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Mentors & Coaches

Meet our team of experts, tech gurus and thought-leaders

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One-to-one coaching and mentoring from startup experts

We provide our members and programme participants with access to a range of mentoring and coaching options.  Whether you want to talk about your product, have a question about expanding your business or just need to talk to someone who’s been in your shoes, our mentors will share their knowledge and insights to support you.

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Our Partners

CodeBase is the UK’s largest startup incubator, home to more than 100 of the country’s best technology companies. We champion businesses tackling big challenges with technology, and work tirelessly to support the development of a more diverse and competitive European digital industry.

Along with their partners at Investing Women Angels, Scotland’s first women only angel group, AccelerateHER delivers a variety of events and workshops to support and inspire female founders to scale their business. Female founders in the Rise and Eagle Labs ecosystem now have the opportunity to access mentoring from angel investors, with a wealth of experience across a variety of sectors. In addition, we're delighted to have become the official banking sponsor for the AccelerateHER Scotland Awards 2021.

Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS) has extensive experience of working with and supporting Innovators, Entrepreneurs, Early Stage Start-Ups, Scale Ups and SMEs. The Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School has supported innovators from the earliest stages of exploring an idea through to established Scale-ups and SMEs with ambitious growth plans.

Meet the Mentors
 

Alan Gardner
CodeBase

Alan is an experienced software developer and consultant based in Aberdeen. Through his work with Cultivate, an Edinburgh-based software consultancy firm specialising in agile development and lean product delivery, he worked with many companies across sectors as diverse as early stage startups, government NPOs and Fortune 50 companies. When Cultivate was acquired by Deliveroo in 2019 he worked as a staff engineer on their payments team, as they built and scaled their payments and accounts system. He has over 20 years of experience of helping clients find the right thing to build and then to deliver their products in the right way. Alan currently consults through his company Narrativium, where he helps his clients to build user-facing, data-driven products in areas such as pharmaceutical development and telemedicine.

 

Babita Devi
CJBS

Babita Devi is a coach and entrepreneur with over 25 years' experience from a broad range of industries where she has helped with marketing and business development. Her marketing company bStrategic helps individuals get clear on how to make strategy part of every day, with a direct impact on the bottom line. She is founder of mySircles – an app that is designed to build stronger communities in a digital world and she has lectured Entrepreneurial Marketing at Lord Ashcroft Business School and Lincoln University. Babita also heads up marketing for coworking company CambridgeSpace and is a coach at the Judge Business School, where she works on the Accelerate Program helping entrepreneurs nurture venture creation and turn ideas into commercially viable companies.

 

Emmanuel Carraud
CJBS

Emmanuel Carraud is an entrepreneur and investor in Mobile Application, Digital Marketing and Property industry. He is the co-founder and CEO of AppChocolate Ltd, the festive mobile apps publisher.
As a serial entrepreneur, Emmanuel co-founded MagicSolver.com, the apps discovery specialists, in 2009 and reached over 50 million downloads, ranking #1 on the iTunes App Store in over 40 countries. 
As a property investor, he manages Maison Invest Ltd, which run a portfolio of residential properties, single lets, HMOs and serviced accommodations across the UK.

Evelyn Simpson
AccelerateHer

Evelyn Simpson is a coach, mentor and advisor. She works with early stage companies and entrepreneurs helping them to develop strategy, raise fund and improve their leadership effectiveness. Evelyn is also an active angel investor and serves on the board of the Investing Women Angels syndicate. She is an entrepreneur in her own right having co-founded her own coaching and training firm. A former investment banker, Evelyn worked for JP Morgan Chase executing a wide range of corporate finance transactions around the world and latterly was COO and board member for Chase Manhattan Asia Limited in Hong Kong. Evelyn chairs accessibility tech start-up, Neatebox and chairs the Board of Trustees of Venture Scotland. She has a BA in Economics and Law from Edinburgh University and an MBA from Columbia Business School in New York.

Jackie Waring
AccelerateHer

Jackie is a pioneer of women angels ‘changing the face of angel investing’; bringing more women angels into Scotland’s dynamic angel investment community. An active and experienced angel investor herself; she established and leads Scotland’s all-female angel group Investing Women Angels whose members have invested over 80% of their funds in highly innovative female founded/co-founded companies. Jackie is an entrepreneur with a passion for helping other entrepreneurs. It was this passion which inspired her to establish AccelerateHER; creating a channel and direct help for female founders going for scale. Publicly recognised by Scotland’s First Minister; she is a major player in shaping the ScotCanDo eco-system. 

 

James Newbery
CodeBase

James is a web product development consultant and coach from Edinburgh. He was an early employee and Director of Engineering at FanDuel, scaling the gaming product to millions of users across multiple channels and helping to grow the company to a $1b 'unicorn' valuation. He has over 20 years’ experience building websites and apps for startups, big consumer brands and government organisations. These days he helps SaaS companies get the most out of the web and their development teams as they grow.

 

Marcela Donatello
CodeBase

Marcela co-created and runs TMRW, one of London’s largest tech coworking spaces where she regularly supports startup founders with their everyday challenges. She has a decade of hands-on experience in early-stage startups - two that she started herself and two as part of the founding team. Following years of frustration from watching entrepreneurs fail their fundraising process for avoidable reasons, she co-created the ‘Fundraising Bootcamp’, a cohort-based, comprehensive "Investor Preparedness" course that gets founders funded quickly and efficiently. Marcela has built South London’s largest startup community, which has generated over £45 million in economic impact to the local area, and is a keen Community leader.

