Secondary schools and JCs across Southeast Asia are still mostly geared towards helping students get into college and preconditioned to find jobs in established careers. I’m not saying we should get rid of math and science, but a classroom experience where teachers regularly invite start-up CEOs to guide , provoke, challenge and inspire (which is quite common here at Harvard Business School and an everyday experience I look forward to) completely changes how students think about career paths.

as for mda ijam, i do agree with dan’s take on it. it is a little too far in terms of quality of the local mentors, with due respect to all the mentors as well as nicholas who has commented.

my analogy has always been, go where the best is if not you will never know how far you can go, if you want to improve your craft as an actor, go HK or Beijing or Los Angeles where the best are. in the digital media world, although there are pockets of innovation that are unlike each other if you compare by continents but the majority of the innovation still resides in the Valley. if no mentor/adviser from iJAM has current SV experience (I am not saying 10 years ago experience), how much can you value add as compared with those who do?

again, it is not hard to improve the ijam program.

keep your ears and eyes tuned, i will be announcing a few things shortly with regards to this.

The mentors (and co-investors) in our case are our Senior Associates and Directors who are actual serial entrepreneurs from Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei; no non-practitioners are within the core team, although we receive valuable insights and feedback from former practioners turned academics in our advisory team.

Most of our Associates are also involved directly with an Azione Capital portfolio startup of their choice, of which a few of the Associates have been successfully running their own startups for at least a year.

The Azione Capital shareholders are our operational team, our investors and our startups (in the form of cross startup ownership), thus incentivizing everyone to work together for the greater good.