Meet the 2023 Dare to Scale Cohort – Mentor the Young
Let’s rewind the clock to the beginning. How did your company come to life? Was it a eureka moment, a late-night brainstorming session, or a happy accident?
Mentor the Young was founded less than 2 years ago back in September of 2021. Throughout our personal and professional upbringing and growth, we’ve found mentoring to be among the most useful and productive ways of progressing toward our goals. Working with more experienced professionals used to be, and still is, able to inspire us to pick a direction and later on – to take action. Therefore, Mentor the Young stems from our belief that individual mentoring has transformational potential. Another observation and analysis was that, in Bulgaria, there had never been any structured mentoring program for students or recent graduates. Combining both realizations, together with our background in NGO, taking the decision to start and work on Mentor the Young just made sense.
Tell us about the accomplishment that makes you do a happy dance or fist pump in the air. What is your proudest moment to date?
It’s particularly hard to pick one best moment, as more than a few of them highlight and characterize our growth as an organization. As our program is on a seasonal basis, each one helps us leap into new heights. So far we’ve had four seasons, during which we’ve welcomed nearly 2,000 mentors and mentees with a 96% net promoter score. After the first season, we hired our first two employees. After the second, we developed our mentoring framework supporting participants in their individual journeys. During the third one, we developed a matchmaking model and an algorithm that helps us reach over 90% matchmaking success. During the fourth one, we grew so much that the total amount of participants in the season surpassed that of the previous three combined.
Dare to Scale is here to help with your entrepreneurial journey, but we’re curious about your wildest dreams and aspirations! Do you envision scaling your company to new galaxies, conquering untapped markets, or revolutionizing your industry? Share your boldest dreams and let your imagination soar!
We ask ourselves the question “What would the world look like if each young person has access to mentoring?”. That same question drives our actions each year, each month, each week and each day. Thus, our dream and mission is to help as many people as possible to adopt the mindset of mentoring – whether that be as a mentor or a mentee.