Founder Institute Mentors provide the support, feedback, and guidance that helped our early-stage founders launch over 800 businesses since the Institute was founded in 2009. When a founder is in need they come to the rescue... sort of like Startup Superheroes.
While all of our 2500+ Mentors help our companies, among these great individuals, there are some that stand out. Earlier this year, we announced the nominees for the 2012 Mentor Awards, which will take place at the 14th Founder Showcase event, on Wednesday, July 17th in Silicon Valley.
Today, we are excited to announce our first winner, for the the "Best Graduate Turned Mentor" Award:
Gagan Biyani, who is a Graduate of the Silicon Valley Founder Institute, is currently CEO and co-founder of Fresh, which is like Uber for food. Previously, he was co-founder and President of Udemy, where he led supply acquisition (6,000+ instructors teach on Udemy) and demand acquisition ($6M+ courses sold). Udemy has raised $16M in three rounds and has been covered by hundreds of publications - including Bill Gates, the New York Times, and TechCrunch. After Udemy, he spent 6 months as an advisor to Lyft, where he led supply and demand acquisition for their launch in Los Angeles, which grew faster than San Francisco. He is also co-founder of the Growth Hackers Conference and an advisor to various early-stage startups.
Gagan has helped mentor new founders across several Founder Institute chapters, consistently gaining incredibly high ratings for his training sessions, feedback, and advisement. Congratulations Gagan on winning the award!
The 2012 Startup Mentor Awards will be handed out at the Founder Showcase event, on Wednesday, July 17th, 2013. In addition to the award ceremony, the event will feature a series of early-stage startup workshops, led by Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote), and more, as well as a pitch competition between six promising companies. We hope you will join us!
