AAMA Taipei Cradle Program: A Group That Could Have Retired, Handing Over Craftsmanship in the Slowest Way

30-Second Overview: The AAMA Taipei Cradle Program is a rare existence in Taiwan: a startup mentorship program that does not invest, take equity, or charge tuition. Founded in 2012 by Hung-Tze Jang (詹宏志), publisher of Digital Times, and retired accounting consultant Charles Yen (顏漏有), it pairs seasoned executives with one growing entrepreneur for two years. It accepts only about twenty participants annually; after thirteen years, it has reached its fifteenth cohort, yet has accumulated names like Appier, Social Enterprise Stream, and Portaly. Its most counterintuitive feature is a choice: a group of people who could have retired to enjoy life chose the slowest, least scalable method to hand over the hard-to-articulate craft of "how to grow a company" to the next generation, without expecting anything in return.

Group photo of the 15th cohort selected entrepreneurs and mentors. Photo: AAMA Taipei Cradle Program official website (fair use editorial commentary).

The public's impression of the AAMA Taipei Cradle Program likely stops at the group photo published every June in Digital Times—a group of people squeezed together, making the hand gesture for the current cohort number. This "reveal moment" has not broken for thirteen years, but it has never been a brand everyone recognizes. It does not appear on the front pages as often as AppWorks or Meet Taipei; instead, it lives in the memories of people in the startup circle: a one-on-one, two-year, no-equity place¹.

To understand why it is strange, we must first look at how it started.

Beijing Did It Once; Taipei Was the Second Time

To trace where this model comes from, we must first dispel an easy misconception born from the name. The name AAMA comes from an Asian tech association established in Silicon Valley in 1979 (Asia America MultiTechnology Association), with global hubs in Silicon Valley, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, and Hong Kong². But the Silicon Valley parent body never had a "Cradle Program." Its core activities were traditional industry association affairs: annual conferences and monthly regular meetings³.

The two-year, one-on-one mentorship model was not the original design of 1979. It was "invented" in 2004 when Charles Yen was stationed in Beijing, transplanting Deloitte's internal corporate culture of "pairing new employees with a senior mentor" into the startup mentoring field⁴.

Chinese Yen’s own story is dramatic in itself. He spent thirty years in an accounting firm, serving as President of Deloitte Taiwan from 1995 to 2003. In 2004, he was sent to Beijing, where he expanded the team from 400 to 2,000 people⁵. This is someone who led a large team and saw the financials of countless companies. After retirement, he could have easily played golf or enjoyed time with grandchildren, but he chose the most time-consuming path of startup mentoring. And he had already done a Cradle Program once in Beijing; in 2009, he was even selected as China's "Entrepreneurship Philanthropist of the Year"⁶. Taipei was his second time bringing a model tested elsewhere back to his hometown.

When the same system was brought back to Taiwan, the personality it grew was quite different. According to reports, Charles Yen compared the differences between the two versions: the Beijing version was highly competitive, goal-oriented, carrying a flavor of hunting for opportunities; the Taipei version added more elements of companionship and sharing⁷. This is actually not hard to understand: the temperature of an institution is ultimately determined by the local people and culture. The same "seniors accompanying juniors" shifts from a competition to a support system when the soil changes. This makes Taipei's Cradle Program more than just a copy-paste of Beijing.

As for Hung-Tze Jang’s role, it is often misread as "co-inventor," but it is not. Hung-Tze Jang made it clear himself at the tenth anniversary: "When Principal Yen (Charles Yen) brought up this program, I thought it was a very good idea."⁸ It was Charles Yen who brought the idea, already tested in Beijing, to him. Hung-Tze Jang’s role was to endorse it and attach the exposure of the Digital Times media platform. One had the method, the other had the stage; their roles were complementary, leaving no record of ideological conflict⁹.

