Our Mentor Spotlight series highlights the incredible contributions of Innovation UBC's mentor network to our venture community. We're privileged to work with a community of more than 250 mentors — entrepreneurs, operators, and industry leaders from across Vancouver and BC's innovation ecosystem — who generously invest their time, expertise, and insights to help early-stage founders navigate uncertainty, build confidence, and move their ventures forward. Through these spotlights, we're proud to share the stories of and celebrate the people behind that guidance.
In this spotlight, we are thrilled to introduce you to Thibaud Bastian. Thibaud has mentored with Innovation UBC since August 2024 and brings a pharmacist's perspective, shaped by both the clinical and business sides of healthcare, to the founders he works with.
Meet Thibaud Bastian
What experiences or areas of expertise do you bring to the table?
I'm a pharmacist by training with a background in scientific affairs, and I've seen the healthcare sector from both the business side and the clinical side. That dual lens has given me a real sense of how complex the healthcare system actually is, and how that complexity shapes the way a founder needs to build and pitch their solution within it.
What's a moment from your time mentoring that has stuck with you?
What's stuck with me is realizing how much guiding others has given back in ways that go beyond my own career. Reflecting on my journey through mentoring, I've found myself thinking: who knows, I might end up making a venture myself one day. Working closely with founders and other mentors has kept me open to that idea, always on the lookout for good examples wherever I find them, whether in the ventures, the founders, or the mentors around me.
How has being a mentor shaped or surprised you?
Mentoring has sharpened how I think about timing: asking the right question at the right moment, rather than just having the right answer. Part of my role is helping founders enter a genuinely complex system, like healthcare, and speeding up how quickly they understand it well enough to shape their solution around it.
What's a pattern you keep seeing in early-stage ventures, and what role do you think mentorship plays in helping founders work through it?
A pattern I see often, especially in healthcare ventures, is founders having to work with far less funding and budget than a big company would, which forces them to prioritize ruthlessly, figuring out which milestone actually needs to be hit next just to keep the venture moving since they can't simply hire their way through problems. I see mentorship as a way to speed that process up: connecting founders to the right conversations and the right people at the right time, and helping with customer discovery so they're asking the right questions before they've burned through their limited runway.
What's keeping you busy or bringing you joy outside of work and mentorship?
I'm an avid cyclist. I ride the route from Vancouver to Whistler and I'm already preparing for other long rides on the horizon.
Connect with Thibaud on LinkedIn.
Interested in mentoring early-stage ventures at Innovation UBC? Learn more.
