ADPList doesn’t care where you went to school, and that’s exactly why 320,000 mentors and mentees trust it

This story is one of nine on The Peak Singapore’s Power List. The list is an annual recognition that celebrates and acknowledges individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, influence, and impact.

The theme for the class of 2025 is Vanguards, spotlighting business leaders who are boldly reshaping their industries, questioning outdated norms, and pushing boundaries with vision and conviction. At a time when conformity is often rewarded and change met with resistance, these individuals choose to lead from the front — not for applause, but because the future demands it.

Felix Lee does not perform for the spotlight, nor does he traffic in borrowed conviction. He speaks with the considered rhythm of someone who has thought long and hard about what it means to be helpful in the world — what it means, in fact, to open doors for others, even when there is nothing to be gained.

There’s a soft gravity to his presence; in conversation, it’s clear he is less interested in staking out territory than in holding space for ideas that linger and take root.

“Mentorship, to me, is not a transaction. And it’s certainly not charity. It is, in some sense, love in motion.” This is the spine of his worldview, though he utters it as if it were common sense rather than a quiet rebuke of the systems most of us accept as natural. He doesn’t deliver it for effect. For Lee, the simple act of showing up for someone — meeting a stranger, listening, offering help with no promise of return — stands as “one of the most human acts”. 

It is this fundamental trust in the value of care that has shaped ADPList, the company he co-founded, into one of the world’s fastest-growing mentorship networks.

A digital infrastructure for care

At a glance, ADPList appears to be the product of its time: a sleek, global platform that matches thousands of mentees with mentors across every imaginable industry. The numbers themselves are impressive — over 800,000 mentors and mentees (as of August 2025, according to Lee), 100+ countries, and millions of minutes spent on conversations that could, in another universe, have remained impossible. 

But the statistics are a smokescreen for something more radical: ADPList, at its core, is an attempt to “show the world that mentorship isn’t just another activity. It’s an infrastructure of care — and more than that, a radical reimagination of what human experiences look like and how knowledge can be passed on from one person to another.”

The product is deceptively simple. Anyone, anywhere, can sign up for free, search for a mentor in fields from design to data science to leadership, and book a one-on-one session — no hidden gatekeepers, no fees, no requirement to have attended the right university or climbed the right corporate ladder.  

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“We bring people in,” Lee explains. “That’s the core of our life’s work: making mentorship the first conversation, not the last. Not something that happens only after you get a job or after you’re seen as successful.”

For many, the first brush with ADPList feels disarmingly personal. The interface is clean and unassuming, but what sets it apart is the intention behind every design choice. Lee acknowledges that “people often think that ADPList is just a platform — a website, a tech company, a scheduling tool” and admits that such a surface view is understandable. 

Yet beneath that exterior lies something crafted for far more: “What’s often missed is that ADPList is designed to be a human experience. It’s an emotional system.” The team obsesses over what cannot be measured — the moment a new user sees a mentor who looks or sounds like them, the sense that “your story matters. That your voice will be heard.” Here, dignity is embedded in every interaction, subtle yet unmistakable.

This “emotional craftsmanship,” as Lee calls it, is the result of a design philosophy that puts warmth ahead of efficiency and dignity above data. Every feature — from the colours to the calendar invites — is considered not for its novelty but for its ability to reassure a first-time user that they belong here. “We design for trust. We design for human connection. We design for warmth. We design for moments that remind people they’re not alone in this big, loud world.”

Turning the system inside out

Lee’s own history is a pointed contradiction to the rules that shape so many careers. He never attended university and so never inherited the alumni networks that quietly smooth the way for others. 

“The default model says: write a resume, game the keywords, hope the algorithm notices you, go to conferences, network, rely on your alumni network. But I’ve never been to college — I don’t have an alumni network. And honestly, I think it’s a system that flattens human potential into a kind of formatting roof.” In this, Lee is both an outsider and an architect, having spent years studying the subtle ways in which opportunity is engineered for some and withheld from others.

That is why, from the earliest days of ADPList, the team asked: what if access to mentorship, and by extension to opportunity, was designed to include, not exclude? What if the first question was not, “Are you qualified?” but, “Are you curious?” In Lee’s framework, success is less a ladder than a web — messy, dynamic, infinitely expandable — where connection itself becomes the metric that matters.

The conviction that “mentorship should be the scaffolding for how we grow, connect, and build trust — whether that’s through career development, leadership, or hiring” underpins every decision. This is what sets ADPList apart in a culture obsessed with speed and surface. “We’ve somehow turned people into data points and hiring into a game of metrics. And it’s hurting us — not just in how we work, but in how we relate to one another.” 

Lee dreams of a professional world “a lot more intentional — calmer, slower in some sense — but definitely more human.” In this world, “companies wouldn’t just be judged by revenue, but by how many people they’ve helped raise. How much they’ve helped their people grow.” 

The discipline of care

It would be a mistake to read Lee’s philosophy as mere sentiment. If anything, his leadership is defined by a kind of monastic patience, a willingness to resist the startup gospel of speed at all costs. “There’s this insidious lie — this myth — that speed equals success. We hear a lot about just shipping things, building fast, and getting it out the door.” 

Lee recounts how, in the earliest days of building ADPList, “we spent nearly three weeks just talking about the experience of booking a mentor — just to even get to the drawing board. We hadn’t written a single line of code yet.” For him, this was not an indulgence, but a necessity. “When you build something with real care and intention, you start to realise that some things deserve to take time.”

That slowness is a form of respect, a kind of craft. Lee references Jony Ive — “people can sense when the person who designed something really cared” — and sees the product as a living expression of this ethic. “What lasts isn’t what launches quickly. It’s what’s made with love, with detail, and with responsibility.”

It is in the quiet, persistent effort of his team that Lee finds the most pride. “I’m proud of the people — our volunteers, our ambassadors — who host city events late into the night or early in the morning. The mentors who give up their Friday nights or Sundays for a stranger on the other side of the world, someone they’ve never met and don’t even know.” 

There is also gratitude for the engineers and designers “who obsess over whether a button or a colour feels kind to someone using it.” These gestures rarely make headlines, but to Lee, “they represent the values that run deep in our company and our team. Because what you design — what you make — is a representation of what you stand for.”

Reclaiming power quietly

If mentorship, for Lee, is the most human act, then power is the most misunderstood. “We’ve made the term synonymous with things like money, fame, control, dominance — and so on. But in truth, the most powerful people I’ve met are the ones who give others their voice. Real power is a form of stewardship.” 

Lee likens it to the doorman — someone overlooked but whose quiet decision to open the door, again and again, is what makes movement possible for everyone else. “The moment he stops opening the door, you realise just how much power he had all along. Because he chose to open it — consistently, humbly, without applause.”

In Lee’s cosmology, the true vanguards are the ones who practise care as a discipline, who hold open the possibility that everyone deserves a way in. “Power doesn’t need to announce itself. It builds steps, ladders, and spaces where others can stand taller. It gives people back their voice.”

As the world grows louder, faster, and more performative, Lee’s legacy will likely be measured in quieter, slower ways: in moments when a person halfway across the world, feels seen for the first time; in a network that chooses trust over transaction; in the small, invisible rituals of care that leave their mark not on the dashboard, but on the lives of those invited in.

For those who still believe in the old calculus of winners and losers, Lee offers a quiet counterpoint: a world built for growth, equity, and a little more humanity — where mentorship is the foundation, and care is the infrastructure that endures. ADPList, in his hands, is less a company than a gentle but insistent proposal: that dignity, trust, and “love in motion” can — and should — shape the systems we inherit and the ones we choose to build.

For more stories on The Peak Power List, visit here.