Being on both sides of the mentoring table, it's definitely an important topic which is hardly covered.
One thing I like doing is in case I do use one or more of the tips given by the mentor, email him/her and tell them how it worked out, even if it's a couple of months later. I think that this is the reason entrepreneurs become mentors and most of them are very interested of hearing if their tips were useful. Sometimes I also share things which didn't work for me and why, I find out that mentors want to hear about these experiences as well.
The only thing I would add is to make it a habit to meet regularly (preferably on the same day and time) with your mentors. Often mentors are giving advice to multiple startups so they sometimes can lose track of what you're working on.
My startup focuses on peer-to-peer mentoring so a lot of what you described in the post applies to what we try and implement in our group setting. Thanks for the tips!
It'd be interesting to know if it's standard practice for accelerators to do intensive pitch/mentoring days like this, or they are more inclined to pair teams off with mentors that make sense centrally or serendipitously.
but at the events they usually try to get mentors that fit to the startups but keep the format as mentioned in the article.
during the acceleration time they usually pair them with specific mentors/advisors - but this usually needs to be pulled by the teams as well. (seedcamp and 500 do this very intensively imho)
I added a presentation as a download to the post. This presentation is done by geoff watts for upcoming seedcamp recruits. I really love the presentation as it goes into several really good details - hope it is useful
