How to find a mentor: lessons from Janice Omadeke's journey

Executive overview

Most people struggle to find mentors because they approach it reactively — waiting to be paired rather than building a deliberate pipeline. Janice Omadeke built a venture-backed company to solve exactly this problem, then sold it after recognising the right time to exit.

Her approach treats mentorship like a go-to-market problem: map the market, sequence outreach, and show up as a learner, not a seller.

Proactive, targeted outreach beats passive hope — mentors respond to intellectual honesty and preparation, not cold asks.

Origins: from dinner-table problem-solving to defence contracting

• Janice's father ran a nightly exercise: name a problem you saw today, identify the market, and sketch a business.
• Early entrepreneurial instinct came from immigrant parents who modelled resilience and community as transferable skills.
• Career path through defence contracting and management consulting reinforced problem-solving discipline.
• Frustration with corporate mentorship programmes — defaulting to demographic matching over development fit — was the direct catalyst for the Mentor Method.
• Dating apps proved meaningful connections could be made at scale; she saw no reason professional mentorship should be harder.

Building the mentor pipeline before the product existed

• Janice kept running Google Docs with three columns: people to learn from, companies to contribute to, and problems she was actively solving.
• Early questions were market-facing: who are the incumbents, why did they fail or grow, where are the landmines?
• Networking events came next — her question shifted to "what don't I know?" rather than validation-seeking.
• Chose B2B over B2C after rapid testing confirmed enterprise was the right beachhead; explored EdTech, management consulting, and HR as first verticals.
• Sequenced outreach around companies actively hiring — new-hire onboarding was a clear use case and conversation hook.

How she got busy leaders to give time

• Got accepted into Mass Challenge; used the accelerator's sponsor and mentor registry as a structured target list.
• Cross-referenced with "best places to work" lists to filter for companies with genuine culture investment.
• Never positioned herself as a vendor: "I know we're too early — I'm not selling you yet. Tell me if my baby is ugly."
• Asked for 15 minutes and framed the ask as listening, not pitching — questions like "why is your job so hard?" lowered resistance.
• Built pipeline towards future yeses through early conversations, not immediate closes.

Grief, motivation, and operating through loss

• Her mother was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in January 2018 — the same year Janice entered Mass Challenge.
• She travelled between DC and Austin throughout the accelerator programme to attend chemo appointments.
• Four days after her mother's passing, Janice flew back to Austin for the finals and won a $25,000 non-dilutive grant — her first significant win.
• Watching her mother remain tethered to a laptop during chemo because of workplace culture became a direct design input: the Mentor Method was built partly to help people find better career paths before they were trapped.
• Processed grief through therapy, a leadership coach, journaling, and regulating when she engaged with stakeholders.
• Years later discovered a letter her mother had written addressed to "Janice and the Mentor Method" — detailed guidance written as if anticipating a future re-read.

The decision to sell

• A panic attack during a routine happy hour conversation about the company's future was the signal she could no longer ignore.
• Had been overriding the internal signal through ego and momentum — "let's get the next round, why not?"
• Consulted a mentor and business partner who had been through an acquisition; heard consistent support from Austin-based CEOs who had faced the same crossroads.
• Completed the acquisition in September 2022, shortly after graduating from Techstars.
• The lesson: the same instinct that said "build it" eventually said "let it go" — tuning into that voice is a skill.

What comes next

• Now focused on angel investing in Black women-led businesses, sharing tactical founder knowledge from her own experience.
• Interested in philanthropic work that amplifies voices underserved by traditional talent and mentorship pipelines.
• Deliberately holding the spotlight on others rather than building another company — for now.

Advice on finding a mentor

• Your gut already knows 75% of what you need to do — trust it before seeking external validation.
• Do not build emotional dependency on mentors; they are not substitutes for parents or therapists.
• Get clear on the specific objective before approaching anyone — the relationship is most useful when it is scoped.
• Be open to relationships lasting three meetings or thirty years; stop trying to force the fit.
• Receive wisdom from all sources, not just a designated mentor — stay open to the unexpected lesson.