YouSaid · the spoken record

Janice Omadeke

lines on the record: 36
first: 2025-09-18
most recent: 2025-09-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“the individual to fit and meet you where you are. That's just not human condition. And the more that you can stay open to receiving mentorship, open to receiving wisdom from all sources, right? Like not just a mentor, but just anywhere that you find that educational moment. Take it. Take it and run with it and study it and do what you can integrate that into your life and you will be unstoppable easily.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know 75% of what you need to do already your gut is telling you Do not build an emotional dependency on your mentors. Your mentors are not a place for your codependency. They are not a replacement for a parent, let's say. Your mentor is there to support, advise, and guide you to become the best version of yourself. So don't lose sight of that when you're building those mentor relationships. Make sure that when you're approaching a mentor relationship, you have other avenues of building connection and get very clear on the objective of what you want to work on with that individual and be okay with the relationship lasting three meetings, three years, 30 years, who knows, but be open to allowing that relationship to run its natural course, however long that may be, instead of always trying to force”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am thoroughly enjoying being the one holding the microphone and kind of holding the spotlight to other founders and leaders right now, but that entrepreneurship bug, I'm sure we will talk again.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Evaluating how I can use those strengths to amplify the businesses that are optimizing other people's way of living and not just in the traditional kind of going to mentorship to another talent management company. There's a lot of diversity of thought and perspective that is kind of untapped powder. So for me now, having mastered that particular space, I'm eager to learn again. I want to get into a new industry. I want to continue expanding because that's that neuroplasticity. It's hard to shake.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Globally now, I can't sit with it and I can't live with it. And so I am now actively interested in collaborating with builders and visionaries who are really going to co-create the world that I want to live in. I'm very motivated by that. How can I use this experiential scar tissue as an entrepreneur to amplify those that need a voice and that takes multiple forms that looks like being an angel investor for black woman-led businesses and providing that mentorship and information of, okay, you know, I started a business under this person's and first administration. So here's how I did it. Here are some ways that, you know, you may be able to get like grants and other opportunities, but don't lose focus. Don't let that distract you. That's an important piece of it. But then also in, you know, philanthropic endeavors where I choose to work in the future.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I started the mentor method, we were at the beginning of this current, what we'll call a president's first turn. And I've been reflecting on Completely different person as time does. That fire in seeing the bigotry and the hate, the misinformation, the intentional emotional abuse. Is being distributed.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For quite some time, and I think also part of me was very ego driven of like let's get that next round, like let's go like, why not? And everything inside me told me to explore an alternate route. And so after that talk to my mentor and business partner, Joseph Kopser, who has been instrumental in every step of the way of this business since we connected in 2021. And he was like, trust your gut. Follow the process. He had gone through his own acquisition process several years ago. I spoke to several CEOs in the Austin community about some of the indicators I was seeing and what my gut was saying. And everyone was very supportive of that decision because they had also gone through it themselves in earlier chapters of their lives before I knew them. So I felt very empowered. It was the right thing to do. So started exploring relationships with our strategics and other opportunities.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same voice that told me to build it told me it was time to let it go. So it was 2022 we had just graduated from TechSars and continued through the fundraising process and then July 2022 I was at happy hour with a friend, fellow entrepreneur and there's nothing better than being able to talk about pipeline and deals and what you're going through with a fellow early stage entrepreneur in the trenches. So what's typically an enjoyable conversation for me in 2022 turned into my very first panic attack when I started discussing the future of the mentor method. I'd never felt that before. So Venmode, my friend, quickly got to my car after 20 minutes of kind of the AC and calming myself down. I just said, okay, I surrender. I'm hearing the wisdom. I get it. Entrepreneurs were stubborn. We are a stubborn lot. So I had ignored that voice.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Proud and just based on that letter alone, I know that she saw it. There was so much guidance and wisdom as if she knew seven years later that I would randomly reread this, you know, at 37 in a very pivotal kind of turning point in my life that I'm in right now. And that's been just such a gift and almost a continuation of that origin story and like why I'm so passionate about advancing others and continuing to evolve in my career.