Hung-Tze Jang, taken at the 2009 Click Award, then Chairman of PChome and Citygroup (unrelated to AAMA directly, as AAMA was not yet established at that time). Photo: Rico Shen. License via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Slowest Way, Written in the System

In May 2012, when this program was officially established, it was not yet a formally registered organization. It was an experiment pieced together by Hung-Tze Jang and Charles Yen relying on their respective networks¹⁰. They brought in Ping Chu (朱平), Fang Cheng (方正), Youwei Fan (范有偉), Ronggui Zhang (張榮貴), Yiqiang Chen (陳一強), Jiancheng Pan (潘健成), Lifeng Jian (簡立峰), Limei Su (蘇麗媚), plus the two founders themselves, making ten mentors to pair with the twenty entrepreneurs recruited for the first cohort¹¹.

The operation of the mentorship model is very different from the general imagination of "finding successful people to give speeches." Each student is paired with a "primary mentor" for one-on-one deep talks, while also interacting with other non-primary mentors, forming a one-to-many, many-to-many network¹². The official term used is "co-learning," not "guidance": mentors and students set learning goals together, review progress together, and meet continuously over two years. The relationship gained over two years is far more precious than a single lecture.

Selection is not drawing lots from resumes. Four steps—application, written preliminary selection, final interview, and announcement—the written preliminary selection is guarded by external venture capitalists, professional consultants, and the executive committee, filtering applicants to about forty; at the final stage, the twelve mentors of that cohort personally interview, deciding the final twenty to twenty-four accepted¹³. In other words, the mentor intervenes from the moment of acceptance: he personally chose you, so he will spend the next two years accompanying you. This makes the "mentor" role carry a sense of responsibility from beginning to end.

📝 Curator's Note
When people talk about "startup accelerators," what floats to mind is the Silicon Valley Y Combinator model: rapid iteration, Demo Day stage to raise funds from investors, batches every few months. AAMA reverses every item: the cycle is stretched to two years, the scale shrinks to about twenty people, and it fundamentally has no Demo Day. In the official vocabulary, there is no word for "graduation ceremony," only "selection announcement"¹⁴. Because it does not invest, does not take equity, students have no structural need to present fundraising to investors; the logic of the entire ceremony's design is different from an accelerator.

This slowness is deliberate. A relationship that can truly inherit judgment cannot be fast.

No Equity, Then What Is the Point?

This is the question everyone asks the first time they hear of AAMA. No investment, no equity, no tuition fees for profit, then how does this program operate? What are the mentors spending their time for?

First, the money. For the first ten years, it operated as an informal community relying on personal connections, until the board of directors resolved at the end of 2019, and in April 2020, officially donated 10 million NTD to establish the foundation "Taipei Entrepreneurs Co-creation Platform Foundation"¹⁵. The list of donors is interesting: Jusi Culture (Hung-Tze Jang’s media group, parent company of Digital Times), the研華 (Advantech) Cultural Foundation, Wistron, Xinyi Real Estate founder Chun-Chi Chou (周俊吉), Charles Yen himself, and twenty alumni of the program¹⁶.

See that last item? Among those who paid to turn this program into a formal legal entity, twenty were people accompanied by it. This connects to the answer from the mentor side. Charles Yen put it plainly: "AAMA is not a social platform, but a learning platform... these mentors are willing to share life experience and management wisdom."¹⁷ And the more complete closed loop is that alumni themselves also come back. The "AAMA NEXT Alumni Alliance" established in 2019, with Guanyi Ye (葉冠義) from the first cohort serving as the first president and Zhiwei You (游智維) from the second cohort as vice president, alumni themselves formed the governance structure¹⁸. Starting from the 14th cohort, alumni returning as mentors changed from a special case to a norm¹⁹.

Thus the whole line grows into a loop: mentors accompany you, you graduate into an alumnus, alumni form an alliance, some alumni return to be mentors, some alumni donate money to keep the program alive. Money and manpower circulate from within the community; a community raises itself. As for corporate cooperation, the only one found with a specific amount is the "AIoT Corporate Co-creation Program" co-hosted by Advantech and Chunghwa Telecom, providing cloud resources worth millions of NTD²⁰.

