Mentor Madness

3 min readJul 25, 2016

This blog is a weekly reflection of WorkHound’s time at Dynamo, a logistics-focused accelerator based in Chattanooga, TN. This week we discuss mentor madness, attending a future of work event, and the importance of amazing customer interactions.

Mentor Madness

This week was “mentor madness” at Dynamo. Each team met with 20+ hand-picked mentors throughout the week in 20 minute sessions. These short sessions help teams work through immediate challenges while building long term relationships.

Having spent time attending a previous accelerator, we learned the key aspect of these mentor sessions:

“Collect the dots before connecting the dots”

This means that we’re not trying to sell a mentor or treat the meeting like a one-time conversation. The goal for these meetings is plain and simple: to build a relationships.

Here are the steps we’ve taken in the meetings that has worked well thus far:

Research mentors ahead of time
Have a concise pitch that helps them understand the business in 2 minutes
Be confident yet coachable when receiving feedback
Know what challenges they can help with immediately
Determine by the end of the meeting how (or if) they can help us long term
Ask how we can help them

In this first week of mentor meetings there was great progress. Mentors helped with pilot offers, potential customers, long-term connections, and valuable learnings. Week two is right in front of us!

Divide and conquer

While I was in Chattanooga for the mentor meetings, Andrew spent the majority of the week in Seattle at the Digital Tools for Workers event. This program invited attendees focused on the future of work. Entrepreneurs, investors, and organizations all worked together. Over 48 hours the attendees teamed up Startup Weekend-style to pitch and work on ideas to build power for workers.

The nature of work is fast-evolving. The need for new solutions as we evolve from an industrial to digital economy. We are appreciative of the opportunity to take part. After reinforcing our direction, we’re excited to keep building WorkHound.

The little things matter

It’s no secret Dynamo’s managing directors are successful entrepreneurs. This week Ted Alling spent some time sharing the story of how their team built and sold their company. Learning what drove success is always fascinating. But where I found insight was Ted’s emphasis on the little things.

Ted’s father was an oral surgeon and was known to call each of his patients every evening after serving them that day. Sometimes he would even visit them at home!

This personal approach has fueled the philosophy of the Dynamo team. Our first letter from the program emphasizes: “you have to go absolutely overboard with giving WORLD-CLASS customer service.”

In an era of tech-driven everything, we can’t forget about people. This week we saw from both successful entrepreneurs and prominent workers groups the importance of putting people first. It’s important to remember people have the problems and people buy products to solve them. Little stories like this show the importance of baking this mindset into a company early.

Read our previous posts about our time at Dynamo

WorkHound Joins Dynamo // Week 1 Recap

What is WorkHound?

WorkHound is a software platform built to help carriers keep drivers and improve the truck driver experience. Truck drivers use their smartphones to share feedback and ideas with the carrier, which WorkHound aggregates and turns into actionable insights to help manage and retain drivers. WorkHound is co-founded by Andrew Kirpalani and Max Farrell.