Mixing Youth with Wisdom

By Jeanette Pang

projecteyeball - September 4, 2000 - Mentoring of young dotcommers fast becoming a vital business strategy JACKIE Lee, then all of 22, had an encounter on the Internet that went beyond his wildest dreams. It was an encounter that eventually made him the chief executive of the online IT magazine-publishing venture Hardware Zone.com.

Now he is 24, an age when his peers are still in college. It helped, of course, that he was interested in the nuts and bolts of computers. He had put together website that enabled computer enthusiasts to interact with one another and share information as a hobby. Luck played a part too. Zacchaeus Boon, 38, chanced upon the site. He liked what he saw and immediately shot off an e-mail to Lee. Today, Boon has sunk in $100,000 of his own funds in the business. For all intents and purposes, Boon is Lee's mentor. It was he who led Lee into the corporate corridor when the young adult took his first business baby steps. Welcome to the age of relationships in the New Economy. Mentors like Boon play a crucial role in moulding just-out-of dotcom chiefs like Lee.

"Mentors are exceptionally important to young dotcom CEOs who may have the passion and ideas to run a company in this New Economy, but lack a macro view on most situations," Lee said. "And most of them lack human management skills that have to be acquired through experience and many years of working in the industry."

Boon, a former Asia-Pacific director in the IBM subsidiary Lotus Development and now a director of investments at the venture capital firm Venture TDF, agrees. "Should they go regional? And if so, do they go to Taiwan or Malaysia first? These are the kind of strategic decisions we help them in, and we also help them to determine the readiness of the markets," said Boon. Such mentors share with their "wards" more than just their vision. Some pass on their network of business contacts too.