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“X, Y, and Z. Think about these things. And I didn't know that she was seeing it because, you know, I'm on my laptop and I'm hustling and doing all of these things, but I never allowed myself to be seen as an entrepreneur in those moments because I just wanted to be her daughter. So I didn't know what she was picking up on. And so at that point, you know, reading it made me feel like I was catching on fire. So I just brought it home with me. I wasn't ready. And then about two months ago, I was just doing general spring cleaning and organizing. There was just a voice. similar to the voice I felt when I needed to start the mentor method that was just like, go read that letter again. Why not? Let's just see. You've grown a lot. Just read it. And so I did. And the synchronicity of it was just unparalleled where I think sometimes in those moments people can ask themselves, did I do the right thing? Did I prioritize my time accordingly? Am I making that individual?”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“made my grief somebody else's problem. I knew that was mine. And I knew that the people I had the opportunity to work with had their own things going on. So I never wanted to monopolize a situation, but I also didn't want to be one of those people that just self-sabotaged and just completely ignored the most detrimental thing in my life. mom passes pandemic happens i hadn't been home because it wasn't safe to fly i come back home september 2021 visit my dad and he tells me that my mom wrote me a letter that i didn't know about her last month or so with us and at the top it's labeled for janice and the mentor method and it's just one page front and back from a notebook and it's just the most detailed information of like well when you're stressed”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I stayed very curious about my own well-being. So the first thing I did was find a therapist. I also had a leadership coach. I let very few mentors know kind of what was going on. And thankfully, they shared their wisdom. So immediately found therapists and, you know, the power of journaling and just keeping track of how my body was responding to things and knowing when I was feeling flooded, like, okay, maybe I need to just work from my apartment and maybe today is just sending out the cold pitch deck emails for today. And then tomorrow, let's go out and do networking when I'm not necessarily in as much of a grief hole. But I really optimize the way that I worked with stakeholders and teams and advisors and business partners around that. And people that I worked with were understanding because I was always consistently professional. And I never.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Control. I promised myself that I couldn't save my own mother from that experience, but if I can help somebody else's child not feel that because they got connected to a mentor, which gave them a new career opportunity outside of where they're currently working or helped them see that there might be another team or opportunity where they can continue expanding, then I've at least done something to make the world a better place. So, mother passes, continue to grow.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't replicate it. And so since then, I really reflected on my mother's journey, and I've reflected on her experience, and it was baked into both the DNA of how I built the team for the mentor method, but also how I built out the product and how I've just operated as an entrepreneur. I saw her so afraid during her chemo process because her boss and the culture of her employer, she was in finance, even in her chemo appointments, she would still be on her laptop answering questions because she didn't want to lose her benefits in healthcare. And that was a heartbreaking thing for me to see. But then I also took that consideration into how employees experience work. That is a terrible and disgusting culture for somebody to be losing their life and still feel like they need to answer an email or be in a spreadsheet? Absolutely not. Within my sphere.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, absolutely, there's no doubt. So the way that mass challenge works, there were about 80 entrepreneurs whose businesses were chosen. And so the mentor method, and I was part of the top eight. So four days after my mom's passing, I was flying back to Austin because it was the finals. And we got our first win, the first big win, a $25,000 non-dilutive investment from Mass Challenge. And that win means the most to me more than anything because the only people who knew that I was suffering going through this emotional turmoil and the situation, managing director and just some members of the team that knew. So to have received that win and to see the joy on their faces and to just feel energetically.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a pivotal moment for me, our last conversation the night before. My siblings and I all took shifts because at this point we were doing at-home hospice and we all wanted kind of that one-on-one time with mom, right? So it was my turn. It was like three in the morning. And I just remember having this like whispering conversation with her of like, I'm going to do this. I'm sorry I didn't do it in time, but I'm going to do it just like keep watching basically. It was like keep watching.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was going back and forth between DC and Austin during that four month period of the program, making sure I could go to chemo appointments and I was still getting that quality time. At the same time, pitching the business continuing to grow, I don't have an explanation for the way it felt to see my star rising and my business starting to grow as my mother and the nexus. And the reason I even was empowered to do this, her health declining. It was something very motivating for me because I wanted at the time I didn't have a win outside of getting into math challenge. My parents were very much like, okay, we want you to do this, but also what is this? What is this risk? We had no idea that you were this entrepreneurial, right? And so I wanted like a massive win for her. I wanted her to just see it while she still could. And, you know, she passed away in August of 2018.