 

Marco Donzelli
CJBS

Marco is a senior business leader with international experience in business development, entrepreneurship, business transformation and change management. His main industries of expertise are professional services, online marketplaces and consumer finance. Marco is the Global CEO at HLB, a leading mid-tier advisory and accounting network with combined turnover of US$ 2.93bn, presence in 158 countries and 30,000 people. He joined HLB in February 2012 as the Head of Strategic Network Development and then moved to the position of Chief Operating Officer in August 2015. As a result, Marco has over 8 years of senior leadership experience in the professional services industry, at a global level. He started his career in Italy, where after a brief period with Deloitte, he moved to Deutsche Bank, where he spent over six years in both commercial and internal consultancy roles within retail and consumer finance, before moving to the UK.

Michael Boniface
CodeBase

Michael held a number of senior positions in financial services before making the move into creative industries. He has worked with teams across Europe, the US, Russia and Brazil to create gaming products focussed around localised customer profiles and purchasing trends. Most recently Michael raised investment in China to build Skymoons Edinburgh, a mobile games studio focussed on building products that bridged both Asian and Western markets. Skymoons Edinburgh was sold to an American publisher in June 2018. Michael is currently Head of ONE Codebase in Aberdeen, a partnership between Opportunity North East (ONE) and CodeBase to deliver tech company growth and transformation in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.

 

Rafik Jallad
CJBS

Rafik is an international entrepreneur with Telecom & High-tech and Internet of Things (IOT) experience. Rafik has the skills required to transform innovative IP into successful and profitable businesses. Rafik latest experience was founder and CEO of BlueCreation, a company focusing on the Internet of Things (IOT). Rafik grew BlueCreation with an international customer base and sold it to NASDAQ listed Sierra Wireless in November 2016. Previously Rafik was Vice President at CSR (now part of Qualcomm) responsible for its Automotive division and part of the team elaborating strategy and managing post-merger. Rafik other experiences include Business Development Manager at Ubinetics (Telco company acquired in 2005 by CSR). Rafik has also previously worked at McKinsey on various mainly Internet strategy and operational projects worldwide.

Rhona Campbell
AccelerateHer

Rhona Campbell is an expert in global product management and product marketing, with over 20 years’ experience working with SMEs and multinational technology companies at a senior level to achieve growth and success in global markets. Her practical know-how has helped companies to commercialise and launch new products, enter new markets as well as develop and implement international product and marketing strategies. Rhona set up her own consultancy, Rhona Campbell Associates, working with start-up and investor-funded technology companies to assess commercial feasibility of new products, formulate product strategy/roadmap and take leading-edge technology to market.

Steven Drost
CodeBase

Steven is a two-time entrepreneur, once successful, once failed. He has extensive experience of hiring, building revenues, selling companies, fund raising, and more. He has the scars and war stories to prove it.  He is currently the Chief Strategy Officer at CodeBase and sees many startups per year. He loves to help business grow and network founders with peers, customers and investors. He has recently been appointed Trustee at David Hume Institute, Scottish policy think-tank based in Edinburgh.

 

Valerie Dryden
CodeBase

Valerie is a tech leader with 15 years of experience working in start-up and agency environments. As Director of Engineering at the £9m startup, Care Sourcer, she built and nurtured the engineering team during the pandemic; implementing the hiring, onboarding and personal development processes. She also architected systems, orchestrated projects and created technical product roadmaps. Valerie has over a decade of hands-on engineering experience, from building critical payments systems at scale with Deliveroo to client-facing software for companies including SkyScanner and Storm ID. She played a key role in establishing Scotland's first coding boot camp, building the instructional team and curriculum while teaching 100+ students how to code. She has also run workshops at Agile Scotland on effective collaborative working and given talks at Lead Dev Edinburgh and others.

 

Each Eagle Lab also has a series of local mentors who volunteer their time to help our members grow.

For more information on local mentors please get in touch with your Eagle Lab Ecosystem Manager.

Explore our Eagle Labs

Content

 

7 benefits of mentoring for startup founders

Tips on the benefits of mentoring from experienced mentors and mentees in the startup community. 

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How mentoring has helped my startup grow

James Powell is technical founder at Sellar, a digital solution that is looking to change the way that breweries sell to trade customers. 

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What to look for in a mentor

Danae Shell, founder and CEO of Valla and a mentor with CodeBase, explains what founders should look for in a mentor and the ways they could help.

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How to find a mentor through Eagle Labs

Providing access to mentors is an essential part of what we do, says David Morris, Proposition Delivery Manager at Eagle Labs.

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Making the most of your mentor

Ilana Fass, FinTech platform lead at Rise New York, discusses mentoring programmes and how to best work with a mentor.

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How to best work with a mentor

Entrepreneur Kerry Ritz mentors many early-stage startups across the globe, sharing his experience with those making their first steps into business.

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Pay it forward: An investor’s experience to mentoring startups

Muhammad Altalib talks about how investors can bring unique experience to a startup and why those in the startup ecosystem should look to pay it forward.

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The key to finding mentors

If you want to find the right mentor you need the right attitude, says Moshe Teitelbaum, founder of fintech startup SHTAR.

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Finding a mentor to help your startup thrive

Experienced mentors can make the difference between startup success and failure. We look at the role they play and how to find the right mentor.

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