A Deliberate Act of Ecosystem Stewardship
For the past two years, nVentures participated as lead mentor across three structured bootcamp programmes — co-facilitated with the Sri Lanka Association for Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
30 startups outside our thesis were selected to improve their overall business. The premise: the same quality of strategic guidance our portfolio companies receive should be accessible to a wider cohort of founders, regardless of whether a cheque will follow.
This is the final report. It covers 25 survey respondents (response rate of 83%) and goes deeper into what worked, what didn’t, and what we should do differently.
Survey Summary
Net Promoter Score: +60
Founders were asked how likely they were to recommend nVentures as a high-value resource — on a standard 0–10 scale. 17 of 25 were Promoters. Two were Detractors, both offering specific, constructive feedback rather than broad dissatisfaction.
An NPS of +60 puts us in the top quartile of global accelerator programmes. The score reflects active advocacy, not passive satisfaction — founders who rated 9 or 10 would genuinely recommend this to other founders. That matters more to us than the number itself.
Accessibility and Actionability
Two dimensions, rated 1–5. Accessibility: How easy was it to reach us? Actionability: Did the guidance feel specific and applicable — or generic?
The accessibility score is the one we’re most proud of. Making senior team members genuinely available — not as a formal programme feature, but as a default. The data suggests it’s the thing founders value most.
The actionability gap is the one we take most seriously. The two lowest scores both pointed at the same thing: we went deep on strategy, but not deep enough on the specific vertical they were operating in. That’s a solvable problem.
Investor Endorsement: 92%
We asked each founder a direct question: If nVentures were investing in your space, would you want us as your investor? It’s a meaningful proxy — these founders had no financial incentive to say yes.
The two ‘Maybe’ responses reflected caution about their own business model scalability — not a negative view of us as a partner. No one said no. That’s the number we’ll keep coming back to.
Where the Mentorship Actually Landed
We coded open-ended responses across all 25 founders. Some responses contributed to multiple themes — the totals reflect that.
ICP & Market Validation came out on top. Founders were challenged on who their ideal customer actually was. The most common pattern: founders had built for a customer who wasn’t quite right, and the process of defining ICP precisely was the shift that sharpened everything else.
Investor Readiness ranked second. This was particularly valuable for first-time founders — understanding how an investor actually reads a data room, what traction signals matter, and how to build a narrative rather than just a pitch deck.
Network and Introductions were described as “timely and useful” — not just valuable in principle, but timed well relative to where each company was.
Mindset and Resilience appeared more than we expected. Founders valued conversations that normalised rejection, reframed what success looks like, and gave them language to think about wealth and progress on their own terms.
Pricing Strategy produced some of the highest-impact individual outcomes — including a founder who raised their subscription price on our advice and saw subscriptions increase. Counterintuitive pricing guidance works because most early founders are underpricing out of fear, not economics.
Three Things We’re Changing
These are grounded directly in the data above. Each is prioritised by estimated impact and how quickly it can be implemented.
1. Introduce Domain Expert Mentors
We’ll partner with sector specialists in agri-tech, fintech, and health tech for supplementary deep-domain sessions. This directly addresses the top two gap themes and closes the most frequently cited shortcoming in the programme.
2. Add a Pitch Practice Session
One structured pitch session with structured feedback per cohort. Its absence was an explicit unmet expectation. It’s low-cost and high-impact — there’s no good reason it wasn’t there from the start.
3. Track Longitudinal Outcomes
We want to know what happens to these companies 12–24 months after the programme ends. Revenue growth. Fundraising outcomes. Team expansion. We can’t claim programme impact without measuring it over time.
The Case for Doing This Again
The knowledge and networks we’ve built as an active venture capital firm have value beyond our portfolio. This programme is one way of deploying that value — and the data shows it’s working.
Sri Lanka’s startup ecosystem is maturing. What it needs is more institutional knowledge flowing freely to founders who are ready to act on it.
We’ll keep going.
Methodology & Disclaimer
This report is based on a structured post-programme survey administered to founders who participated in one of three bootcamps, co-facilitated by the Sri Lanka Association for Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) between 2024 and 2025.
Of 30 startups selected across the three cohorts, 20 completed the full programme. Survey responses were collected from 25 founders in February 2026, representing an 83% response rate among completers.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) was calculated using the standard Bain & Company methodology: respondents scoring 9–10 are classified as Promoters, 7–8 as Passives, and 0–6 as Detractors. NPS equals the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors.
Mentor Accessibility and Advice Actionability were each rated on a 1–5 Likert scale; one respondent did not answer the Actionability question, giving an effective sample of n=24 for that measure.
Open-ended responses were thematically coded by the nVentures team; responses citing “N/A,” “None,” or equivalent were excluded from gap analysis. Some responses were coded to multiple themes, so thematic totals exceed 100%.
The survey was conducted anonymously; respondents were informed that their identities would not be linked to their answers at any stage of collection or analysis.