StartUp Lab Mentors | David Trueman

By Alex Kinsella

Bringing a startup to life takes grit, patience and vision. It also helps to have advice and guidance from entrepreneurs who have been where you are in your journey. StartUp Lab's mentor program, brings together highly successful and dedicated alumni and community members who volunteer their time to support Startup Lab's founders. In this series, we're introducing you to a few of our mentors to share their advice on entrepreneurship and startups.

Startup founders start each day with new challenges on top of the backlog of customer feedback, hiring decisions, sales prospect questions, and other day-to-day operational issues. That's why having great mentors matters. They've been there and done that already, and they can share those experiences with you to help you find your way to a decision.

When it comes to experienced mentors at StartUp Lab, we look to David Trueman. With a resume that includes time leading software engineering teams at AOL, BlackBerry, and Intelligent Mechatronic Systems (IMS), Trueman has been on the frontlines of leading tech companies—and now shares that knowledge with our StartUp Lab ventures.

Mentoring the next generation of founders

After retiring from IMS in 2015, Trueman sought opportunities to give back and stay connected to the community. He said his experience leading development and business teams can be applied to many of the challenges founders are facing in their ventures today.

"I want to make a difference in the world. I feel if I can make a difference in one person's life, then that's making the world a better place. I think of myself as a lifelong mentor because that's the approach that I took to develop staff when I was working full time," Trueman said.

Mentoring at an accelerator or incubator was an easy decision for Trueman. But choosing StartUp Lab came down to one thing—our volunteer-based mentor program.

"StartUp Lab values volunteerism. That has a tremendous advantage because you get to leverage an enormous breadth and depth of experience that you can't always get in hired mentors," Trueman said.

The common trait of successful founders

Over his eight years of venture mentoring at StartUp Lab, Trueman has seen various software and hardware ideas pitched as the next big thing. When evaluating applicants to StartUp Lab, Trueman said there is one common trait that can predict if the founder or founding team will be successful—they need to be coachable.

"They need to listen to advice, think critically about it, and act accordingly. They don't have to always take the advice, but they have to at least consider it carefully," Trueman said.

Ego is still essential to being a founder, especially when bringing a radically new idea to solve a problem to market. Trueman said balancing that ego with critical thinking and introspection is the secret to protecting yourself against the naysayers who say you're crazy.

"You have to be able to step back from that and think a little more critically about your own viewpoints, assumptions, and biases," Trueman said.

One team that Trueman sees these qualities in is Ahmed Khanani and Ahsan Qazi from Empowered. The venture is working on a platform for businesses to develop and support wellness within their employee base. As non-technical founders, Trueman said the duo have a more difficult path to develop their technology, but have done the groundwork to set themselves up for success.

"They put the right structures in place and are asking the right questions to ensure that their developers are on the right track and building quality in a trustworthy way," Trueman said.

Finding product market fit

Of all the challenges ventures face, Trueman said the biggest is establishing product market fit. While many ventures try to rush this step to get their first customers, Trueman said the emphasis should be on finding product market fit in a highly iterative way.

That iterative approach starts with something as simple as asking your friends and family about the problem you're trying to solve. From there, Trueman said you begin to expand who you're interviewing, create initial storyboards or mockups to show how you approach the problem and repeat. Only then can you get to the point where you're ready to start working on a minimum viable product (MVP).

"Ultimately, you don't get the full product market fit until you have a finished product that is selling and scaling. But you don't get there in one step. You start with an assumption and work to strengthen that assumption time after time," Trueman said.

Want to get involved? Ask us how at startuplab@wlu.ca