So many people come back to give, partly because the relationships here are unadorned. AAMA’s own official website alumni interview series is so candid it hardly reads like a press release—Shijie Jian (簡士傑), founder of UNT nail polish, said: "Cross-border at the beginning is definitely burning money! ... Like our nail polish has a high market penetration rate, but half is luck."²¹ An entrepreneur who says "half is luck" and a mentor willing to sit down and accompany him for two years are both not acting out successology. This space to admit vulnerability and admit the component of luck is itself one of the reasons this community sticks people together.

✦ "Today, no matter if you are an entrepreneur or not, as long as you come to AAMA, you will feel love, patience, and empathy."

One caveat that should be made clear: philanthropy does not equal entirely free. The official website states clearly that the program itself "will not charge students fees for profit purposes," but "some learning activities and external professional cooperation require self-payment"²². It is a philanthropy program that honestly marks its boundaries, not a paradise where you pay nothing.

Names on the Wall, Still on the Road

Back to the first cohort list in 2012. Among those twenty people, there was one named Zhihan You (游直翰). The company he later co-founded, Appier, became Taiwan's first AI company listed overseas (on the Tokyo Stock Exchange)²³. And his current identity is a mentor for the 14th cohort of AAMA: from the accompanied person to the one accompanying others²⁴.

This "first cohort alumnus returning as mentor" contrast is real, and very beautiful. But here we must carefully draw a line: this is a symbolic connection, limited to symbolism. It does not constitute a causal chain of "AAMA created Appier." In a public interview, the two key figures Zhihan You thanked were Andrew Ng of the Stanford AI Lab and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, neither of whom were mentors paired by AAMA for him. When he talked about how he approached Andrew Ng, he said: "I printed a thick stack of my own background materials and research results, went to every professor's office related to AI research and knocked on the door, with my awkward English..."²⁵ This has nothing to do with AAMA.

So, what can be said is: Zhihan You is the most famous alumnus of the first cohort, now returning as a mentor; this cycle itself is evidence of the program's stickiness. What cannot be said, and for which there is no evidence, is: "The advice he got from AAMA helped him build Appier." Treating symbolism as causality is deification; honestly admitting we cannot find that causal chain is realism.

Other alumni also support a cross-industry list: Yihan Lin (林以涵) of Social Enterprise Stream (3rd cohort), Weixuan Zhang (張瑋軒) of Womanism (2nd cohort), TapPay Qiaorui Technology (6th cohort, acquired by PChome Group subsidiary in 2022), Kneron (9th cohort), Tea Seed Hall which reversed traditional industries, and Qiwei Lin (林啟維) of the 13th cohort—who founded Portaly, which later became Taiwan's largest creator business platform²⁶.

14th cohort mentors and entrepreneurs outdoor group photo. Photo: AAMA Taipei Cradle Program official website (fair use editorial commentary).

Three-time returning mentor. If mentors were merely honorary titles, this program would have no soul. But its stickiness can be proven by two people.

Fangcheng Shen (沈方正), CEO of the Grand Hotel Group, returned as a mentor three times (1st, 8th, 13th cohorts), spanning thirteen years²⁷. Liyan Huang (黃麗燕), founder of WAVE Brand Marketing, also returned three times, respectively for the 5th, 8th, and 12th cohorts²⁸. A person willing to repeatedly return to the same program over ten years, repeatedly spending two years accompanying a young person they do not know, speaks for itself: what they get back is something that cannot be exchanged elsewhere. A resume title is far from enough to explain this stickiness.

Chinese Yen has a comment on the traits of entrepreneurs they are looking for, which actually speaks inversely to why mentors are willing to give. He said an entrepreneur "knowing their own shortcomings, learning with discipline... is a very uncommon and quite precious trait"²⁹. A person who led a team of two thousand, seen countless rises and falls, wants to pass on not "how I succeeded back then," because that is not replicable; he wants to pass on judgment, that craft hard to write into textbooks, only talkable out one by one.

