Tina Fox is a dynamic entrepreneur, award-winning business leader, and passionate advocate for growth and mentorship. With over 20 years of corporate experience and a decade of entrepreneurial ventures, Tina is driven by a relentless pursuit of excellence and a belief in the power of continuous learning.
Her journey began at a young age when she won her first sales contest in the 6th grade, and it has since evolved into a career marked by innovation, resilience, and leadership.
Tina ventured into business development and excelled in competitive industries. Along the way, she became a mentor and champion for others in business (particularly women), founding a group to support female professionals that ultimately merged with Women on Course in 2019.
Tina founded TERN Mentoring in 2021, a company dedicated to empowering individuals through mentorship, education, and authentic connection. TERN Mentoring reflects Tina’s deep belief in lifelong learning, wisdom exchange, and the transformative power of mentorship in accelerating personal and professional growth. Through this Ed-Tech platform, she helps others share their stories, expand their networks, and live out their legacies.
Company: TERN Mentoring
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Tina Fox: TERN Mentoring was born at the intersection of purpose, connection, and action. What began as volunteering time and talent quickly evolved into a mission to reimagine mentorship, not as an exclusive club or a corporate perk, but as something every student deserves and every professional can give. Founder and CEO Tina Fox saw a persistent gap while serving her alma mater: decades after being a first-generation college student herself, students were still searching for the same guidance and connection she once craved. The need hadn’t changed. The opportunity to meet it had.
With an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for people, I founded TERN to make mentorship accessible to all, to democratize it, simplify it, and bring mentorship to the masses. TERN isn’t just an EdTech platform, it’s a human-centered movement. You can’t just throw an app at mentorship. You need real connection. You need intention. While technology powers the logistics, it’s the people who power the purpose.
TERN Mentoring brings more people to the mentorship table, from universities who need a better way, students unsure where to start, and alumni wondering if they’re ready to give back. We remove the barriers that often keep people from engaging: Where do I find a mentor or mentee? What’s the etiquette? Am I even qualified? TERN answers these questions with simplicity, flexibility, and encouragement. TERN’s platform makes room for all levels of participation, no ivory towers, just open doors.
And the results ripple outward. Students gain confidence, internships, job offers, and, most importantly, a sense of being seen and heard. Mentors reconnect with their purpose, offering wisdom from their own paths while gaining fresh insight from a new generation. We call this quantum giving, impact that multiplies beyond the platform into the real world.
My journey is as multifaceted as the mission I lead. As a Chinese American and military dependent, I grew up across cultures and continents, from Taiwan to Hawaii to the mainland U.S. Each relocation (“PCS,” in military terms) honed my adaptability, my love of learning, and my deep belief in human connection. Being new taught me how to ask questions, how to listen, and how to belong anywhere. These skills shaped her career and her calling.
With a communications degree and 22 years of success in business development, spanning Med Tech start-ups and Fortune 500s, I always led with people in mind. TERN was in the making before I knew to build it. Every step of my career led me here, to a mission that feels more like a movement.
Today, Tina is not just running a company; she’s living her legacy. TERN Mentoring connects generations, breaks barriers, and brings mentorship to those who need it most. “Mentorship should never be a luxury,” she says. At TERN, we’re making it a standard, for everyone.”
What emerging technology trends do you believe will have the most profound impact in the next 5-10 years?
Tina Fox: TERN lives at the intersection of technology and people, because we believe we both need to move forward. As the world becomes increasingly connected and data-driven, the question isn’t whether technology will shape the future of education and mentorship; it’s how we ensure it does so with humanity at the center.
In the next 5–10 years, I believe AI will have the most profound impact, particularly in the areas of personalization, predictive analytics, and scaled connections. At TERN, we’re excited to explore how artificial intelligence can enhance the mentor-matching process, analyzing not just resumes, online profiles, and majors but deeper human elements like values, communication styles, and goals to create more meaningful and effective connections.
Beyond AI, other technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and behavioral analytics will revolutionize how we understand learner needs and adapt mentorship and career development experiences accordingly. Immersive tech, like augmented and virtual reality, may also play a role, especially in helping students build soft skills, conduct virtual job shadows, or engage in mentorship across time zones and cultures.
That said, while these innovations are exciting, our compass remains unchanged: technology should serve people, not replace them. Mentorship is rooted in human connection, empathy, and shared experience, things no algorithm can replicate. The most impactful EdTech solutions will amplify our ability to connect, not those that try to automate empathy.
At TERN, we’re committed to leveraging emerging tech to broaden access, deepen connection, and create data-informed pathways that help every student feel seen, supported, and set up for success.
