▶ “If businesses don't adapt now, your competitors are going to be leveraging AI and you are going to fall behind.” — Annie Liao In this episode of In the Blink of AI, host Georgie Healy speaks with Annie Liao, founder of BuildClub, an AI-focused community and learning platform. Annie shares the journey from a weekend coworking group to a thriving ecosystem helping over a thousand founders and engineers learn, build, and grow in AI. They discuss why technical founders often struggle with customer validation, how AI is reducing barriers to entry for startups, and the importance of diversity, inclusion, and accessible education. From partnering with frontier dev tools to envisioning a future where anyone can build with AI, Annie’s insights paint a picture of a rapidly evolving landscape. If you’ve ever considered launching an AI project or up-skilling to meet the new era’s demands, this episode is a must-listen.
Chapters
1:10 Origins of BuildClub and its community roots ▶ 5:30 From side projects to funded ventures: success stories ▶ 9:45 Why technical founders need to talk to customers early ▶ 14:20 Partnering with AI dev tools and building a learning platform ▶ 19:00 The future of AI education: career tracks and global reach ▶ 24:15 Diversity, inclusion, and safe AI practices ▶ 30:00 Advice for Aussie founders and connecting with the US market ▶ Resources
• Claude by Anthropic – Recommended AI chatbot tool
• Cohere – AI language model provider collaborating with BuildClub’s curriculum
• Various Dev Tools (e.g., Blend. ai) featured in BuildClub’s learning modules
Notable Quotes
"If you had to hire three software engineers before, now you might only need one armed with Copilot or Cursor, and they’ll deliver the same output." – Annie Liao
"There’s a saying now that English is almost like the new coding language—AI tools let you build without traditional code." – Annie Liao
"Building a startup is just surviving and not giving up. Resilience matters more than almost anything else." – Annie Liao
"If there’s any time to jump into AI, it’s now—don’t wait until everyone else is ahead." – Annie Liao
Transcript Synced · select any line to jump ▾ 0:02 Georgie Healy: Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deel.com/dayone. That's deel.com/dayone. 0:23 Annie Liao: I think with AI, like, anyone can run a startup with a very, very small tight-knit team. I think AI democratizes a lot of things, and one of those things is building a startup with a lot less resources than before. So for example, maybe if you had to hire like 3 software engineers before, you now probably only have to hire one, and they can use like Cursor or Copilot tools to increase their output. 0:51 Georgie Healy: Hello and welcome to In the Blink of an Eye, where I talk to the brightest AI startups innovators each week. I'm Georgie Healy, and this week I'm speaking to Annie Liao, the founder of Build Club, the largest and fastest growing AI engineering and founder community in APAC. Now, what to say about Annie that hasn't already been written about in every big media publication in Australia? Literally just after this episode was recorded, Annie had a huge write-up in Forbes for their 30 Under 30 article. But the hype around Annie is warranted. It's almost impossible to be an AI technical founder and have not heard or benefited from Build Club. In this episode, we discuss the kinds of personas that are successful, what Aussie founders should do to grow and succeed, and the surprising things AI founders at Build Club do. If you've ever dabbled in AI and want to take the next step, Or maybe you're completely non-technical but keen to know what it's like to join an AI community. This episode is a must-listen. Hello, Abby. Welcome to In a Blink of AI. Firstly, could you please introduce yourself and what Build Club aims to achieve? 2:12 Annie Liao: Awesome. Thanks, Georgie. Uh, really nice to be on this podcast. So Build Club, we're currently the largest and fastest growing AI engineer and founder community in APAC. And we're also, I'm not sure when this episode will launch, but about to launch our e-learning platform too, with the aim to democratize access to AI. 2:34 Georgie Healy: Incredible. How many AI startups have gone through Build Club since you launched it? 2:40 Annie Liao: That's a really interesting question. I think a lot of the people in Build Club actually end up tinkering on like multiple projects. We do have more than 1,500 AI startup founders in Build Club at the moment. 2:53 Georgie Healy: Wow. 2:54 Annie Liao: A lot of them are either tinkering on like little side project startups and some of them are also more progressed, so at like Series A stage too. 3:02 Georgie Healy: Incredible. So you've got some really technically proficient people come through. What if you were someone like myself who's not got AI experience but really passionate about learning? Do you ask those kinds of people to go off and do some pre-work before they can apply to join? How does that work? 3:23 Annie Liao: Yeah, so in the beginning of Build Club, we kept it only to technical software engineer founders. I think our thesis behind that was because if everyone was at the same level of proficiency in AI, they would have a lot more to talk to each other about. I think over time, as Build Club grew beyond just a founder community, we found that a lot of people that want to learn AI want to join. I think like the amazing thing now with AI is you don't need to know how to code to be able to build like an app. There's a saying out there where English is almost like the new coding language. And what we're looking to launch with like the platform is for people who are non-technical, ways for them to also build really amazing things in AI, whether it be for their personal projects or even in the workplace for them to use like specific AI tools. 