ElevAsian

About

Andrew Goldberg has decades of experience providing entrepreneurship training, mentoring, peer-to-peer learning, and small business ecosystem capacity building to help Asian and all underserved entrepreneurs and business owners start, stabilize, and build successful businesses. Prior to founding ElevAsian he was the director of development at the Asian American Civic Association (AACA), where he created the Asian Business Training & Mentorship Program. Previously he advised numerous nonprofits on fundraising strategy, which included securing seed funding for a client that has become a multimillion dollar nonprofit. He was the national program director of Boston University's InnerCity Entrepreneurs (now Interise), founded an international IT/telecom and publishing enterprise and was the Latin American trade expert for Massport. He earned his B.A. from Bowdoin College and M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He speaks Spanish and Portuguese.

The purpose of the ElevAsian Cohort & Mentorship Program is to provide early-stage entrepreneurs and established business owners with opportunities to develop and improve their operational skills and access resources and professional networks, while receiving social/emotional support. The Program provides numerous real-world opportunities and scenarios to learn from our instructors, who are MBA faculty and successful entrepreneurs, mentors, and each other. An important part of The Program is community building. Our quarterly social networking events, which are hosted and catered by alumni, consistently sell out, which underscores the need to feel like they belong to a community of people in similar circumstances and facing similar challenges.

The Program Is delivered online and meets bi-monthly. The online feature makes the program as convenient as possible for busy entrepreneurs. The class pace provides ample time between classes to take what they are learning to run their businesses more efficiently.  We start each class by going around the table and updating each other on developments since the previous class, which builds interest in each other’s ventures and creates a collegial sense of accountability to each other.

Rather than read case studies of large corporations that are for the most part irrelevant to early-stage ventures, participants are asked to make mini-case presentations in which they use their businesses as the focus of the case study. Presenters are selected by the instructors or self-select based on the alignment of the issues facing their businesses with the class topic, which creates rich real world learning opportunities. Mentors team up with their mentees and instructors to develop presentations, which often go through multiple iterations to maximize learning opportunities. An exciting aspect of the program is presenters find teachable opportunities during their mini-case presentations, which further enriches the learning experience.

The Program provides a safe space for participants to pivot from working in their businesses to working on them. No direct competitors are admitted to a cohort and everything discussed during the program is treated as strictly confidential. As participants feel more comfortable with the instructors and each other they begin to talk about their challenges and struggles more candidly. This is one of the greatest benefits of The Program because most don't have investors, boards of directors, or partners to hold them accountable.