 DAV, welcome to DAV Caffeine Connect and Happy National Mentorship Month. Every time we host a DAV Patriot Bootcamp entrepreneurship event, we ask participants to grade their experience. And every time we do, we find out resoundingly the most valued and worthwhile aspect of the program is mentorship. DAV and the founders we serve are blessed with a large network of business leaders who are willing to invest their time in our entrepreneur success. We're also blessed with today's guests for expertise and the great company she represents. Sarah Wadud is the Global Mentor Program Manager for Techstars. Sarah is an experienced and dynamic professional who graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington before serving as an Archer Fellow in Washington DC. She earned her master's degree in Global Policy Studies from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin. She's also the founder and CEO for the startup TICOR, which allows consumers to rent and access designer South Asian clothing while empowering and helping women in the garments industry where those clothes are created. Techstars is a longtime friend of Patriot Bootcamp. In fact, the initiative began as an idea from Techstars own Taylor Macklemore when he challenged the tech industry to do more to include veterans and was in turn challenged with those ideas into action. That's where DAV Patriot Bootcamp eventually ultimately came from. Techstars Accelerators have one goal, to help entrepreneurs succeed and they do it like no one else while continuing to support DAV and making veterans a priority. Sarah, welcome to DAV's Caffeine Connect. Thanks so much, Dan. I am so excited and just honored to be here with you all. I'm gonna make sure that I have... All right, thumbs up. You guys can see my screen. Perfect. Amazing. I will dive right into it right before that. I just went to share that I am getting over a nasty viral cold. And so if I have a couple of coughing bouts or fits, please do pardon me for that. I promise it's nothing too scary. I have, luckily this is caffeine connect. So I have my caffeine and tea and water by my side. I hope you've got some snacks by you as well. So there's a saying that, if you want something, dream dare do. If you want something extraordinary, dream dare do with great mentors. And if you want to learn a powerful lesson about yourself, become a mentor. I've been blessed in my career to be mentored by amazing leaders who have given me a lot of wisdom and growth and through hard work and their precious guidance, I've been able to build a very meaningful career. One of the joys of my corporate life is to mentor people, not only on my team, but also within our company. A while ago, I decided to take my skillset a little bit further and have been actively mentoring for some time now. Mentorship is a very powerful tool. It can help us to achieve our goals, learn new skills, grow as individuals. It's a relationship built on trust and mutual respect where a mentor shares their knowledge, their life experiences and guidance with a mentee. It's a two-way street where both parties can learn and grow together. Now, instead of me talking at you all about what it takes to be a great mentor, how to become a mentor, how to acquire a mentor, what are the skillsets necessary, I'd like to share a story about how mentorship can change your life. About four years ago, two fascinating women entered my life. Both of them are 18. They have absolutely completely different life backgrounds, life circumstances, skillsets, needs, and yet they were a perfect mirror of each other. Meet Stacey. Stacey is attending my alma mater, UT Austin, and getting dual degrees, a bachelor's of science and a master's degree in Arabic and public affairs. Needless to say, I was incredibly impressed by Stacey. In fact, one of our first mentoring calls, it was so hard to hear her because she was in Okinawa, Japan, working with the farmers there on creating hydroelectric power as the farmers there had been devastated by a recent tropical storm. And I thought on that call, oh my gosh, this is nowhere near what I was doing when I was 18. It was just so impressive to hear her resume and background and her passion for changing the world. As we started to work together, we discussed her life goals, her career goals, her 10-year vision, and how she wants to change the world. Stacey appreciated the power of mentoring. She was diligent. She was self-disciplined. She finished every reading assignment well before our mentoring sessions and came with questions and eager to understand and learn those concepts and enthusiastically had discussions about mentoring philosophies, all those other things that mentors and mentees discuss. She was the one driving this relationship. Now meet Shazia. Shazia was a very different circumstance for me as a mentor. She had a very different life circumstance. We were matched through a nonprofit organization in Bangladesh supporting young women to gain financial dignity through entrepreneurship. Shazia married very young. She had a child. She didn't have higher education and she didn't have community support from her friends and family. Mentoring Shazia was a wildly different experience for me. I could never get a hold of her. In fact, those first two months of our mentoring sessions, it always felt like I was chasing her and urging her to make mentoring appointments with me. She would be a bit disengaged in our conversations. She would actively be missing appointments with me. All together I was a bit frustrated and always urging her to come to me