One of the most common reasons people come to me for coaching: they can't get the learning and growth they need inside their day-to-day job at a startup. A few of them end up paying for part of it themselves, out of pocket, because there's no budget at work for it. So why couldn't mentoring live inside the startup itself? Was there a way to do it that didn't cost a fortune and still actually worked?
As a former Head of People at 3 startups, I know this problem all too well. Startups pour their budget into things that generate revenue directly, and immediately. Hiring is one of them, and for good reason. You need the right people in the building. But because everything moves so fast, years can pass before anyone gets a real chance to learn and grow beyond their job description.
For a lot of high performers, that's fine at first. Getting thrown into a huge project is how they grow. But a huge project alone isn't always enough. With the lack of guidance and support, even the highest performer can feel too much pressure and start to miss their targets. Add a mentor into the mix, though, and that same project becomes the thing that gets someone to the next level of seniority.
So if you're a founder or a People lead trying to figure out how to start a mentoring program with no L&D budget, here's what I've seen work and what doesn't.
Peer Learning Groups
Peer learning groups are a fantastic resource, and they cost close to nothing to set up. You take a small group of people, ideally from different roles or teams, and put one real, specific problem in front of them. Structure the discussion so it stays practical, not just a general chat, and let the group work through it together over a few sessions. It's a good format for surfacing collective knowledge that's already sitting inside your company.
What it doesn't do is give any one person a dedicated relationship over time. Nobody in the group is tracking a specific person's goals from month to month, and nobody is asking them the harder, more personal questions about where they're stuck. It's a strong complement to mentoring, not a replacement for it.
The risk with peer groups is that, left unsupervised without someone responsible for keeping them on track, they can drift into gossip and lose their original objective and their impact along with it. The fix is simple: stay anchored to the actual problem being worked through, and assign one person from the group to own that. It takes more time to set up and supervise than it looks like at first, but it's a genuinely strong addition to whatever else you're doing. Google runs something similar through their G2G peer coaching program, with strong results.
Formal 1:1 coaching or mentoring
Professional coaches and mentors are expensive, and they should be. Years of training and preparation go into that work. My take: don't go looking for a cheaper version. You want someone qualified, not someone discounted. Occasionally you will find new programs and newer coaches who are in training and they might still be a great resource, but it will take equally as long to find and vet these individuals. This is a great option for very specific cases where you're looking for a type of support for selected internal individuals who carry much of the weight for your business objectives. Coaching is also a great, if sometimes overlooked, option for individuals on performance improvement plans.
The research backs this up. Two meta-analyses covering dozens of coaching studies, Theeboom, Beersma, and van Vianen (2014) and Jones, Woods, and Guillaume (2016), found consistent positive effects on performance, goal attainment, wellbeing, and self-regulation. The International Coaching Federation's Global Coaching Client Study, run in partnership with PwC, surveyed over 2,100 coaching clients and found that more than 70% reported improved work performance. Coaching is not free, but it's one of the better-evidenced investments in this list.
Group coaching or mentoring programs
These can sometimes be cheaper (per individual) than 1:1, but hit or miss. I know a handful of genuinely good ones, happy to point you to them if you're looking. But they're the minority, and the costs are rightfully higher when connected with genuinely good programs. This is a good option when you have a bench of newer managers and the budget to invest in setting them up for success. It can also improve communication among first-time managers and create a wave of support that travels through your organisation.
Internal cross-mentoring (senior people mentoring junior ones and vice versa, in-house)
This one looks free on paper. Your best people mentor your other people, no external cost. If you set the program up well, and dedicate the right amount of time to preparation, matching, and support, this can be the best solution on this list. It combines the support of internal sponsors with the learning that comes from mentoring, and costs time rather than budget.
For this to work at its best, start with a selected group of individuals before opening it to the whole company. That gives you more control over the first run and lets you see what works and what doesn't before scaling it. I'd also recommend setting a fixed time frame for each mentoring engagement, so it stays concentrated instead of fizzling out the way year-long programs often do.
Two problems tend to show up. First, in a startup your pool of senior mentors is small. Sometimes it's five people. Sometimes it's the same three names for every function. To keep things fair, aim for one mentee per mentor. Second, because everyone sits in the same organisation, politics can get in the way, especially in smaller companies. It's hard to be fully honest with someone who sits three levels above you, particularly about the stuff that actually matters: what you're bad at, where you're stuck, whether you actually want the promotion you're chasing.
Hackathons
Hackathons work really well as a one-off learning experience for collective learning. Pull people from different teams together for a day or two, hand them a real business problem, and you usually get genuine creativity, some cross-functional exposure, and a good jolt of energy in the building. It's a great exercise for the business too, sometimes surfacing fresh ideas or even new features and business lines.
What you don't get, in terms of learning, is anything that continues past the event itself. A hackathon is a moment, not a relationship, and it doesn't tell you anything about how a specific person is growing over the following months. A great addition to a learning strategy, not a stand-in for mentoring.
Cross-company mentoring
This is the one that can solve for cost, pool size, time investment, and honesty all at once. Cross-company mentoring pairs your people with mentors and mentees at other companies: usually similar stage, sometimes similar function, never a direct competitor. A few things happen when you do this:
Cost drops. You're not paying for a full-time program or absorbing the whole bill alone. Mentors come from participating companies themselves, and because of that exchange, companies split the cost of running a cohort together. Nobody pays what a solo formal program would cost.
The pool problem disappears. Instead of picking from five senior people in your own building, your mentees get matched with one of hundreds of mentors from other companies who've actually lived the specific thing they're trying to figure out.
Honesty is easier. There's no internal politics when your mentor doesn't sit in your Slack, doesn't influence your next review, and won't see you in tomorrow's standup. People say the real thing because there's nothing to protect.
You get the time back. Because the program runs on an external platform that handles selection, matching, support, and scheduling, you don't need to invest nearly as much of your own time. That matters most for teams without a dedicated L&D function, who wouldn't have the resources to run an ongoing mentoring program on their own anyway.
This last one is the model I built PeopleTopics around, after running a pilot with real companies. If you want the fuller picture of how cross-company mentoring actually works, I've broken it down in What Is Cross-Company Mentoring and Why It Works. If this is the kind of program you've been trying to figure out how to start, take a look at what we're building.