milbury will lead the mentorship  discussion until 5:10 pm, at which time Pond will take the stage.

You can contribute to these discussions, which we hope will lead to lasting change in our ecosystem. You can register here. The $75 cost covers the cost of the dinner and wine. We'd like to thank NBIF for assisting us in hosting this dinner.

Please bring along your opinions. We are looking for open and spirited discussions about these subjects. If you have strong feelings about them, please join the people from across the region who plan to attend this dinner.