📝 Curator's Note
The sentence Charles Yen repeatedly says is "success cannot be replicated, but wisdom can be inherited"³⁰. Deconstructing this sentence hides the foundational argument of this entire program. The Silicon Valley model believes in scalable methodologies, standardizing processes, bringing hundreds of companies per batch. AAMA believes exactly the opposite of methodology: the truly valuable part of judgment is precisely unstandardizable and unscalable, so it can only be passed in the oldest way, that is, master-apprentice, face-to-face, slowly. Its scale of about twenty people seems limited, but is actually deliberate: what it believes in cannot be mass-produced.

If mentors were merely honorary titles, this program would have no soul. But its stickiness can be proven by two people.

Fangcheng Shen (沈方正), CEO of the Grand Hotel Group, returned as a mentor three times (1st, 8th, 13th cohorts), spanning thirteen years²⁷. Liyan Huang (黃麗燕), founder of WAVE Brand Marketing, also returned three times, respectively for the 5th, 8th, and 12th cohorts²⁸. A person willing to repeatedly return to the same program over ten years, repeatedly spending two years accompanying a young person they do not know, speaks for itself: what they get back is something that cannot be exchanged elsewhere. A resume title is far from enough to explain this stickiness.

Chinese Yen has a comment on the traits of entrepreneurs they are looking for, which actually speaks inversely to why mentors are willing to give. He said an entrepreneur "knowing their own shortcomings, learning with discipline... is a very uncommon and quite precious trait"²⁹. A person who led a team of two thousand, seen countless rises and falls, wants to pass on not "how I succeeded back then," because that is not replicable; he wants to pass on judgment, that craft hard to write into textbooks, only talkable out one by one.

📝 Curator's Note
The sentence Charles Yen repeatedly says is "success cannot be replicated, but wisdom can be inherited"³⁰. Deconstructing this sentence hides the foundational argument of this entire program. The Silicon Valley model believes in scalable methodologies, standardizing processes, bringing hundreds of companies per batch. AAMA believes exactly the opposite of methodology: the truly valuable part of judgment is precisely unstandardizable and unscalable, so it can only be passed in the oldest way, that is, master-apprentice, face-to-face, slowly. Its scale of about twenty people seems limited, but is actually deliberate: what it believes in cannot be mass-produced.

Halfway There

Up to this point, things have been warm. But an honest portrait must accommodate its own tension.

AAMA likes to talk about "graduating without graduating." Yan Lou-ye has said in the original text: "We often say AAMA is graduating without graduating."³¹ This means you don't leave after a day; you remain in this community for life. This is its most moving narrative: an unending relationship.

Yet, the same program requires participants to maintain an "80% participation rate in learning activities" on the application page over two years.³² On one hand, there is the warm promise of a "lifelong community," and on the other, there is the concrete governance threshold of "80% attendance." These are not contradictory enough to cause an argument, but they do exist simultaneously. A community bound by human connection and emotion must grow quantitative rules when it seeks formalization, accountability to donors, and sustainability. This is a growing pain that every organization transitioning from "a group of friends" to "an institution" encounters.

There is also an honest blank spot that must be addressed: this article could not find any public records of AAMA alumni companies going bankrupt or exiting. Multiple searches from different angles yielded only stories of growth and success. But this does not mean AAMA alumni have a "zero failure rate." Media interest in reporting on failures is naturally low, and AAMA has never publicly released exit statistics; the only documented "exit" case (the acquisition of TapPay) was a successful merger, not a liquidation.³³ Therefore, a more accurate description is: the samples we see tend to be survivors. This report truly presents a landscape selectively illuminated by the media, not a guarantee of 100% success.

AAMA's official channel, "AAMA Community Culture," produced the short video "From a Program to a Community."