as a mentor. Then one day in the spring, Shazia missed another appointment with me and needless to say, I was frustrated and a bit aggravated. And so I rang her up and she picked up the phone and her voice was a bit shaken. My husband has lost his job. We couldn't make rent and we have been evicted. That's all she said to me. Now, talk about a bucket of water being dumped on my mentor fire. It really put things into perspective for me. And at that moment, I was determined to not let her down as her mentor. Through the power of network, I was able to help Shazia secure a job as a garment worker in one of the biggest factories in Bangladesh. It gave her the opportunity to have a daily wage and gain some financial stability. I told her, I understand, I get it. This seems foreign and new, but one day this will be routine for you. This will feel like your new normal. This will become your workspace and something you can be proud of as you work hard. I truly believe in society, people have different statuses due to different life circumstances, but that doesn't mean people's innate worth is any different. Over the next few months, as these two women generously allowed me into their lives and as I continued to explore their beautiful minds, I was in awe of how extraordinary these two women's lives and similar stories had become. Despite their life circumstances, one on each side of the spectrum, quite literally they were both on each side of the globe. They had strikingly similar similarities at their core. Both were fantastic good quality souls. Both were intelligent, both were courageous and both shared the same hopes and fears in their lives. They shared the same doubts in securities and anxieties about themselves and about their futures. You know what? Even getting a dual degree from one of the top most public universities in the world, you still have those same anxieties. What was fascinating is that those same anxieties that they shared are not so different from the fears you and I have. I learned firsthand that at the heart of it, as human beings, we all share the same emotions inside. We all have the same fears and hopes in life. I also started to understand the impact and importance of education. Stacey, because she had the benefit of education and training as a high level strategic thinker, she was able to go on to make good decision after good decision and go on to a positive cycle. Shazia, on the other hand, she doesn't have the benefit of the same training or analytical skills. So she tends to take the risk of making less than ideal decisions after less than ideal choices, which spiral into a difficult decision. And as we all know, life is the result of the daily choices that we make. Stacey has gained an abundance of skill sets to carry on creating a brilliant career and a self-sufficient future. Her worries are more long-term and I am less worried about her. Shazia, on the other hand, is more restricted by her current set of skills and her worries are much more immediate. She worried about food, shelter and transportation, something that sometimes feels very far and removed from all of us here, sitting on the Zoom call or beyond. So we worked out a plan that her month, she would need 5,600 Dhaka's in Dhaka to make a survivable living, roughly that's about 54 US dollars. That amount brought her an intense amount of anxiety. So we broke it down further. We broke it down by day. We put together an action plan for her to work daily and regain her financial stability. And she does that day by day, humbly and proudly, through her own effort and with good people by her side. Shazia gained color in her cheeks, her head was lifted a little bit higher and her voice was a little bit more confident and her eye contact was a lot more steadier. I was so impressed by her grit and intelligence and her fast capability to evolve as I watched her take our coaching techniques and session after session and apply it to her daily life. I witnessed her reinventing herself as a young woman in a very difficult life situation to a woman who has rebuilt her life with strength and courage and slowly but surely she is rewriting writing her own self identity. Through Shazia, I saw the possibility of human potential and the inspiration was incredible. A lot of people think mentoring is a formal transmission of knowledge. In fact, when I first got into this, that's really how I approached it. I thought my education and my background would be what I would be sharing with these two women. I think now and what I truly believe is that mentoring is really an act of kindness that needs to happen on a daily basis and be scaled across the society to benefit more people. Research shows that 55% of young people who come from low income backgrounds who have mentors go on to higher education. 