Mentor
Department: Studio
Employment Type: Volunteer
Location: Cambridge
Reporting To: Beth Porter
Description
As a Mentor with C10 Labs, you will play a pivotal role in guiding and accelerating early-stage startups across multiple industries. We pride ourselves on fostering a dynamic AI ecosystem that promotes creativity, execution, and growth. Mentors are seasoned leaders—founders, operators, investors, or technologists—who provide high-impact guidance to founders navigating the journey from idea to scale.
You’ll have a front-row seat to breakthrough innovation, with opportunities to become
early advisors, board members, or fractional CxOs within our portfolio companies. You’ll also gain access to exclusive C10 programs, events, and our global network of investors, corporates, and academics.
Key Responsibilities
- Provide strategic mentorship to portfolio companies, leveraging your domain expertise, operating experience, and network to drive meaningful outcomes.
- Support founders in refining business strategies, market positioning, product roadmaps, and go-to-market approaches.
- Act as a trusted advisor—helping startups overcome challenges, seize opportunities, and build resilient organizations.
- Share perspectives on market trends, customer needs, regulatory landscapes, and competitive dynamics across industries.
- Participate in workshops and cohort programming, enhancing founders’ skills in areas such as fundraising, business development, product scaling, and team building.
- Facilitate access to potential partners, investors, and customers within your network.
- Provide ongoing feedback and insights to the C10 investment and operating teams to strengthen our venture-building approach.
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
- Proven track record as a founder, operator, investor, or industry leader in enterprise, health, bio, mobility, robotics, fintech, or related domains.
- Experience mentoring or advising early-stage or high-growth startups.
- Strong professional network and ability to make meaningful introductions to investors, partners, and customers.
- Knowledge or familiarity with of state-of-the-art (SOTA) AI models (e.g., foundation models, multimodal AI, agentic systems) and their applications across industries.
- Understanding of venture capital, startup ecosystems, and the dynamics of scaling companies.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to deliver constructive feedback and strategic guidance.
Benefits
- Shape the trajectory of the next generation of AI-driven companies.
- Work in an intellectually stimulating and collaborative environment.
- Leverage your expertise to make a lasting impact on founders and industries.
- Gain access to exclusive C10 global professional network, events and a broad, cross-sector network of innovators and investors.
- Explore opportunities for deeper engagement with ventures as advisor, board member, or fractional executive.
C10 Labs is an equal opportunity organization, deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We believe breakthrough innovation emerges when people from different backgrounds, disciplines, and perspectives come together to solve the world’s hardest problems. All qualified applicants and participants will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.
We see diversity as a strategic advantage—
fueling creativity, improving decision-making, and expanding the scope of what’s possible—making inclusivity core to how we build ventures, empower founders, and shape the future of AI.