Can you share a specific technological breakthrough from your company that has the potential to reshape your industry?
Tina Fox: At TERN Mentoring, our most significant technological breakthrough is the development of our proprietary mentor-mentee matching algorithm, designed specifically for the nuanced and deeply human process of mentorship.
Unlike traditional platforms that rely solely on basic filters like major, graduation year, or job title, our system integrates behavioral data, communication preferences, values alignment, and long-term goals to match mentees and mentors in a way that fosters deeper, more enduring connections. Without fail, we often hear from our matches, “I don’t know what magic you have in your algorithm, but we found so many things we connect on. It’s amazing!”
We are excited to continue evolving our platform and test how AI and machine learning can enhance this matching process even further, predicting successful outcomes and continuously learning from user feedback and engagement patterns. This approach has the potential to reshape the mentorship landscape, particularly in higher education, by making mentorship scalable and personal. It ensures that institutions can serve thousands of students without sacrificing the quality of connection, and it opens the door to equitable access for all learners, regardless of school size, background, or geography.
We see this as more than a tool; it’s a bridge between people and possibilities. As mentorship continues to gain traction as a vital component of student success and alumni engagement, our platform is setting a new standard for how technology and humanity can partner to transform lives.
How do you approach innovation while balancing the need for practicality and market readiness?
Tina Fox: At TERN, innovation always starts with purpose. We don’t innovate for the sake of novelty. We innovate to solve real problems that have been overlooked for far too long. In the mentorship space, that means removing barriers to access, simplifying participation, and strengthening connections between students and professionals in meaningful, measurable ways.
As an EdTech company, we’re constantly exploring new technologies, from AI-driven mentor matching to predictive engagement analytics, but we balance those explorations with a deep commitment to practicality and market readiness. Our university partners need solutions they can implement quickly, integrate easily, and trust to deliver results, not just experiments in a sandbox. At TERN, we serve 18-80+ (years of age) and our user experience needs to be intuitive, simple, and not get in the way of the interpersonal space we are creating and fostering.
So, we take a “people-first, tech-enabled” approach: we listen closely to our users, build iteratively, and validate each step with feedback from students, mentors, and institutional stakeholders. If the solution doesn’t improve experience, scale access, or drive stronger outcomes, we go back to the drawing board.
Ultimately, we see innovation not as a product feature, but as a responsibility to make mentorship more accessible, more impactful, and more inclusive for the next generation of learners and leaders.
What challenges do you face in integrating cutting-edge technology into existing business models?
Tina Fox: One of our greatest challenges in integrating cutting-edge technology is striking the right balance between innovation and institutional adoption. In the world of higher education, where high-impact practices like mentorship is often underfunded, decentralized, or dependent on volunteers, introducing new technology can feel like a heavy lift. Many universities are cautious with implementation, and rightfully so. They want tools that are secure, accessible, and immediately impactful, not just promising prototypes.
At TERN, we solve for this by designing our technology to enhance human connection, not replace it. Our platform integrates seamlessly into existing mentorship frameworks or helps institutions build new ones from the ground up, without adding complexity. We also face the ongoing challenge of showing that tech can serve equity, by making mentorship more accessible to non-traditional students, community colleges, and trade schools, not just flagship universities.
Internally, we’re mindful of building tools that scale without losing the personal, human-centered nature of mentorship. That means being intentional with AI, using it to improve matches and engagement, but never to automate engagement.
The key is building trust, both with our users and our institutional partners. When people see that the tech works because it understands people, not in spite of them, that’s when integration truly takes root.
How do you foster a culture of innovation within your organization to stay ahead in the tech race?
Tina Fox: At TERN, we foster a culture of innovation by staying relentlessly curious and purpose-driven. We’re not chasing trends, we’re chasing impact. Our team is constantly asking: How can we remove barriers to mentorship? How can we make connections easier, deeper, and more meaningful?
We stay ahead in the tech race by building a team that values both creativity and empathy. We intentionally bring together educators, technologists, and mission-aligned advisors who challenge assumptions, experiment boldly, and stay focused on real-world results. Everyone at TERN is encouraged to bring ideas forward, test them quickly, and learn from what works and what doesn’t.
But innovation at TERN isn’t just about what we build, it’s about who we build for. We maintain close, ongoing dialogue with students, mentors, and university partners so we’re never innovating in a vacuum. Their feedback isn’t an afterthought; it’s a catalyst. We also believe in creating space to think big. From exploring AI-driven mentor matching to expanding into community colleges and trade schools, our innovation is anchored in the belief that mentorship should be accessible to all, and that the right technology can help make that a reality.
