Angel investor Dave McClure has added a roster of mentors and advisors to the team at his recently launched seed fund/incubator 500 Startups: a group he’s decided to call (not surprisingly) 500 Mentors. Although there aren’t actually 500 people on the list, it’s a fairly impressive collection of talent that McClure says will be available to help the startups he’s investing in, some of which include Foodspotting and Flowtown. The mentors include Google’s “open advocate” Chris Messina, Josh Elman of Twitter, Slideshare CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha and Hunter Walk of YouTube.
Playing on the recent AngelGate furor — in which McClure played a role after being singled out for mention in super-angel Ron Conway’s leaked email on the topic — the startup investor described the mentor team as “a super-secret society of powerful tech-heads [that is] gathering their forces even as we speak, coming together with a shared mission of world domination — er, no, wait, we mean souped-up startup support.” McClure said that while many of the mentors come from the Bay Area, others come from a range of cities, including Seattle, Boston, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Vancouver, British Columbia.
The mentors will be available for one-on-one discussions as well as presentations and advice, and some will even be working from 500 Startups headquarters, he said. McClure also named another group of “venture advisors” that is much smaller, including Brady Forrest of O’Reilly Radar, Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, Dave Schappell of TeachStreet, Sean Ellis of Startup Marketing and Hiten Shah of KISSMetrics. The full list of mentors is embedded below.
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