65% of the people who come from unemployed backgrounds who have mentors go on to secure employment and 75% of the top executives in our country say that mentors played a key part in their careers. I would not be where I am without mentors who helped nurture me and pave the way, whether that's for my education, my career or just even for my life. Now, mentoring is a very commonly known and heard of concept here in our era. Let's take the US, for example, which is one of the countries where it's very popular and widely aware of the concept of mentoring. We all know about it. According to statistics, only 1% of the people are actively engaged in a mentoring collaboration. I'm gonna say that again. So according to statistics and the research done on this topic, only 1% is engaged in an active mentoring collaboration. When I read that, I found it so strange because we hear about mentoring, we think about it all the time. To think that something we hear about every day and in practice, it's actually a very niche practice and needs to be scaled globally. I was in awe of that statistic. There is so much to do in this realm and work when it comes to mentoring. I almost like to give the analogy of recycling. About 25 years ago, 30 years ago, those of you that can remember, recycling was something that we had heard about but it's not something we actively participated in. And over time, over decades with continuous advocacy and effort, now many people, including local governments are actively recycling to protect our environment. It's something that's gone into policy. It's something we talk about. It's something that's now become mainstream and a part of our daily lives. Now imagine if we applied this to mentoring, we could transform this herd of concept into something that is more mainstream and everyday action that everyone does. That would be so amazing. We could make a fantastic change to the world. Now, if we further extrapolate some of the data I've shown to you guys today, imagine if we took the 1% ratio of mentorship we were talking about earlier and extrapolated it to the US population and then took it a little bit further and extrapolated to the global population of currently 7.6 billion. If we did that, every single person in a country size of France would receive mentorship. If we bumped that number up to 2%, we'd be looking at the entire population of Russia. That's the ninth most populated country in the world. If we did that, we would be applying an activating direct and impactful positive change to the world and to the next generation. And in my opinion, that is the duty of educated and global citizens like us. So where are my two mentees now? Stacey is awaiting to graduate in the spring and already has two job offers and in hand and deciding between those two. I have no doubt she will go on to an amazing career. She dreams, she dares and she does it. Shazia is building her entrepreneur business plan for her textile business. She will continue to rebuild her life and regain her financial independence. She has courage, she has conviction, and she's ready to do it. I continue to stand by their side and have no doubt that both of them will become powerful change agents. Mentoring really is a two-way healing process. There is great power in serving and helping others. And when two people come together at the moment of contact, when one flame ignites another, both people end up shining just a little bit brighter. When I thought my role was to be teaching my mentees knowledge, in fact, they taught me profound wisdom. From them, I learned about stereotypes, both for people who are more fortunate and for people who are less fortunate in society. I thought I was a compassionate, non-judgmental person. And it turns out I still have some work to do. I do have prejudgment. I thought I was a humble person. Turns out I still have to tame my ego. Life goes on and the journey of learning goes on, for them as well as for me. I also really started to appreciate my career even more thanks to the organizations, the education, the educators, my mentors, and folks who nurtured me while I've been on this path. During this process, I was able to realize that I had grown into a powerful change-maker myself. And through my skills, education, experience, I'm able to apply it to society and make contributions on a single individual level. Ultimately, I realized that at the end of the day, there is nothing bigger than that. It's one single conversation of us versus us asking ourselves, am I proud of the way I used my life? Did I use my fullest potential? Did I help someone? I know one thing for sure, for me personally, is that joy comes from service. Lifting others as I continue to build my career and life through mentoring is one of the many, many good and accessible ways for me to do that. So next time, when another person reaches out and asks you a question about life, about career, about their hopes, their insecurities, I hope that you will remember my story about my two mentees that changed my life perspective. I hope you will remember and give them some time and your service. Watch both of your lives transform and watch both of you shine just a little bit brighter from this exchange. And one by one, as we all advocate and act to make mentoring a mainstream activity, collectively, we could be making an enough impact to the world and to our next generation. Now, we didn't come this far for me to not share a little bit about mentoring at Techstars. As Dan mentioned earlier, Techstars is a worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. And we at Techstars have three simple ideas. And this is the ethos that we on our daily basis have in our conversations when we talk to our founders, when we talk to our mentors. We truly believe that entrepreneurs create a better future for everyone. We believe in collaboration that drives innovation and great ideas can come from literally anywhere. Today, our mission is to enable everyone on the planet to contribute and benefit from entrepreneurs' success. In addition, operating of accelerators and funds, we connect startups, investors and corporations and cities to help build thriving startup communities. This is a little bit about just where we are all over the world. We have 55 accelerators operating in 41 cities across 15 different countries. Excuse me. And with