4:11 Georgie Healy: Fascinating. Personally, I've been in a few accelerators and incubators myself. They range from, you know, you need to quit your day job and go all in on this to a few workshops in the week. The accelerator I'm involved in is like a bootcamp and then it's virtual for a few hours a week. What's the structure for Build Club? What's the commitment level? 4:35 Annie Liao: So we've tinkered with a few different like program structures with Build Club. I think our thesis is always it's very much for people choose your own adventure, because we find that a lot of people in corporate jobs now also like to tinker in AI, like on their weekends. The very first iteration of Build Club, we just ran it on the weekends only. So it was mainly for people that currently work maybe at Atlassian or Canva and are working on their own side projects, but usually maybe working at like a Starbucks cafe by themselves. And we wanted to provide just a space where a lot of people building could connect with each other and hopefully like help each other learn faster. So we run like a variety of programs now because we're launching like a virtual platform. We're making it accessible to anyone like 24/7 to join Build Club. And we are still going to continue to run like more structured bootcamps. And the thesis behind the bootcamps is just to create more cohort-based structure. Because a core part of Build Club has always been that human-to-human connection for people as they go on the learning journey. 5:37 Georgie Healy: Amazing. 5:39 Annie Liao: Okay. 5:39 Georgie Healy: You have a fascinating career history. So taking a bit of a sidestep here, you've worn so many hats, but even very recently, Chief of Staff at Relevance AI, an incredible AI startup at the same time of being founder of Build Club. I guess I have two cheeky questions. How and how come? 6:00 Annie Liao: Yes. Honestly, a bit of a balancing act. So Build Club was founded when I was working in venture capital over a year ago now. And it was originally more of like a side hustle. The role opportunity came up at Relevance, I think in late last year actually was when I started talking to the founders. And it actually took me 3 weeks to accept the Relevance role because I was actually deciding on, because Build Club was growing quite quickly, but Relevance has a really smart team and a really amazing vision and mission that they're working on. And at that time decided that I really wanted to experience on the operator side and just to be like in a fast-growing team environment. So I chose relevance and just continued to do book club on like nights and weekends. And recently the opportunity to go into book club full-time came up. In my gut, I just wanted to be out like focused on one thing and do one thing really well. And book club is something I'm really passionate about. 6:55 Georgie Healy: Yeah, you're amazing at it and I'm not surprised. It was a good but difficult decision when you're given two amazing opportunities. Definitely understand. So your role as the founder of Build Club— to people that don't know, this is like relatively new on the ecosystem, and you're coming up against Techstars, Antler, the AWS and Google accelerators in some ways, right? Like we're all targeting AI startups and founders. Was it a scary jump, like ultimately, you know, launching an accelerator? I apologize if this you know, not fair, but at a relatively young age too. Like, it's quite incredible what you've achieved and quite inspiring. How did you go about doing that? And was it scary? 7:42 Annie Liao: Definitely very scary when we were trying really new program structures. And like, when you like post about your program on LinkedIn and you're not sure how people will receive it. I think I was pretty lucky in terms of like, I've always been like in the ecosystem for a while. So like felt comfortable exploring and trying to pursue my own thing within it. With the accelerators themself, we are more early stage, I'd say, than a lot of the other accelerators. So for example, in our latest cohort, we're usually like the first step into the ecosystem for people. So off the back of the cohort we ran, we're actually gonna do a summary post about this probably in a few weeks' time. But for example, one of them is in like Y Combinator. Oh, wow. Another one just raised from like a US VC. Mary Technology announced like their $1.35 mil pre-seed round. Jack just got term sheet from Galileo. And I know two of them are in Startmate and one in Techstars now. So I think we serve a very sweet spot in the ecosystem in terms of it's like equity-free. Like I'm just running it for fun because it's a cool thing to do for people and people love it. So there's like not too much pressure in terms of like competing with people. It's more, can we just like build something really cool, which people in the ecosystem respect essentially. 