A Letter to the Community: ADPList Wrapped 2025

Dear ADPList Community,

Every year, I find myself pausing in December to reflect on what we've built together. And every year, I'm reminded that ADPList was never supposed to get this far.

In 2021, this was a Google Spreadsheet. A scrappy list of designers willing to help strangers during a pandemic. I didn't have a grand plan. I just knew that somewhere out there, someone needed advice—and somewhere else, someone was willing to give it.

Four years later, I'm writing to you about something we've been working on for months. Something that, when I first saw it come together, made me sit in silence for a while.

Today, we're launching ADPList Wrapped 2025—and with it, something we call The Globe.

→ Experience it here: adplist.org/wrapped

Why we built The Globe

Let me take you back to where the idea started.

Earlier this year, I came across Shopify's Black Friday Globe—a real-time visualization of commerce happening around the world. Every purchase. Every transaction. Mapped on a spinning globe with arcs of light connecting buyers and sellers across borders.

It was mesmerizing. But something else clicked for me.

Shopify was visualizing money moving around the world. What if we could visualize knowledge?

Because that's what mentorship is. It's not a transaction. It's not content consumption. It's one person saying to another: Here's what I learned. Here's what I'd do differently. Here's what I believe you're capable of.

And on ADPList, that exchange happens across borders every single day. A product designer in Cairo learning from a VP in San Francisco. A junior developer in Lagos getting feedback from a staff engineer in Toronto. A career changer in Singapore preparing for their first interview with someone in Berlin who's been through it.

This isn't abstract. It's real. And now, you can see it.

What you're looking at

When you open the Globe, you're seeing every mentorship session that happened on ADPList in 2025.

Not a sample. Not a projection. Every single one.

Connections across borders. A full year of this community showing up for each other, mapped, visualized, and preserved.

Spin it. Zoom into your city. Watch the arcs light up between continents.

Here's what struck me when I first saw it: the density. The sheer volume of knowledge flowing between places you wouldn't expect. The fact that mentorship doesn't follow the patterns you'd assume—it doesn't just flow from "tech hubs" outward. It moves in every direction. From everywhere. To everywhere.

The cities that lit up 2025

Some cities showed up more than others this year. Here are the places that generated the most mentorship activity:

• San Francisco
• New York City
• Chicago
• Cairo
• Singapore
• Bangalore
• Tehran
• Tel Aviv
• Seattle
• Toronto
• Vancouver

What's remarkable isn't just the individual cities—it's the connections between them. Mentors in Israel helping mentees in Egypt. Sessions bridging the US and Iran. Knowledge flowing freely between places that, in almost every other context, feel impossibly far apart.

This is what mentorship looks like when you remove the barriers.

2025: The year in numbers

I'm not going to dwell on stats. We already celebrated a mentorship minutes milestone earlier this year. But a few things from 2025 are worth naming:

• Mentors and mentees took part across borders. For current figures, see adplist.org/stats.
• Time spent learning together. Time that could have been spent anywhere, given freely to strangers.

But what I keep coming back to is this… every one of those minutes was a choice. A mentor chose to show up. A mentee chose to ask for help. Neither had to do it. Both did.

That's not a platform metric. That's human generosity at scale.

What this community means to me

I'll end with something personal.

When I started ADPList, I was 23. I didn't go to a prestigious university. I didn't have a network. I didn't have access to the people who could have helped me figure things out faster.

I built ADPList because I wanted to make sure no one else had to feel that way. I wanted to build the infrastructure I wish I'd had.

Four years later, I watch this community every day—and I'm still in awe. I see mentors giving hours of their time to strangers. I see mentees showing up nervous and leaving with clarity. I see people paying it forward before they've even "made it" themselves.

The Globe isn't just a visualization of sessions. It's proof that when you remove the barriers, people want to help each other. They do it freely. They do it across borders, languages, and time zones. They do it because it matters.

Thank you for being one of the lights on that Globe.

Here's to 2026.

— Felix Lee
Founder & CEO, ADPList