Mentors selecting mentees: The effects of founder characteristics and startup mentor motivations.

Startup mentoring is widely recognized as a crucial service for founders in accelerators. However, mentors are a scarce resource and only support a small proportion of the startups that solicit their services. In this paper, we propose that startup mentors select potential mentees based on indicators of competence and relationship quality. Using a conjoint experiment, we examine the extent to which startups' external recognition and founders' entrepreneurial experience serve as indicators of competence, and coachability and gender concordance serve as indicators of relationship quality, and how these factors influence mentors' willingness to mentor. Additionally, based on self-determination theory, we test hypotheses about how mentors' motivational dispositions shape their responses to founders' attributes. In line with our hypotheses, we find that intrinsic mentoring motivations buffers against lower relationship quality indicators whereas prosocial mentoring motivation buffers against lower competence indicators.