El programa Cuna de Taipéi de AAMA: un grupo de personas que podían jubilarse entregando su oficio de la forma más lenta

30 segundos para ver: El programa Cuna de Taipéi de AAMA es una presencia poco común en Taiwán: un programa de mentoría para emprendedores que no invierte, no toma acciones ni cobra matrícula. Iniciado en 2012 por Jang Hung-tze, editor de Digital Times, y el consultor de contabilidad jubilado Charles Yen, permite a empresarios experimentados acompañar a un emprendedor en crecimiento durante dos años, de uno a uno. Solo acepta alrededor de veinte personas al año; tras trece años, se ha llegado a la decimoquinta cohorte, acumulando nombres como Appier, Sheqiliu (Social Enterprise Stream) y Portaly. Lo más contraintuitivo de este proyecto es una elección: un grupo de personas que podían jubilarse y disfrutar de la vida eligió el método más lento, sin economías de escala, para entregar a mano la difícil de verbalizar habilidad de «cómo hacer crecer una empresa» a la siguiente generación, sin pedir nada a cambio.

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

The impression Taiwanese people have of the AAMA Taipei Cradle Program probably stops at the large group photo published every June in Digital Times — a group of people squeezed together, making the gesture for the current cohort number. This "reveal moment" has not stopped 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; rather, it lives in the memory 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 is the second time

To trace where this model comes from, we must first dispel an easy misconception arising from the name. The name AAMA comes from an Asian technology association founded in Silicon Valley in 1979 (Asia America MultiTechnology Association), which has global hubs in Silicon Valley, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Hong Kong, among others². However, the Silicon Valley parent body never had a "Cradle Program". Its core activities are traditional industry association affairs: annual conferences and monthly regular meetings³.

The two-year, one-on-one mentorship system 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 "assigning a senior mentor to each new employee" into the startup mentoring field⁴.

Charles 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 retiring, he could have 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 is the second time he brought a model experimented with elsewhere back to his hometown.

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

As for Jang Hung-tze's role, it is often misread as "co-inventor", but it is not. Jang Hung-tze himself spoke clearly during the tenth anniversary: "When Principal Yen (Charles Yen) mentioned 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. Jang Hung-tze's role was to acknowledge it and connect the exposure of the Digital Times media platform. One person had the method, the other had the stage; their roles complemented each other, leaving no record of ideological conflict⁹.

Jang Hung-tze, taken at the 2009 Web Golden Finger Awards, 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 held together by Jang Hung-tze and Charles Yen relying on their respective networks¹⁰. They brought in Chu Ping, Fang Zheng, Fan Youwei, Chang Jung-kuei, Chen Yi-chiang, Pan Chien-cheng, Chien Li-feng, Su Li-mei, plus the two founders themselves, making ten mentors to pair with the twenty entrepreneurs recruited for the first cohort¹¹.

The operation of the mentorship system is very different from the common 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 names from a hat. Four steps — application, written preliminary selection, final interview, announcement — with the preliminary selection guarded by external venture capital, professional consultants, and the executive committee, filtering applicants down to about forty; at the final stage, the twelve mentors of that cohort personally interview to decide 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 keeps the role of "mentor" responsible from start to finish.

📝 Curator's Note
When people talk about "startup accelerators", what comes to mind is the Silicon Valley Y Combinator model: rapid iteration, Demo Day on stage to raise funds from investors, batches every few months. AAMA reverses every single one of these: the cycle is extended to two years, the scale shrinks to about twenty people, and it fundamentally lacks a 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 ceremonial design is different from that of an accelerator.

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

No equity taken, then what for?

This is the question everyone asks the first time they hear about 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, money. For the first ten years, it operated as an informal community relying on personal connections, until a board resolution at the end of 2019 and a formal donation of 10 million NTD in April 2020 to establish the foundation "Taipei Entrepreneurs Co-creation Platform Foundation"¹⁵. The list of donors is interesting: Chusi Culture (Jang Hung-tze's media group, parent company of Digital Times), the研華 (Advantech) Cultural Foundation, Wistron, Xinyi Real Estate founder Chou Chun-chi, Charles Yen himself, and twenty alumni of the program¹⁶.

Did you see that last item? Among those who paid to turn this program into a formal legal entity, twenty are people who were accompanied by it. This connects to the answer from the mentor side. Charles Yen puts 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 a more complete loop is that alumni themselves also come back. The "AAMA NEXT Alumni Alliance" established in 2019, with Ye Guan-yi (1st cohort) as the first president and You Zhiwei (2nd cohort) as vice president, had alumni themselves form the governance structure¹⁸. Starting from the 14th cohort, alumni returning as mentors has become the norm rather than the exception¹⁹.

Thus the whole line grows into a loop: mentors accompany you, you graduate and become an alumnus, alumni form an alliance, some alumni return to be mentors, some alumni donate money to keep the program alive. Money and human resources 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 Project" 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 unvarnished. AAMA's own official alumni interview series is frankly unlike a press release — Jian Shijie, 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 can say "half is luck" and a mentor willing to sit down and accompany him for two years are neither acting out successology. This space to admit vulnerability and the component of luck is itself one of the reasons this community sticks people together.