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always try to find some type of movie analogy when I talk about this, but there isn't one. Someone who has loved and lost a core piece of themselves through a parent knows that there isn't an equivalent to it. You know, I used to call it my sort of Christian Bale dark night origin story. And in a way, yeah, it is. But it was really a strong motivator in reflecting on the power of what I was building and what it could do for an individual. So I get into mass challenge. I called my mom, asked for her blessing, and she said absolutely, this is what I immigrated for. Like you have to go. And so”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so at the end of 2017, my mom grew gravely ill, and then top of 2018, January 3rd, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer stage four. So we'd anticipated about four months based on what the surgeon said, but we were very fortunate and grateful to have had eight months before her passing.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I have 15 minutes of your time? I am too early for you to purchase this, just so you know, I'm not selling you yet. I know we're too early, but I know that I can come back and pitch you in a year, two years with your guidance, and that this really has legs. So if you can just give me some advice on why it will work, why it won't work. I promise you coming from defense contracting, I have a very thick skin. So if you think that this doesn't have legs or my baby is ugly, tell me why so I can fix it so that in the next several meetings we're building out that pipeline towards yeses, towards sponsorship, towards strategic partnerships and just over time coming in through the headspace of I want to learn from you, I want to listen. I want to hear what your experiences are. Why is your job so hard? Those sort of real questions without any other”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In twenty eighteen, I got accepted into the mass challenge accelerator. I made a very specific mass challenge list looking at previous sponsors, looking at partners, and looking at those who were in the mentor registry of where they were working, cross-reference that with HR leaders within those organizations, made a spreadsheet in my Google Doc so that I could go to specific mentors. I also cross-referenced with things like best places to work and wanted to make sure from a values perspective that I”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First set of customers, how they did it. If there were prospective customers that maybe we could collaborate, which is such a sweet thought now, looking back with that level of gumption, but that was my first set of questions.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or going enterprise. And I just wasn't sure which one I actually felt more passionate about the B2C, but quickly realized in talking to people in the similar space that B2B was the right way to go. And I said, thank you for that feedback, tested it myself. They were 100% right. So there were a lot of questions around what industry I should focus on because mentorship is just so broad. I didn't want to boil the ocean. I was really urgently seeking my beachhead market. Like where would I go first? So I was exploring ed tech in the university system from a B2B perspective, management consulting, of course, and various other places. So my questions were to leaders and CEOs that were dominating in those industries with their respective businesses, what their go-to-market strategies were, how they were communicating with their buyers, how long it took them to acquire their”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are my core differentiators? And why do I feel that I could take this forward? And how come other incumbents and other businesses haven't done it this way? And if they have, why did they fail? Why did they grow? Just kind of getting a sense of where the landmines were. So I could mentally prepare for what I was going to get into. From there, when I saw it had legs, and I was like, okay, let's continue taking this on. Then I started going into networking events. And my questions were around where else should I be spending my time? While I am technically classically trained in entrepreneurship from MIT, we all know there's a difference between a case study and actually getting into the arena. So what don't I know? At this point, I was still teetering the line of trying to decide between a B2C concept of going straight to consumer.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To this day, I still have several Google Docs with running lists by category, so individuals I hope to have the opportunity to learn from one day, companies that I hope to contribute to their growth using my strengths and backgrounds as I know that I will one day. And then there's also one of these are the problems I'm seeking to solve right now, broken out into different categories. Now at the time of the mentor method and building that, that was all I was thinking about. You know that feeling it's all consuming. So every question that I had, every thought that I had, every time I left my townhome in Old Town, Alexandria at that point was spent on learning how to move the mentor method to the next step. So my first set of questions weren't even to other entrepreneurs, but just what is the market? What are the incumbents doing?”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not quite. Knock white. Good reason to get out. But there was just something almost noxema refreshing feeling about being around her and the space to ask questions and not have to worry if they were dumb questions. It was just such an important season of my life. But that was the first and probably the only until I started venturing into entrepreneurship networking groups when I was still working nights and weekends on the mentor method. And it was essentially a PDF and a dream. That's where I really started meeting my mentors.