Techstars Anywhere program, we are pretty much covered globally. At the remote program, it's in different cities all over the place. I wanted to share a bit about the core principles that we highlight at Techstars. This is something we highlight for our staff as well as our founders, our corporate partners and mentors as well. We live by a give first philosophy. We offer support without any expectation of anything in return. And that's something that goes beyond mentorship. We do what's right by our founders. We are very quality focused over quantity. Mentorship is not only in my opinion an art but also a science. There is data that drives mentorship, but it is also something that has quality. The human experience is never lost from mentorship. And our fourth core principle is network over hierarchy. We value remote decision-making over a centralized process. This happened more so over the pandemic, but we are real big believers that we can unleash the power of network and use it for good. So what are the characteristics of Effectives Techstars mentors? We really value our mentors having a Socratic approach when it comes to teaching and learning and getting in those conversations with our founders. We again, will always be driving home our give first philosophy. We expect that from our mentors because that is the experience that you will be able to share with our founders. We have mentors that are thought leaders, that are experts in their domains and are fearlessly pushing the envelope in the domain and expert that they're level setting in. I truly believe that when you are able to see the exchange between a mentor and a mentee, you're able to instantly see that tangible magic happen. And it's the most rewarding thing of my life to be able to be a part of this conversation and this dialogue. We also have something called the Techstars Mentor Manifesto. We share this with all of our mentors when they come on to our global mentor network. I have it linked. I'll make sure that Dan and the crew are able to share that with you guys via email. It's a really great manifesto that David Cohen and Brad Feld spun up in the early years of Techstars but it's something that we still live by and share with our mentors on a daily basis. And that just brings me back to the end of my presentation where we give first and we're always here to be able to support those folks that need our help but are also enthusiastic in helping us support our founders. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Sarah. That's great. I'm curious, when you talk about the formal relationships that you have with mentors, can you explain what the mentor experience is like? And thank you so much for coming on. We know you're suffering through it but you're really helping out some veterans today. No, I appreciate that, Dan. That's a great question. So the formal experience of mentorship really looks like, if you were wanting to be a mentor with us at the program accelerator level, you would apply through our Techstars application form and then my team does their due diligence about checking out your background and skill set and really understanding what makes you, you at your core. And then you would be paired up with our program teams. And at that point, programs takes over. Like I mentioned, we have programs in so many different, not just geographic locations but in so many different verticals. We have a program for anything that you can think of whether it's NFTs, whether it's music accelerator program, whether it's a program in diverse thinking and health tech and HR tech. So all of these verticals are being supported by some wonderful program managers and our managing directors. They will then take you on as a lead mentor or you would come on as an ad hoc mentor and you would be able to support our founders in that capacity. A lead mentor means that you are working with a founder on a much more closer basis, which would entail possibly an hour a week for the three months of that program. An ad hoc mentoring is you're a mentor that's in orbit that, you know, once a founder is like, hey Dan, I need your help. You are able to send them a Cal and Lee link and get on a conversation or a phone call with them and then be on your way. Do you ever use metrics to track how or I'm sure you guys use all kinds of metrics all the time but do you use that to track the impact of these relationships or how do you kind of evaluate? Yeah, absolutely. We have something called the NPS score that program teams monitor and measure at the end of every program. So after the three month program, all our mentors and founders get a similar survey where we ask about general questions and feedback about how your experience was. Founders will also rate our mentors at that time and mentors also, you're not left out of that conversation. We value your feedback about our founders and your experience as well. And so they will get to rate their experience of what the mentorship process felt like, whether it was operationally, but also at the much more local level with that founder, how they got into the trenches with them, all of those questions. And then that score is something that's shared with us as well as the rest of the team to kind of understand qualitatively and quantitatively what mentorship is doing. What do the mentors get out of the program, do you think? That's a really great question. I will assume that they get a couple of things out of it. Now, there isn't any financial contribution that comes out of this. I will share that sometimes we find that mentor and mentee have built a