✦ "Today, regardless of whether you are an entrepreneur, as long as you come to AAMA, you will feel love, patience, and empathy."

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

The names on the wall, still on the road

Back to the first cohort list of 2012. Among those twenty people, there was one named You Zhihan. 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 beautiful. But here we must carefully draw a line: this is a symbolic connection, only symbolic. It does not constitute a causal chain of "AAMA created Appier". In a public interview, the two key figures You Zhihan 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 talking 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, using my awkward English..."²⁵ This has nothing to do with AAMA.

So, what can be said is: You Zhihan 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 received at AAMA helped him build Appier". Treating symbols as causality is deification; honestly admitting we cannot find that causal chain is realism.

Other alumni also support a cross-industry list: Lin Yihan of Sheqiliu (Social Enterprise Stream) (3rd cohort), Zhang Weixuan of Womanism (2nd cohort), TapPay Qiaorui Technology (6th cohort, acquired by a PChome Group subsidiary in 2022), Kneron (9th cohort), ChaZi Tang (Tea Seed Hall) which transformed traditional industry, and Lin Qiwei of the 13th cohort — his Portaly later became the largest creator business platform in Taiwan²⁶.

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

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

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

Charles Yen has a comment on the characteristics of entrepreneurs they are looking for, which actually speaks in reverse to why mentors are willing to give. He said that an entrepreneur "knowing their own deficiencies, learning with discipline... is a very uncommon and quite precious trait"²⁹. A person who led a team of 2,000 and saw countless rises and falls does not want to transmit "how I succeeded back then", because that is not replicable; he wants to transmit judgment, that craft that is hard to write into textbooks, only to be talked out one by one.

📝 Curator's Note
The sentence Charles Yen repeatedly says is "success cannot be replicated, but wisdom can be inherited"³⁰. Breaking this down, it hides the foundational argument of this entire program. The Silicon Valley model believes in scalable methodology, standardizing processes, taking hundreds of companies per batch. AAMA believes exactly the opposite of methodology: the truly valuable part of judgment is precisely that which cannot be standardized or scaled, so it can only be transmitted 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.

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

Charles Yen has a comment on the characteristics of entrepreneurs they are looking for, which actually speaks in reverse to why mentors are willing to give. He said that an entrepreneur "knowing their own deficiencies, learning with discipline... is a very uncommon and quite precious trait"²⁹. A person who led a team of 2,000 and saw countless rises and falls does not want to transmit "how I succeeded back then", because that is not replicable; he wants to transmit judgment, that craft that is hard to write into textbooks, only to be talked out one by one.

📝 Curator's Note
The sentence Charles Yen repeatedly says is "success cannot be replicated, but wisdom can be inherited"³⁰. Breaking this down, it hides the foundational argument of this entire program. The Silicon Valley model believes in scalable methodology, standardizing processes, taking hundreds of companies per batch. AAMA believes exactly the opposite of methodology: the truly valuable part of judgment is precisely that which cannot be standardized or scaled, so it can only be transmitted 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 program but not graduating", Charles Yen's original words are: "We often say AAMA is finishing the program but not graduating."³¹ The meaning is that you will not have a day where you "graduate" and leave; you stay in this community for life. This is its most moving narrative: a relationship that does not end.

But the same program, on the application page, explicitly requires students to maintain "over 80% participation in learning activities" during the two-year period³². On one side is the warm promise of a "lifetime community", on the other is the concrete governance threshold of "80% attendance rate". These two are not so contradictory that they need to argue, but they do exist simultaneously. A community held together by personal connections and emotion, once it formalizes, must be responsible to donors, must 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 "exit" case found (TapPay acquisition) was 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 official channel "AAMA Community Culture".

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 per year, 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. Lin Zhichen, 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 official census (FINDIT Ecosystem Survey) also classifies AAMA as a "comprehensive 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 discussed 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 its own believed way, 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 combined exceeded 57 billion NTD; in 2026, the 15th cohort, 158 applications set a new high in five years, female application ratio reached 34%, annual revenue breaking 100 million NTD application companies doubled from 9 to 19³⁸. These numbers are beautiful.

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

This sentence is the "unfinished" framework drawn by the founder himself, coming from inside rather than external criticism. A person with ten years of achievements, standing at a celebration occasion, choosing to say "we are only halfway there", 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, thirty years to measure.

So looking back, the most counter-intuitive thing about the AAMA Taipei Cradle Program has never been how many unicorns it produced. It was thirteen years ago, a group of people who could have retired and enjoyed life, in an era where everyone was pursuing "faster, bigger, more", chose the slowest, least scalable, least cost-effective path: two years, one-on-one, no equity, to do something 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 who is still stumbling, temporarily unable to see the end. Craft is 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 where AAMA sits in the landscape
• Lin Qiwei: 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 Project"
• 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 (like Portaly) are situated

Image Sources

This article uses 3 images, all cached in public/article-images/economy/ to avoid hotlinking 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 Jang Hung-tze (2009 Web Golden Finger Awards) — 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