8:56 Georgie Healy: Yeah, it's incredible the impact you guys have made on a relatively short amount of time. Everyone's aware of Build Club and the momentum you guys are having is incredible. I do remember in the early days of Build Club, you wrote this on LinkedIn and you mentioned that traditional accelerators in, in some ways have failed startups and you hope to reinvent the relationship between founders and incubators. Or maybe I'm paraphrasing that terribly, But how do you hope to give founders something different that adds so much value? You know, I've definitely been asked so many times about my experience in accelerators because there is that kind of polarity of like it's terrible or it's amazing. Yeah. 9:38 Annie Liao: So with Build Club's accelerator, a lot of it was inspired by what we saw in like the San Francisco tech scenes where there's a lot more culture of people like paying it forward, helping each other. People live in hacker houses together and it's just a really fun vibe. So we really wanted to try to bring that spirit to Australia. And in terms of our accelerator itself, we focused on a very specific persona of builder. So the latest accelerator cohort we ran, everyone was basically a solo founder and had to be able to code. And the reason why we did that is so people had more to connect on. And we literally just took like the top builders in our community. So Some of them were just tinkering on the side. And then with our accelerator, we help them go like full-time into their idea. And a lot of it is just like, how can we like bring together really like-minded people and just like support them where they need it? 10:33 Georgie Healy: Amazing. You and I have like a VC background, quite a technical background, very metrics-driven. How do you identify metrics that help you know if these startups are successful? Succeeding? Like they've all got different goals, I'm guessing. It's all very early stage. How do you know if you're achieving what you want to achieve? 10:53 Annie Liao: I think VC is always a game of chance. When we were selecting our cohort, I did, I interviewed every single person and a lot of it is just based off, I think the best founders are super resilient and you can tell like they've probably been traumatized in some type of past life or have had to work through something like a really hard scenario. And I think building a startup is just surviving and not giving up. So for our cohort, a lot of it was just like vibe check, to be honest. And a lot of the people, because they had been coming like to Build Club for a while, we knew they were ambitious and we knew that what they were building was like pretty cool. 'Cause we have, I'd like to say like a deep understanding of the AI space. 'Cause we run like an AI community and see a lot of the discussion and like what tools builders are really interested in using. So I think all those things helped us build conviction a lot in the founders. A lot of them were pre-idea almost at that stage. And we just like help them, give them like the knowledge which they might not be familiar with. And that stuff is more on like the cap raising side. 11:56 Georgie Healy: Yeah, very rewarding role as well. You touched upon San Fran and for the longest time and still the debate of whether startups from Australia need to relocate or have a co-founder move to America or San Fran to get the investment support they need or not. We recently had Christine from Brainland experiencing a bit of a ceiling with health tech and AI here in Australia. Talk to me about the San Fran part of the cohort, and do you think there is a bit of a ceiling in Australia before, like, to grow and to scale? 12:35 Annie Liao: Yes. I will be careful how I answer this one. 12:38 Georgie Healy: In an externally able to be shared format. 12:42 Annie Liao: Like I've always really liked the Australian tech ecosystem. When I was in uni, like I met Michael Batko from Startmate, who I asked to like, like advise her on like this mini entrepreneurship program I was running in university. And then had always like been in and out of like the Startmate circles and everything for a while. So like, I do think our ecosystem is like maturing with time and all our VCs are very, very friendly and just generally nice people. So I think that's really amazing. I think San Francisco, their tech scene is more mature just because they have been around for longer and have seen the circle effect of like exits and then the founders who exit then like going back and giving back to the ecosystem. I think we're at that point now with like Canva and like a few other startups. So I think that's like pretty exciting to see. I guess like with Build Club, hearing a lot of chatter, there's a lot of startups who are raising like at the moment or just closed rounds. Like for example, 2 startups in our accelerator have US lead investors. And for them, they were able to get, to be honest, just like a better valuation and faster decision to yes. I'd say like, if you're raising money, you should definitely try US and Australia. But I don't think you're like set back also if you just choose Australian VCs. 13:58 Georgie Healy: Quite an interesting insight. I recently spoke to one of the mentors for our accelerator, who's originally from the US and just said that they were dismayed at the lack of support here. And I always thought there was a ton of support. So, so it's really interesting to hear. It's a great takeaway that if you're looking to raise, that perhaps don't limit your pool of options. Side note, a few trends since I first started in the Australian startup ecosystem. I remember everyone used to be in stealth mode and it used to be very desirable to be in stealth mode. And now I'm noticing, and perhaps you are too, that this like build in public persona has come out from founders. Do you think that this is benefiting your AI founders to build in public or does it depend on the startup? 