Looking for a mentor match for your good idea? Now you can easily request a mentor through this simple form or on our new “request a mentor” page on the LaunchPad website. We have grown our professional mentor network through alumni volunteers and added five talented peer Rubin Family Innovation Mentors this academic year, making it easier than ever to connect. A simple few questions will start the mentor matching process in our new LaunchPad Discord platform. The LaunchPad team of Nick Barba ’20, Patrick Prioletti G’21 and Emma Rothman ’21, created platform for campus entrepreneurs to communicate over voice, video, and text, connect with peer mentors, get advice, or just hang out with fellow like-minded innovators using Discord. If you are not already a LaunchPad member, join here and then hop on LaunchPad Discord here. You’ll immediately be greeted by a Rubin Family Innovation Mentor who will guide you through the next steps.
For those not familiar with Discord, it is a freeware instant messaging, VoIP application and digital software platform that features integrated text, image, video and audio communication that a chat channel that can run on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and in web browsers. More than 250 million people are currently on the platform. Originally launched in 2011 for the gaming community, it has now become a community-based platform serving education, businesses and other sectors as “Your place to talk.”
New to Discord? Watch a simple on-boarding video that explains the LaunchPad’s Discord platfrom, created by Rubin Family Innovation Mentor Patrick Prioletti here.
Rubin Family Innovation Mentors serve as peer advisors to a portfolio of student startups, coaching them on strategy and venture development. 2020 – 2021 Rubin Family Innovation Mentors include:
- Emma Rothman ’21, Falk College, food studies
- Patrick Prioletti G’21 iSchool, graduate program, applied data sciencce
- Sam Hollander ’22, Whitman, finance and Newhouse, advertising dual major
- James LePage ’23 Whitman, real estate
- Bruno Luiz G ’22, iSchool, graduate program, applied data science
Rubin Family Innovation Mentors are supported through a gift from The Rubin Family Foundation, facilitated through Todd B. Rubin. This is the second year that The Rubin Family Foundation has supported the peer mentor program through the LaunchPad. Last year’s Rubin Family Innovation Mentors mentored more than 50 student teams, organized and ran Startup Weekend and Mentor Madness, prepared teams for campus, state and national competitions, and helped teams with research and discovery, team building, goal setting and achieving milestones. Along the way, Rubin Family Innovation Mentors also continued to build their own ventures, win national awards, and raise investments to take their own ideas from concept to commercialization. They helped select the 2020 – 2021 Rubin Family Innovation Mentors.
Joining them as mentors will be alumni volunteers, including members of The Founder’s Circle – students who came through the LaunchPad program and are now leading their own ventures. The Founders Circle is a group of active, dedicated LaunchPad alumni who significantly contributed to the development of the program. They are a diverse group of entrepreneurs and professionals who are trailblazers, role models, and mentors for current student entrepreneurs. They exemplify Syracuse University’s spirit of entrepreneurship and are now “paying it forward” as alumni mentors. Syracuse alumni can become a mentor here.