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Her name was Amy and she was the creative director of the team I was on. So it was myself and then my manager and Amy. And I met her during the interview process at PWC. And she was so unapologetically herself. She practiced a high level of self-awareness and approachability, which I hadn't seen yet coming from defense contracting at that point.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Exactly. And this was around the time where Bumble, Tinder, was just blowing up. And I couldn't understand how I could theoretically meet someone for a larger relationship just by using my phone, yet I had to beg people and hunt them down in their offices to try to find mentorship. That felt way too hard and too difficult for me. And so looking at the market, seeing that there was space to make building meaningful connections accessible as it was in, say, the online dating space and the dating app space, to me, it felt like a no-brainer. Thankfully, I'd already studied entrepreneurship from MIT and so started following a lot of their process, but that's really how it started.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Space, I did find that it was extremely difficult to find mentorship. Oftentimes people would want to match me to the only underrepresented professional that had made it to the top. And that felt odd to me that a large corporation would take a high performing, over-eager, very moldable talent that I was in my early 20s and default to something that doesn't even matter in the long term landscape.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I myself had several Steve Job quotes in my dorm room and in various apartments of Follow Your Heart and Dreams and Do What You Love and everything. But I was also very intentional about wanting to pay off student loans and just be like strategic with it. And so when I had the idea for the mentor method, I was in year two of my strategic management graduate certification from Harvard in my disrupting technologies course. And the final project was to, similar to my upbringing, pick a problem, disrupt the industry. How would you do it and build out the complete business plan? Coming from defense contracting, which was predominantly the All Boys Club, and coming from management consulting, which was very similar, I was always eager to expand my learning in any way possible. And so within that...”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My parents having both immigrated from the Congo to the United States through college scholarships from missionaries. You know, learning to make it on your own, learning the importance of community, learning how to believe in yourself that even when things are hard, you will find a solution and one that builds a better life for yourself. Those are all transferable skills into entrepreneurship. And so seeing that across my parents and the communities in which they were a part of to me, when I had the idea for the mentor method or even in my earlier career days in management consulting and defense contracting, I always approached it with that headspace of this is a problem that I need to solve. And of course, I'll find a way to solve it.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hated the way that it felt on a rainy day or a snowy day in DC when you would wear jeans and then get on the bus and the bottom of your jeans were just not a comfortable feeling so I wanted to create some sort of device that you could clip your jeans and roll them up without taking up too much space in your backpack and then once you're back at school then you just unclip them and you're good to go without that feeling of wet denim around you”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What problem would it solve? Who would you sell it to? I mean, he would ask questions around not realizing what it was, but just what would be the go-to-market strategy? How big do you think the TAM actually is and things? And out of myself and my two siblings, they definitely were kind of rolling their eyes at it and weren't as enthused. But 11-year-old Janice was locked in. That was my favorite time of the day because I've always thought in an entrepreneurial space. I've always come from a space of empathy and wanting to help others. And the way that my brain would light up in solving those problems and getting that sort of dopamine response of, okay, I might be 11, but my contributions to the world could be much bigger than that if I really refine these concepts. That was extremely powerful.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being a proud daughter of immigrants, my parents always taught us to think about how we could amplify our lives and live as big as possible. And while my parents did face hardships, they always instilled the importance of education and problem solving and how you can continue to work to improve yourself. And so around the dinner table, my dad would ask myself and my two siblings to play this game of what was a problem that either you or your peers encountered at school or you saw on the bus home, wherever, that you would want to build a business around.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entrepreneurs were stubborn. We are a stubborn lot, and I think also part of me was very ego driven of like, let's get that next round. Like, let's go. Why not? And everything inside me told me to explore an alternate route.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you can just give me some advice on why it will work, why it won't work. I promise you coming from defense contracting, I have a very thick skin. So, if you think that this doesn't have legs or my baby is ugly, tell me why so I can fix it.”
2025-09-18 · Masters of Scale · How to find your next mentor, with Janice Omadeke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT