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.

The Road Is Only Half Done

Up to here, it is all warm. But an honest group portrait must accommodate its own tension.

AAMA likes to talk about "finishing the course but not graduating," Charles Yen’s original words are: "We often say AAMA is finishing the course but not graduating."³¹ Meaning you will not have a day to "graduate" and leave; you stay in this community for life. This is its most moving narrative: a relationship that will not end.

But the same program, on the application page, explicitly requires students to maintain an "over 80% participation rate in learning activities" during the two-year period³². On one side is the warm promise of "a lifetime community," on the other is the specific governance threshold of "80% attendance rate." These two are not so contradictory as to require arguing, but they do exist simultaneously. A community held together by personal connections and emotion, once it needs to formalize, be responsible to donors, and be sustainable, must grow quantitative rules. This is the growing pain all organizations face moving from "a group of friends" to "an institution."

There is another honest blank that must be addressed: this article cannot find any public record of any alumnus company going bankrupt or exiting. Searching from multiple angles multiple times, the results are all stories of growth and success. But this does not mean AAMA alumni have "zero failure." Media willingness to report on failure cases is inherently low; AAMA has never publicly released exit rate statistics; the only found "exit" case (TapPay acquisition) was still a successful acquisition rather than liquidation³³. So a more accurate statement is: the samples we see tend towards survivors. This report card truly presents a landscape selectively illuminated by media, not a guarantee of 100% success rate.

Official short film "From a Program to a Community" produced by the AAMA Community Culture channel.

In Taiwan's startup support system, AAMA is often compared to AppWorks. The differences between the two can be organized into a clear comparison: AppWorks has a batch every half year, 30-40 teams per batch, manages four venture capital funds, invests from seed to Series C, it is an "accelerate plus invest" model; AAMA is two years one-on-one, about twenty people annually, no investment no equity, focusing on "growth-stage" rather than earliest-stage entrepreneurs³⁴.

Interestingly, the founders of these two institutions, with completely different positioning yet often mentioned together, actually participate in each other's ecosystems. Chihchen Lin (林之晨), founder of AppWorks, is listed on the AAMA official website's mentor list³⁵. Rather than confrontation, this is more like the natural overlap of familiar faces in a small ecosystem. Taiwan government's official census (FINDIT Ecosystem Survey) also classifies AAMA as a "comprehensive-type startup base," explicitly not placing it in the "accelerator" classification system. It was never the same thing from the beginning³⁶.

What is truly worth stopping to look at is another contrast. AAMA has a sister program (SLP, Taipei Startup Leadership Program) with highly overlapping target audiences, also not focusing on investment and equity. Logically, these two programs should often be talked about together. But flipping through both official websites and media reports, one finds a thing: they are two parallel worlds, never mentioning each other publicly.

This "zero intersection" itself explains the landscape of Taiwan's startup support system better than any competition story: it is more like a galaxy of small systems operating independently, not interacting with each other, rather than an integrated market. Every program is on its own orbit, in the way it believes, catching a small group of entrepreneurs.

In 2022, AAMA turned ten. This is a moment suitable for self-praise: accumulated 106 mentors, accompanied 299 entrepreneurs, interaction hours reached 10,000 hours³⁷. By 2024, the official website statistics showed alumni companies' annual revenue totaled over 57 billion NTD; in 2026's 15th cohort, 158 applications set a five-year high, female application ratio reached 34%, annual revenue over 100 million NTD application companies doubled from 9 to 19³⁸. These numbers are all beautiful.

But at the tenth anniversary forum, Charles Yen did not choose to celebrate. He quoted the argument from the book Startup Community, saying a sentence: "Operating a startup community requires accumulating at least 20 years to exert true influence, so we are only half done."³⁹

This sentence is the "unfinished" framework drawn by the founder themselves, from within rather than external nitpicking. A person with ten years of achievements standing at a celebration occasion, choosing to say "we are only half done," contains a rare clarity. It admits a thing: the inheritance of judgment is inherently a slow work where results cannot be seen clearly in ten years, requiring twenty or thirty years to measure.

So looking back, the most counterintuitive thing about the AAMA Taipei Cradle Program was never how many unicorns it produced. It was thirteen years ago, a group of people who could have retired to enjoy life, in an era when everyone was pursuing "faster, bigger, more," chose the slowest, least scalable, and least cost-effective path: two years, one-on-one, no equity, to do a thing where results are only visible after twenty years. Among those twenty people in the first cohort, some have now returned to sit in the mentor's position, waiting to accompany the next young person still stumbling, temporarily unable to see the end. Craftsmanship is just like this, handed from one pair of hands to another.

Further Reading:

• Startup Ecosystem: The panorama of Taiwan's startup ecosystem, from early challenges to accelerators, venture capital, and the pursuit of unicorns, see what landscape AAMA sits in
• Qiwei Lin: From an Internationally Awarded Physical Board Game Brand to a Software Platform for 200,000 Creators: AAMA 13th cohort alumnus, Portaly founder, a profile of an entrepreneur who "resets and relearns every time"
• Taiwan Enterprise: Advantech: One of the AAMA Foundation donors, and also a partner in the "AIoT Corporate Co-creation Program"
• SLP Taipei Startup Leadership Program: Another sister track not focusing on equity
• Taiwan Self-media Creator Economy: Understand the creator economy wave in which AAMA's recent alumni (such as Portaly) are situated

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