I hired great people at three different startups earlier in my career. None of those companies had a formal L&D budget. We were too small and moving too fast to spend time on it.
That never sat right with me. I knew what a good mentor could do for someone's career. I'd had one. But the people I hired didn't have access to that, just because of where they worked and how early-stage it was.
We tried leadership programs sometimes. The feedback was mixed at best. Expensive, generic, and usually reserved for a handful of people already tagged as "high potential." I don't think development should work that way. If someone is good enough to hire, they're good enough to grow.
At one company, I organized a cross-mentoring exchange with people outside our org. It worked. But coordinating it manually, matching people, scheduling, checking in, ate up so much of my time that I couldn't keep it running once the day job caught back up.
A year ago, someone I was mentoring at the time brought it up. She was an HR leader herself, wanting to offer mentoring to her employees, with no dedicated budget and no time to build it. I told her I'd build the thing properly this time, and that her company could be one of the first in it.
That's how the PeopleTopics cross-mentoring program started.
What cross-company mentoring actually is
Cross-company mentoring pairs people from different organizations for structured, ongoing mentoring relationships. Instead of matching a junior employee with a senior leader inside the same company, you match them with a senior mentor at a different company.
The structure looks like regular internal mentoring: paired match, a cadence of 1:1 conversations, some light structure around topics or goals. The difference is where the mentor comes from.
In practice, that usually means a cohort of pairs running for a set stretch, three to six months, meeting every two to four weeks. Conversations cover the same ground good mentoring always covers: a specific decision someone's stuck on, a skill they're trying to build, a leadership challenge they can't bring to their own manager. It doesn't have to be strictly senior-to-junior either. Peer-to-peer pairs, where both people are at a similar level but at different companies, work just as well, since the value comes from the outside perspective, not from a hierarchy.
Why it works better than internal mentoring, for a lot of companies
No internal politics. A mentee can say what they actually think to someone who doesn't sit in their reporting line, doesn't know their manager, and has no stake in how they're perceived internally. That changes what people are willing to say out loud.
No pool problem. Small and mid-size companies often don't have enough senior people internally to mentor everyone who could use it. A 60-person company might have three people qualified to mentor, and they're already stretched thin doing their actual jobs. Cross-company mentoring solves the supply problem by pulling from outside the building.
Real outside perspective. A mentor who has only ever seen how one company does things gives advice shaped by that one company. A mentor from a different org, industry, or stage brings a genuinely different frame of reference. That's often more useful than someone who's only ever seen it done one way.
It's affordable at a level formal leadership programs aren't. Leadership development programs are expensive, usually built for a small group, and often built around content instead of relationships. Cross-company mentoring is structurally cheaper because you're not building curriculum or paying facilitators for cohort sessions. You're facilitating a match and a cadence.
How it's different from a buddy program or internal sponsorship
If you already run something that sounds similar, it's worth knowing what actually sets cross-company mentoring apart, since the differences matter more than the surface similarity suggests.
A buddy program is usually informal, short-term, and focused on onboarding — helping someone get oriented in their first weeks. It's not built to support someone's development over months or years.
Internal sponsorship means someone senior inside your company advocating for you: putting your name forward, opening doors. It's valuable, but it depends entirely on who's already inside your building, and it still carries the internal-politics problem, since the sponsor has their own stake in how things play out.
Cross-company mentoring is neither of those. It's ongoing, it's development-focused rather than onboarding-focused, and the mentor has no internal stake in your career, which is exactly what makes people willing to be honest in those conversations.
The part I had to solve
The idea isn't new. What's hard is the coordination. Matching people well takes real judgment, not just matching job titles. Keeping pairs on track without micromanaging them takes structure. And doing all of it manually, the way I did the first time, doesn't scale past a handful of pairs before it collapses under its own admin weight.
That's the actual problem I've been building PeopleTopics to solve: keep what makes cross-company mentoring work, and get rid of the coordination overhead that made it so hard to sustain the first time I tried.
What HR and People leaders in this position need is one thing: a way to give their people real mentors without having to coordinate any of it themselves. That's what I built. If you're in that spot, that's what this is for.