CSUF Entrepreneurship Mentor Celebration!

Earlier this month we celebrated our current mentors in the CSUF Entrepreneurship program. These mentors dedicate many hours to helping our student teams complete some of the most demanding projects that any students have to do at Cal State Fullerton. Mentors help students with their consulting projects with local businesses, creating business plans based on the students’ own concepts, and even launching those very businesses.

Mentors do a lot!

The CSUF Entrepreneurship Mentor Celebration was hosted at the Yorba Linda Country Club and in total we celebrated the contributions of 28 different mentors as well as honoring the amazing contributions of the founder of the Center for Entrepreneurship, Michael Ames, and the director for the Center for Entrepreneurship, John Bradley “JJ” Jackson.

During the event, CSUF Entrepreneurship alumnus and serial entrepreneur Victor Macias moderated a panel that included John Trail and David Cairns, who are the founders of Shine 4 Good and CSUF Startup Incubator clients (we did an interview with them earlier this year), Rachel Littell and Andrew Ayres, who are CSUF Entrepreneurship alumni and the founders of Gotta Go Foods (whom we did an interview with earlier this year), CSUF Entrepreneurship professor Atul Teckchandani, and CSUF Entrepreneurship mentor Dave Kinnear.

One of the biggest things discussed by the panel was, not surprisingly, what makes for a great mentor. Here were some of the key takeaways:

Trust is the biggest factor of success in a mentor/mentee relationship
You can build trust by being vulnerable and opening up
It’s a mentor’s role to coach, not to drive a project towards success

All told, it was a great event and was a modest way for CSUF Entrepreneurship to show its appreciation for the many hours of hard work that the mentors in this program put in to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders.

If you are interested in becoming a mentor in the program, please sing up clicking the button below

Become a Mentor!

Here are pictures of the mentors accepting their awards!