In Taiwan's startup support system, AAMA is often compared to AppWorks. The differences between the two can be summarized in a clear comparison: AppWorks runs cohorts every six months with 30-40 teams per cohort, managing four venture capital funds and investing from seed to Series C; this is an "acceleration plus investment" model. AAMA operates one-on-one over two years with about twenty people annually, without investing or taking equity, focusing on the "growth phase" rather than early-stage entrepreneurs.³⁴

Interestingly, these two institutions, which have completely different positioning yet are often compared, have founders who participate in each other's ecosystems. Lin Chi-chen, a founder of AppWorks, is listed as a mentor on the AAMA official website.³⁵ Rather than being competitive, it is more like a natural overlap of familiar faces within a small ecosystem. The official census by the Taiwan government (FINDIT Ecosystem Survey) also classifies AAMA as a "comprehensive startup base," explicitly not placing it in the "accelerator" classification system. It was not the same thing from the start.³⁶

What is truly worth stopping to look at is another comparison. AAMA has a sister program (SLP, Taipei Startup Leadership Program) that shares a high degree of service overlap and also does not focus on investment or equity. Logically, these two programs should often be discussed together. However, after searching the official websites and media reports of both, one thing becomes clear: they are parallel worlds and have never publicly mentioned each other.

This "zero intersection" speaks more to the nature of Taiwan's startup support system than any competitive story: it is more like a collection of small galaxies operating independently and not interacting, rather than an integrated market. Each program operates on its own trajectory, supporting a small group of entrepreneurs in the way it believes in.

In 2022, AAMA celebrated its tenth anniversary. This was a time for self-praise: accumulating one hundred and six mentors, accompanying two hundred and ninety-nine entrepreneurs, and achieving ten thousand hours of interaction.³⁷ By 2024, the official website reported that the cumulative annual revenue of alumni companies exceeded 57 billion NTD; in the fifteenth cohort in 2026, 158 applicants set a near five-year high, with female applicants reaching 34%, and companies generating over 100 million NTD doubling from nine to nineteen.³⁸ These numbers are impressive.

But at the tenth-anniversary forum, Yan Lou-ye did not choose to celebrate. Citing the arguments in the book Startup Community, he made one statement: "It takes at least 20 years to operate a startup community to have a real impact, so we have only done half."³⁹

This sentence is a framework of "incompleteness" drawn by the founders themselves, not from external criticism. A person who has accumulated ten years of achievements, standing at a celebration, choosing to say "we have only done half," contains a rare clarity. It acknowledges one thing: the transmission of judgment is inherently slow work that cannot be judged in ten years and requires twenty or thirty years.

Looking back, the most counterintuitive aspect of AAMA's Taipei Cradle Program was never how many unicorns it produced. It was thirteen years ago when a group of people who could have enjoyed retirement chose the slowest, least scalable, and seemingly least profitable path—two years, one-on-one, without taking equity—to do something that might only show results in twenty years, while everyone else was pursuing "faster, bigger, more." In the first cohort of twenty, some are now back to sit as mentors, waiting to guide the next generation who is still stumbling and cannot yet see the finish line. This is how skills are passed from one pair of hands to another.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan Startup Ecosystem: An overview of Taiwan's startup ecosystem, from early challenges to the pursuit of accelerators, venture capital, and unicorns, seeing where AAMA fits in the landscape.
• Lin Chi-wei: From an Internationally Awarded Physical Board Game Brand to a Software Platform for 200,000 Creators: A profile of an entrepreneur who "restarts from zero" as an alumnus of AAMA's thirteenth cohort, the founder of Portaly.
• Taiwanese Enterprises: Advantech Technology: A donor to the AAMA Foundation and a partner in the "AIoT Corporate Co-creation Program."
• SLP Taipei Startup Leadership Program: Another sister track that does not focus on equity.
• Taiwanese Self-Media Creator Economy: Understanding the creator economy wave in which AAMA alumni (such as Portaly) operate in recent years.

Image Sources

This article uses 3 images, all cached in public/article-images/economy/ to avoid hotlinking to the source server:

• AAMA Taipei Cradle Program 15th Cohort Selected Entrepreneurs and Mentors Group Photo — AAMA Taipei Cradle Program official website, Fair use editorial commentary
• Portrait of Hung-Tze Jang (2009 Click Award) — Photo: Rico Shen, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• AAMA Taipei Cradle Program 14th Cohort Outdoor Group Photo — AAMA Taipei Cradle Program official website, Fair use editorial commentary

References