His brother had ADHD and an idea. He turned it into a Superpower
Northeastern University grad Max Sussman spent much of his senior year helping his neurodivergent brother start a mentoring business.
Max Sussman jumped at the chance to turn his brother’s fledgling mentorship idea into a full-fledged startup.
That opportunity came during his senior year at Northeastern University, when his brother Jake asked for his help starting a business.
Before the COVID pandemic, Max’s brother Jake Sussman launched Superpower Mentors, an online platform that links adult mentors with students who need support with the transition into middle school, high school or college. What makes the mentorship program unique is that both mentors and mentees share the same learning differences.
Diagnosed with ADHD as a child, Jake found students in need of mentoring through speaking engagements in which he shared his story of overcoming his learning difference and attending college.
“Parents would come up to him and say, ‘Do you work with kids?’” says Max, who graduated from Northeastern in 2023. “Your experience is what they need. You’ve lived what they’re living right now.”
Then the pandemic hit and connecting with clients in person became impossible.
“He was working through some of his biggest challenges while I was in my last year, so we teamed up,” Max says. “It was the perfect time. I spent the last year while I was at Northeastern working on the company.”
With help from late-night Zoom calls, Max and Jake built a partnership that played to each brother’s strengths. Jake is the founder, president and face of the company, sharing his story and the company’s mission to empower neurodiverse thinkers to succeed. Max is CEO, handling the logistics and managing the team of employees.
“My number one job is to create an environment where Jake is as successful as possible sharing our story,” Max says. “I create the operation behind the story that makes us so powerful.”
Taking a leap into a fledgling business with his brother may have been a gamble, but it was one that Max felt prepared to take. His education at Northeastern, he says, made him unafraid of investing time and energy into something he cared about, even when there’s a chance it won’t go as expected.
“Northeastern allowed me to unapologetically try,” he says. “There were so many opportunities to be successful, so many opportunities to explore different avenues of what interested me.”
At Northeastern, Max was deeply engaged with the Entrepreneurs Club and cultivated relationships with faculty that continue to this day. One professor, visiting at Northeastern when Max was a student, checks with Max periodically to see how the business is doing.
“That’s the type of support that Northeastern fosters,” says Max.
Jake’s college degree is in public relations, but there were times in his life when he didn’t think he’d ever attend college, much less graduate. When he was in sixth grade, a teacher told him he would never be successful. After that, he attended schools that specifically support students with learning differences.
He even wrote a poem about how that teacher’s comment stuck with him and dealt a blow to his confidence. A performance of the poem went semi-viral, which inspired Jake to start Superpower Mentors.
What he wanted to address was the high college dropout rate for students with ADHD. Early on in his own college career, he noticed that many classmates from his high school for neurodivergent students had dropped out of college.
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When the brothers partnered up, Superpower Mentors was slowly growing. Then the pandemic hit, keeping students at home. Business boomed, Jake says.
“Everything changed,” he says. “I went from five to 30 kids in three months that I was personally mentoring.”
After hiring an additional mentor Jake could match mentees and mentors with shared experiences. While Jake can share his experience with ADHD, not every student with a learning difference has ADHD. Others might have dyslexia, dysgraphia, autism or difficulty speaking.
When Max came on board he streamlined mentor onboarding and recruiting, making it more efficient for more mentors to get involved.
The team has facilitated more than 14,500 sessions for 800 mentees from ages 10 to 25. They rigorously screen mentors and require them to complete a certification course.
“We have mentors from all over the world,” Jake says. “All different types of people from NASA engineers to professional artists, who all have what these kids have.”
For Max, the opportunity to both support his brother’s vision and help other neurodivergent learners to succeed is something more gratifying than he ever imagined in a career.
“I studied entrepreneurship, but this was never something that I thought was going to happen,” he says. “It’s blossomed into an extraordinary responsibility to impact real people and real relationships all because of something that my brother experienced.”
