How StartOut Scaled Mentorship for LGBTQ+ Founders and Allies with Mentorloop
with Allison Wright
Director of Education at StartOut
with Allison Wright
Director of Education at StartOut
More than two years after piloting Mentorloop, StartOut is still growing with it. What began as a six-month pilot with 50 people has become a network of more than 800 mentors supporting LGBTQ+ and allied founders around the world, and the program has outgrown Mentorloop Pro and moved up to Mentorloop Enterprise.
Match times have fallen from 60 days to one. Mentors and mentees now choose each other through dual opt-in matching, and Director of Education Allison Wright can see how every match is going, not just how many were made. Every mentor still gets a personal onboarding call, because for StartOut, scaling has never meant giving up the human touch.
“You can leverage incredible technology while maintaining the human element. You just have to be intentional about it.”
Your mentoring program works. People love it. And now it’s the thing holding you back.
Matches take weeks. You can’t tell whether the introductions you make turn into real relationships. Every new mentor or mentee adds to a pile you can’t clear without hiring, and underneath it all sits a quieter worry: if you automate any of this, will you lose the personal touch that made the program good in the first place?
StartOut faced exactly that. More than two years into their partnership with Mentorloop, they have a clear answer.
StartOut is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has supported LGBTQ+ and allied entrepreneurs since 2009, giving founders the knowledge, networks and industry experience to build and scale their businesses. Mentorship is its biggest program, with a network of more than 800 mentors, many of them based outside the US and supporting US founders from around the world.
For seven years, every match was made by hand.
Manual matching worked until it didn’t. When Allison joined, the cracks were measurable:
"We had more people interested in mentorship than we could serve. We needed to improve match times, improve quality, and gain better insights into how pairs were working together."
For a nonprofit, Allison says, this wasn’t just an operational headache:
"Because we're a nonprofit, it was barriers to impact. We couldn't help more people the right way we wanted to help them if we didn't solve these."
And a 60-day wait was never just a number. Founders need support right now, and asking them to wait two months meant asking them to stall.
Allison didn’t pick a platform on a whim. She mapped what mattered most to the program, then researched around it: roughly 12 platforms, narrowed to 6, then a final 3. Mentorloop won against competitors that were more expensive and packed with more features. She felt those extras would have made mentorship harder, not better.
She also took StartOut’s community with her on that journey. In July 2024, she ran a six-month pilot with 50 people: her top mentors and brand-new founders, telling them openly that this was a chance to beta-test and shape something new.
"When we include people versus tell them what's happening, it makes such a big difference. Mentorship programs are always personal. It's a people-based program, and it's really important to bring your people with you along the way."
She logged every question that came in so she could see where people struggled. By the time StartOut launched program-wide in January 2025, the team had already worked through the friction.
"The power of a dual opt-in platform, where both people choose one another, transforms the quality of the match, because no one knows you better than you."
On the data:
"Mentorloop has transformed feedback. It's transformed data and insights. We're not just tracking who matched and how long the match went. We're actually tracking the quality of the match too."
Highlights has also given Allison an early-warning system. Because feedback is mostly people raving about one another, she can spot the moments where a founder needs extra support, or where a mentor deserves a thank-you.
This is the question prospects ask most, and the mentors in StartOut’s own network asked it too. Allison’s answer is practical:
"You can be 80% automation. That's great. But always keep 10 to 20% personal, because it's actually what makes the automation so successful."
The impact has gone well beyond the mentoring program. Fundraising kept surfacing as founders’ number one request for support. So StartOut used that signal to build a fundraising course for early-stage startups in StartOut Academy, a different program entirely.
"We hear every day from founders that mentorship didn't just change their business. It changed their life. For LGBTQ+ founders and allies, the value isn't only in expertise. It's in feeling heard, having a safe resource, and knowing someone has your back."
Mentorloop has changed Allison’s role as well. When she joined, her sole focus was the mentorship program. Implementing Mentorloop, she says, allowed her own role to scale, and she now oversees StartOut’s accelerator, incubator, and Academy too.
"Relaunching on Mentorloop has been completely transformational, not just for the mentoring program, but for us as an organisation levelling up our tech and impact."
After more than two years, Allison points to something less obvious than any one feature:
"I've loved having a direct line to your product team. When it's not a gigantic company, we get to work with you and have direct lines to your product managers, and it allows for such incredible creativity and innovation."
Now on Mentorloop Enterprise and heading into their third year, StartOut is looking at:
"Only great things await. I'm really excited to shift onto Enterprise and for all the growth we're going to have subsequently in our program."
For LGBTQ+ founders and allies, mentorship is more than advice — it’s a lifeline of connection, confidence, and being seen.
With Mentorloop, StartOut has turned a manual program into a scalable, inclusive, and transformational experience that changes both businesses and lives.
Ready to scale your mentoring program and deliver transformational impact?
Director of Education at StartOut
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"Mentorloop delivers a high-quality experience for a really reasonable price. It feels like it has a soul, not just an algorithm — and that makes a big difference.”
– Director of Education at StartOut
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