serendipitous relationship where perhaps the mentee has crossed over to the mentor's domain experience and the mentor can offer a little bit more personal coaching. At that point, if they go offline and set up some sort of a payment structure, we're hands off on that at Techstars and we don't have any visibility. But in terms of what mentors get out of this experience, you're part of a global network of mentors. You're plugged into the startup ecosystem with us and with our founders. And honestly, from what I've heard from mentors as a feedback, they love that they're able to get down in the trenches with our founders. They love the ability to give back to our founders and to these young entrepreneurs to help them kind of leap over the mistakes that they've in the past maybe had, whether that's in life, whether that's an entrepreneurship or just in their career as a journey. And Dan, I think you know it too. Mentors sometimes become life coaches. I love those stories where mentors continue to stay on even after those three months of program and continue to nurture those relationships with our founders. It's not just an off button that happens after three months where they're like, okay, great, done. They continue to check in on those founders and those mentees and continue to even meet up sometimes. Now that the pandemic's over, I've heard of great coffee and taco conversations that have been happening. And I love that. That's what we want. That's the experience we want you to have and cultivate those relationship with our founders. Frank over on LinkedIn said that in order to truly have great mentor-mentee relationship, there has to be no directional and unconditional trust. And when we're talking with the vast majority of page of boot camp folks anyway, are looking at things from the perspective of, well, this is my dream. This is my company. It's kind of hard to trust people sometimes. And I know not everyone's gonna make it through tech stars. Your great program. Do you have any advice for entrepreneurs who are entering into relationships with folks where they can kind of protect their intellectual property? Yeah, absolutely. We've gotten those questions before. In terms of protecting your intellectual properties, I will share, and I've been there as an entrepreneur, you guys. No one is really out there to steal your ideas. We have this fear and it comes on, but it's not what everyone is really out to do. So definitely protect yourself in the ways that you need to legally and be smart about it. In terms of building that trust with your mentor, I always highlight this to founders is that you definitely have to be hungry for knowledge and open to ideas and conversation. Your mentor is, yes, your buddy, your coach, but your mentors are gonna have some tough conversations with you. They're gonna ask you, do you think this idea is valid? Do you think this idea is gonna make you money? Do you think this is gonna push the envelope? And sometimes founders don't love these tricky questions, but those are the moments of growth. Those are the moments that creates magic for you, your team, your company. So my advice to founders are constantly to remain hungry, to be humble, remain close to the ground to your problem that you're solving and to your customers and know that your mentor is not there to essentially steal your idea or hurt you. They're mentoring you because they believe in you and your idea. They believe in the tenacity that you've shown and the grit that you've shown to them. And that's why they've come on board to become your mentor. It's something that I often have to have this conversation with founders and entrepreneurs because as we are building in the trenches, we tend to think that everyone's out to get our idea. Rest assured that even though your idea is possibly unique, your company is unique, someone might have already thought about it, but you're the one building it, you're the one now going to grow it and scale it. Your mentor has way more things to do in their life than to kind of take your ideas and run with it. I've seen that in my career, I've never really seen that happen. It's kind of funny, especially around LinkedIn, I see people connecting with mentorship opportunities kind of between them. It's just, it's such a natural thing. And someone pointed that out with the military too, where that's just part of, that's an ingrained part of it. People stick around in the military and people move a lot faster in civilian jobs. So I think it's sometimes harder for military folks adjusting because not every company wants to make the same investment in its people. When it comes to these relationships though, what are signs that things aren't going so well? Or what are key things to avoid to have an effective mentorship relationship? I would say if you come on guns of blazing a bit arrogant and as have an attitude that you know everything, that's probably going to turn your mentor away from you. I understand that we are very close to our problems and the companies that we're building. So know that your mentor has the utmost respect for that, but definitely, you know, you should also as an entrepreneur have a socratic approach to your problem that you're solving. You know, always be ready and willing to learn and ask those imperative questions, ask your questions to your mentor. That's what they're there for. I would avoid being disrespectful in any way and shape and form. And we have a zero tolerance situation when it comes to those conversations. You know, if anytime we feel a mentor or a founder is disrespectful, we