There’s no doubt a Mentor can have a crucial role on a Startup’s way to success. Within the strong Lisbon Challenge network, there are three Core Mentors that will help and guide every single team from day one to the final pitch, covering these main areas: growth, product, tech and investment.
“It’s tempting to be focusing only on building your product/company during the program, but you should also focus on learning as much as possible, and try new things. Also, accept that many of the things you hold for true are actually hypothesis that you need to validate, and LC is the best place to do it. Lastly, be focus, be constant and show up, keep the involvement high.
My role is to push the teams to break the ice with their users and potential users, to help them go and talk with people, and build their own lean process for prototyping, testing and learning as efficiently as possible.” – Nicholas Mandelbaum.
Nicholas Mandelbaum – Former Entrepreneur and Development and Design Manager, Nicholas has more than 8 years in product design and management. He gathers a deep experience and a strong intuition into the right approach to deconstruct a problem and work on an effective user-centred strategy to solve it, always with a focus on UX/UI, innovative thinking and effective design.
Pedro Falcão – Currently Managing Partner of LC Ventures, the first global hands-on, accelerator investment vehicle based in Portugal. He counts with a solid background on managing funds and analyzing investment opportunities, that make him an expert in funding, pitching to investors and to what it takes for a startup to be investment-ready.
Fred Oliveira – Full Stack developer and UX designer, he was the first TechCrunch employee, a former 500 Startups mentor, Entrepreneur and now working at 1776, a global incubator based in Washington. As a Startup Advisor his focus areas are User Experience, Design, Development and Scaling.
“Mentors can help startups in many ways. On one hand many of the problems and struggles are common to many startups and mentors can surely help the startups address them in a better way.On the other hand, startups can lookup to mentors as someone with whom they can be totally open, being never afraid to say the wrong thing or to expose their weaknesses.” – Pedro Falcão
You can see who are the other mentors here.