Imperial venture mentoring service (IVMS)

At Imperial, enterprise is in our DNA. We want to support our students and staff to turn great ideas into innovative solutions that will benefit society.

The Enterprise Lab’s Imperial Venture Mentoring Service (IVMS) is a free advisory service for students or staff showing a clear entrepreneurial aptitude and wanting to launch a startup company. Venture mentoring offers support for inexperienced entrepreneurs with an idea, a product or a service who have made some progress in clarifying their concept, understanding the commercial opportunity and identifying next steps.

The existing team is comprised of 55 highly qualified mentors who offer their time and expertise pro bono. They have strong and varied experience and among them they have raised in excess of £1.6bn across more than 100 funding rounds, exited for more than £2.2bn and continue to operate in a range of sectors and business models.

IVMS mentors come from all industries with different types of experience from the C-Suite in established companies, to serial entrepreneurs, to sector specialists with deep technical and regulatory knowledge.

Volunteer Role Description: IVMS alumni mentor

IVMS launched in September 2017 and has grown year on year. Successful ventures continue to benefit from ongoing support, and we would like to increase our capacity for new entrepreneurs. We are also constantly seeking to ensure our mentors reflect the diversity of our pool of entrepreneurs and the ideas they are developing.

We are looking for up to ten alumni to join our existing team of IVMS mentors. In particular we are looking for women and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) alumni. We are also keen to recruit deeply experienced alumni working in Medical Technology (MedTech), B2C or B2B. IVMS is currently fully virtual and we welcome applications from alumni in all locations.

This role would suit somebody who…

• Has a wealth of business knowledge and experience and is willing to share it with those who are just getting started.
• Has a passion for helping young ventures and a love of innovation.
• Has high emotional intelligence and kindness - you will have empathy for the vulnerability, and occasionally, naivety, of teams who commonly have little experience of the working world.
• Has the time and energy to invest in helping others benefit from your own success and experience.
• Is motivated by the opportunity to work with innovative ideas from some of the country’s brightest students.
• Has an appreciation that success can take several forms - you will know that even the best ideas don’t always translate into the best businesses, and that learning from failure is an integral part of the journey to success.
• Has a sense of realism and perspective - you will bring real-world experience and stability to founding teams grappling with how to pursue their ideas and establish their businesses.

IVMS welcomes a range of mentors, so you may have done a number of different things in business from founding a company to developing expertise in a large global corporate. You could be a seasoned entrepreneur, sector specialist, C-Suite or an investor specialist.

What are the benefits?

• (Re)connect with the College as a volunteer.
• Inspire and make a difference in the lives of upcoming entrepreneurs.
• Support the College and share your professional experience and learning with students.
• Gain satisfaction from helping ventures develop and grow as a result of your input. 
• Become a member a highly qualified team of mentors and make new connections.
• Working with some of the country’s brightest students.
• Have first sight of new and early-stage ventures coming out of Imperial.

What to expect as a mentor

• IVMS mentors bring experience and expertise to help entrepreneurs develop their financial, marketing and management skills. This could include developing a business plan, plotting a route to market, building relevant networks and raising funding.
• The exact shape of the mentorship, including time and involvement, varies based on the commitments and circumstances of the mentors and ventures.
• Ventures are always assigned at least two mentors, who are expected to act as a mentoring team, offering multiple perspective, objective advice, and meeting the venture together.
• Just as each entrepreneur and team is different, so is each mentor. We encourage mentors to use their own styles, preferences and experiences to mentor in a way that fits them.

IVMS is based on the principle of mentors providing unconflicted advice. It is therefore not an ideal opportunity for alumni looking to invest in Imperial startups. Please contact Brijesh Roy, Seed Investment Manager at Imperial Enterprise Lab at b.roy@imperial.ac.uk if you are interested in investing.

How will mentors be matched with a venture? Mentors can indicate which kinds of ventures they are suited, and would like, to mentor. They will be invited to attend pitch evenings where entrepreneurs will pitch their idea and outline the value that a mentor could bring to their business. Mentors can give feedback and share whether they think the venture would benefit from mentoring and whether they would be interested in taking on that role. The Enterprise Lab team then matches mentors with ventures.

Time commitment

Mentors are expected to attend at least three pitch evenings a year and to mentor at least one venture. You will also be invited to attend the annual feedback meeting to share progress and recommendations for improvements.

The length of the mentoring relationship can vary, depending on the needs of the particular team, but it is generally 6-18 months and involves giving approximately two hours a month to the venture - though some mentors give substantially more when the progress made by the venture warrants it. Some mentors focus on one team at a time, while others have the capacity to mentor more.

Traditionally, mentoring teams meet their mentees at least once a month in person, usually for one to two hours. They may also maintain contact via email and phone between meetings as agreed. With social distancing in place, IVMS moved to virtual mentoring and will be reviewing whether a new hybrid model of in person and virtual mentoring would be more productive going forward.

How to apply

If you meet the IVMS mentor criteria and would like to be considered for the role, please complete this short online form to express your interest by Friday 31 July 2020. The form will ask you to submit your CV and/or provide your LinkedIn URL

A member of staff from the Imperial Enterprise Lab will be in touch if you are selected for an initial interview. If successful, you can expect to start the role in Autumn 2020.

You can find full details of the selection process and learn more about the Imperial Venture Mentoring Service here.