A SaaS company scales a mentoring culture through hypergrowth

About the company

A B2B infrastructure software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices in London and Singapore. After closing a Series C in early 2023, the company went from 380 to 780 employees in 18 months, hiring aggressively across engineering, sales, and customer success. Fast growth solved the headcount problem. It created a different one: in a company where half the employees had been there less than a year, nobody knew who to learn from or how to find them.

The challenge: scaling without losing the culture

Priya joined the company when the headcount was around 200 people. By the time the Series C closed, her team was scrambling to keep up. "We hired 200 people in the first eight months after the raise. On paper that's an incredible achievement. In practice, half of your company suddenly doesn't know how anything works, who the right person is to ask, or why certain decisions were made the way they were."

Onboarding covered the basics. But onboarding cannot teach culture. It cannot replicate the accidental hallway conversation where a new engineer learns from a founding team member why a particular technical bet was made three years ago. At 780 people spread across three time zones, those conversations were not happening organically anymore.

Priya's team ran a quick internal survey. The top two things employees said they were missing: access to senior knowledge and connections outside their immediate team. Both pointed to the same gap. "We needed a structured way to make those relationships happen, because they were no longer happening by accident."

"We tried to launch a mentoring program internally once before, with a Google Form and a shared spreadsheet. It lasted about six weeks before it collapsed under its own administrative weight. We knew we needed a platform that would take that operational burden completely off our hands."

The solution: four tracks, one platform

The team launched four distinct mentoring program tracks through RandomCoffee, each designed for a different growth challenge.

• New hire integration. Employees in their first 90 days were automatically enrolled and matched with a peer from a different team who had been at the company for at least 18 months. The program was configured with a closed audience synced to the HRIS, updating automatically as new hires joined.
• Leadership pipeline. Individual contributors identified as high-potential were matched with senior leaders outside their reporting line for a six-month structured mentoring cycle. Intake surveys captured the specific skill gap each mentee wanted to address.
• Cross-geo connection. Teams across Austin, London, and Singapore were matched across time zones to reduce the growing sense that remote offices operated as separate companies. Sessions were asynchronous-first, with a shared agenda template provided in the welcome email.
• Reverse mentoring. Senior leaders, including two C-suite members, were enrolled as mentees and matched with junior employees from engineering and customer success. The stated goal: help leadership understand the day-to-day reality of the company's fastest-growing teams.

All four tracks ran simultaneously from the same admin interface. Priya's team managed the full program in an estimated three hours per week, primarily reviewing dashboard data and sending targeted Broadcasts to specific cohorts.

"One thing I did not expect was the reaction from senior leaders. Our CTO told me that his reverse mentoring sessions were the most useful 45 minutes of his week. He was hearing directly from engineers about friction points in the developer experience that had never surfaced in any all-hands or survey. That kind of signal is worth more than any engagement score."

The numbers that mattered

Six months into the program, the team ran its standard biannual eNPS survey. The score had moved from 24 to 34, a 40% relative improvement. The two items that improved most: "I feel I have access to the knowledge I need to do my job well" and "I feel connected to people outside my immediate team."

The new hire track showed an even cleaner result: 90-day voluntary turnover dropped by 22% compared to the cohort hired six months earlier, before the program launched. Priya attributes this directly to the peer matching structure. "When someone has a real relationship with a company veteran before their first 90 days are up, they are far less likely to feel lost. And feeling lost is why people leave early."

The team is now planning a fifth track for the next fiscal year: a cross-company program connecting employees with key customer contacts, using RandomCoffee to structure and run what they are calling their Customer Empathy Initiative.

"We went from a program that died in a spreadsheet to four parallel programs running across three continents, maintained by one person spending a few hours a week. That is what the right infrastructure enables. The relationships are human. The platform just makes sure they actually happen."