try to get in a conversation and not have those bad actors within our ecosystem itself. You know, sometimes founders forget that your mentor in some ways is still a professional relationship that you're building. So even if you have personal conversations with them, it is still a very professional dynamic that you should be having. When it starts to feel like it's not professional, those are definite red flags that I would kind of, you know, act accordingly from there on. Now, when you're looking for a mentor, it's probably good for a mentee to know what are areas where a mentor can help and what are things that it's just, that's not an effective use of your mentor relationship. Can you speak more to that? Yeah, absolutely. I've found that nine times out of 10, it definitely helps when mentees come with a little bit of background knowledge. And then these days, it's so easy to, you know, look up on LinkedIn, your mentor and even on websites or see the interviews that they've given and kind of a background understanding of what is their domain expertise? Where are they, you know, as a thought leader, what their stances are on certain views? Similarly, you as a mentee should come and do your due diligence and homework and have certain questions. You know, you shouldn't show up to these mentoring sessions kind of case-or-or-on and have no questions or nothing to work on. At that point, it's a waste as a relationship, but as well as time for you and your mentor, because what are you solving in those sessions? Even if it is a personal conversation, sometimes we have those conversations where a mentee needs to ask a mentor, like, hey, me and my co-founder are not getting along. How do we talk about conflict resolution? That's still a valid conversation to have and ask your mentor, because I'm sure they have at least gone through it or have some know-how to, you know, make sure that those relationships are not burning bridges or have those conversations in a very direct way. But yes, I definitely implore and urge entrepreneurs to do your homework. Don't come into those sessions thinking that this is gonna be a very laissez-faire approach. And the mentees that come with those questions and want to drive the conversation forward, that's where you see the magic being created, because the mentor comes to this as open as you and wants to be able to help you scale further, grow further, help you grow your team, help you be the best leader that you can potentially be. But in those early conversations, they also have to learn you as just as well as you have to learn them. Mentorship sometimes feels almost like dating, but in a professional way, right? You're learning about them, their experiences, they're learning about you, your company. And those are very valid moments of exchange to have with your mentor. Simon Karmacar from mossrefund.com, one of the folks on the chat here just mentioned, a mentor is not an employee. I have to remind myself, which is probably a very valid, great point to make. How do you think a mentor? First, let me just say, Simon, that is such a great, I know it's not a question, but great feedback and comment. We have to remind our founders at times that a mentor is not an employee, you haven't hired them. They're not there to be your CTO, CFO, or CMO at any point of the time. They're your advisor. They're a person that's going to give you a tremendous amount of advice, whether it's very, very granular when it comes to your questions or just broad about life and just their experience. They're usually there to share their background, their information, their experience so that you can benefit from that. How do you thank your advisors? I think that's like I said, goes back to any professional setting. I personally will use the holiday time every year I have. It's a bit nerdy and kind of data-centric of me, but I have an Excel sheet list with all of my mentors and friends and family that I consider have been mentors. And around the new year or their birthday, I will send them an email or just thank them for the conversations we've had in the past and just check in on them. So that's really a great way to kind of make sure that you're still continuing that engagement and that relationship. And in those aspects, it doesn't feel like an employee-employer situation. It does feel like an advisor. At Techstars, when we have our programs, they go so fast because it is a three-month program that it is really difficult to make it feel like it's an employee situation. Our program managers are very good at making sure that we're setting up our founders as well as our mentors for a really impactful experience. So when things go that fast, it's really from zero to 60, it's hard to kind of wrap your mind around it. So I do encourage our founders towards the end to write them a thank you card. No one writes thank you notes or even thank you emails anymore. I used to be taught at school to follow up and write thank you emails. Very few people do that. Even a thank you call or a text nowadays will go a long ways. And these are all just professional habits and things to kind of keep in mind as you grow your career. So you, you of course kicked off, give first the appropriate Techstars way, talking about how passionate you are about who you're helping and what you want their outcomes to be. You didn't talk about necessarily how mentors have shaped your career or your life. Do you want to talk about any mentorship experiences where you've been the beneficiary? Yeah, so I will share, I'm the first generation in my family to achieve higher education. I mentioned that I was or Dan mentioned that I was an Archer Fellow. So I got a chance to live and work in our nation's capital in 2014. At that time, Barack Obama was our president. I would have never made it to DC if I didn't have mentors. A, write me those incredible recommendation letters, but B, even nominate me for that prestigious fellowship. I didn't think that that was something within my scope and ultimately going to our nation's capital, living there, working there. I almost call that fellowship like real world DC. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the reality show, but back in the day it would be like, 20, 30 strangers dropped into a city. They're roommates. They kind of live and learn and grow together and they work together. Essentially that's what the Archer Fellowship is. I was there with 40 UT students. I've never met them. We were all hustling and working and living in the capital. And we all thought that was the best time of our lives. And I learned so much about what it means to be a public servant and to have and lead a life of service that I intentionally changed my career path and went to UT's School of Public Affairs at the LBJ School and enrolled the next semester and kind of changed my trajectory forever. Now it might not be something my parents are always happy with. Sometimes when I'm changing jobs, they will still say, you know, you can still take the MCAT and go to med school. And at this point I have to tell my mom that that trip has really sailed. Like I don't think I want to do that. But it has been the greatest joy of my life to be able to lead a life of service and bring that onto my career because not so many people are fortunate enough to do that. I didn't mention that you were on your undergrad, a biology major. Jim, I would try to pronounce your last name, but whichever way I say it will be the wrong way. But do you want to come on introduce yourself and ask your question? I think I got you on mute, Jim. Oh, I got Jim muted here. Oh, shit. I think I didn't have that. You got it. Sorry about that. No, it's not me. Sorry about it. Hi, I'm Jim Minji. I'm a Vietnam veteran. I'm a semi-retired. I do small business feasibility studies for the VA vocational rehab program. And my question is a lot of times entrepreneurs would come to me. They're really at the idea stage. They really have to grow into it, if you would. And I'm wondering how X-stars would handle an inquiry from a smaller idea or a neighborhood idea. What would you do with them? Yeah, great question, Jim. Nice to meet you. An absolute honor. And thank you so much for your service. I truly believe, and I think others and my colleagues at Techstars will share the same philosophy. There's no small question for us when it comes to entrepreneurship. If they've got a question, we would just make sure that we're working to get the right channels and the right people in front of them to answer that question. And it's not a plug, but I have a very fairly active Twitter. Most folks at Techstars have a very fairly active Twitter entrepreneurs are continuously asking questions. And so that's one way to definitely get ahold of us, but there are absolute paramount ways on our Techstars website to get ahold of whoever it is that you want, whether it might be someone on mentor or arm, or if you want to apply to our accelerator programs and have questions about requirements and things like that. All of that is actually on our website. And I think our website does a better job than me explaining this. But yeah, I would definitely, depending on the question and the breadth of it, I don't think there's any question that we think is too small when it comes to entrepreneurship. Great, thank you. Hey, thanks, Jim. And there's someone on the LinkedIn chat, if you follow along there who just wanted to connect with you, who knows someone who's in the research feasibility of small business funding, and just another plug there. Patriot Bootcamp comes from Techstars. It's kind of the foundation of where Patriot Bootcamp came from and the program's free. And a lot of people will come to DAV, Patriot Bootcamp, and then they'll apply for Techstars. And everything you can do that's kind of a building block will kind of take you to the next level and prepare you better for what comes next. Sarah, do you have any other comments or questions or thoughts for the group? I just wanted to thank every one of you guys for your time. I so appreciate you taking a time on Thursday afternoon to come here and talk about mentorship. It is a complete honor to meet you guys and share my thoughts on mentorship with you all. And I look forward to seeing some of those applications on our Techstar site. I think every one of you have some phenomenal experience that would only add some magic to our founders. Well, thank you so much. And everyone who's here, I know I've seen here in the chat and on LinkedIn, some folks who have been mentors through DAV, Patriot Bootcamp, want to thank our friends at Techstars for the great work that they do and the desire to constantly come back and find ways where we can work together to help veterans to make business more accessible to them. We do have talking about mentorship or just a couple of weeks away from our next DAV, Patriot Bootcamp event. You can sign up at patriotbootcamp.org to get notifications to get in on the chat if you're on the LinkedIn or on Facebook so that you can tune in in the future. Thank you to all our mentors. Happy National Mentor Month. Thank you, Sarah, for your service. And thank you all.