In this promotional talk, Ozan Sonmez outlines the Brutally Honest Mentor (BHM) ecosystem, a comprehensive support platform for startup founders and aspiring angel investors. The program offers curated video playlists covering practical startup skills such as fundraising, pitching, storytelling, and team building. Leveraging a vast global mentor network spanning the US, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Turkey, and the Far East, BHM connects founders with experienced mentors and peers. The initiative includes a Founders Club—a Y‑Combinator‑style community where founders help each other—and an Angels Club that educates newcomers to angel investing, facilitates deal sharing, and clarifies legal and economic nuances. BHM also acts as a connector to incubators and accelerators, interviewing program managers and linking eligible founders to suitable programs through government, NGO, and technopark channels. The talk concludes with invitations to engage via the website, social media, and upcoming events.
Chapters
So, the Brutally Honest Mentor, what are we going to give you? First and foremost, we talked about this before, we care about making you better, making the founders better. And we have designed a few things to be able to do that. One, there will be some videos and playlists that you'll be seeing With our experience, what we think should be doing, tips and tricks, how to fundraise, how to pitch better, how to build a storyline better, how to find team members. So things around building your startup, getting it to a more successful stage. That's what we will be sharing. Me and our colleagues from around the world will be sharing that. The second thing is the global network. As you've seen in our intro video, we have a huge experience and a huge network. I think that differentiates us from a lot of people. I don't know many mentors that are this connected in this side of the world, through US, through Middle East, through Europe, through Turkey, through Africa, even to Far East. So we have a lot of people that can help you, that we can reach out, and from time to time we're going to give you the opportunity to meet them. So that you can also understand what they're coming from, how they're different, how you can scale. Scaling is a big part of what we will be covering. You can scale geographically, you can scale vertically in different products, and every one of those has different challenges. So we'll try to help you with scale. Another part of critical importance to us is we don't know everything, and we know we don't know everything, but there is a founder that knows something that you're needing. We have a huge network of founders, and through events, through conferences, through a lot of opportunities that we will be doing in our own work, we're going to introduce you to these founders. And we're building a founders club where founders will help founders get better. This is very important. This is one of the differentiating factors of what we want to do.
You can call it kind of a Y Combinator-style community where The founders will need more founders to connect to, and not just advisors and mentors and investors. The third piece is the Angels Club. We don't want to be an angel investment association or angel investment club. What we want to do is bring people who are interested in this new asset class of angel investing and help them communicate better, help them share deals. Help them understand the differences in different economies, help them understand the legalities, and help them understand how to better communicate with founders.
We are investors in multiple teams, multiple startups as well, so we have been in both ends of the world. We're in the same boat with angels and founders, so we can translate that language. One other thing that we will be very looking forward to build is the connected network of incubators, accelerators, so that if you are a founder that's eligible, that's going forward, and your vertical is very important to an accelerator and they create a program, we'll try to connect you. So we will be interviewing a lot of incubation managers, a lot of accelerator programs, a lot of systems and supports that are offered to founders. Through government organizations, NGOs, and technoparks. So you'll be having a lot of content as well as a lot of mentorship if you want. You can connect us through our website and through our social media channels, and then hope to see you in one of the conferences or events or wherever we're going to have some impact. So take care. May the Force be with you.