14:51 Annie Liao: I'd say it's very startup dependent. There are still a lot of people in Thought Club who build in stealth mode. A cool trend, or like one thing I think is really taking off is like founder-led sales. So a lot of the time when people actually post in public, it's to drive a particular like CTA for their startup, for example, to like sign up to a demo or a waitlist. And I think if you share what you're building, a lot more people like buy into your journey and also like support you as you grow, go up and down like the startup rollercoaster. 15:24 Georgie Healy: Yeah. 15:25 Annie Liao: Yeah, it's really a mixed bag. I know in book club we always encourage building in public because then that way the community can like help each other out. 15:32 Georgie Healy: I think it reminds me of LinkedIn or social media in general. Some people love it and are so good at it and it helps their personal brand. Some people just rub people up the wrong way or it comes across like self-congratulatory and it's like, you should not be posting so much on LinkedIn. So it reminds me a little bit of that. So your background in VC, no doubt got a view on how to best support your cohort in terms of how to pitch to investors and how to go to market. But for these founders in their infancy, team building, is that something that you cover or you focus on the solo founder and developing personally first? 16:13 Annie Liao: I'm pretty opinionated about this. I think with AI, like anyone can run a startup with a very, very small tight-knit team. My view on like the future of work is that in future, all work will be done through, or like bounties. And then it will be people who have like swarms of agents or their startup, like solving bounties. And that's how jobs will be done in future. I think AI democratizes a lot of things. And one of those things is building a startup with a lot less resources than before. So for example, maybe if you had to hire like 3 software engineers before, you now probably only have to hire one and they can use like Cursor or Copilot tools to increase their output. So I'm very passionate about like solopreneurship and that in future people will be able to bootstrap their way to profitability and that our whole ways of working are just going to change now with AI. 17:08 Georgie Healy: Yeah. Amazing. Great insight. I have kind of more insights in the slightly later, closer to Series A stage, where their technology and engineering talent is phenomenal, possibly because they have capital, right? And they've already established their platform by that point. But where they seem to fall over is a little bit like accidental incorrect hires or, or more personal team-related relationships. 17:36 Annie Liao: Yeah. 17:36 Georgie Healy: But what about the earliest stage startups, where do they fall down most? Where do they need the most support overall? 17:43 Annie Liao: Yeah, I think it's a long-running joke in Build Club that people don't like to talk to customers that much. So I think as a technical, like, founder, which is, to be honest, probably the majority of people in Build Club at the moment are on, like, the more technical track, it's encouraging them to, like, validate their ideas in market early, not just build it for themselves, but also try test for customers and see if it's a product that will serve more than just one person. 18:11 Georgie Healy: Yeah, it's really hard. I, I am not an actual founder because you get really excited by your own idea, right? And then the idea that someone might not like it, it's so painful. Like, it's awful. 18:25 Annie Liao: Yeah. 18:27 Georgie Healy: But what's more painful is pushing it down the hill for 3 years and knowing that no one will ever actually buy it. So that's, that's good advice for your founders. Okay. A little bit more about the technology. This is In the Blink of AI. So we, we do touch on technology a lot in other episodes. Are you affiliated with any particular tech companies at Build Club? Do your founders get credits? Like how, how do you play in that space? 18:53 Annie Liao: It's a really great question. So Build Club at the moment, so with our e-learning platform, what we're actually doing is going out there and partnering with a lot of the AI startups and developer tools who are used by people in our community. So what we've done is like curated essentially a lot of dev tools into what we call like e-learning, like bite-sized project-based learning courses. And our vision is to democratize like access so anyone can like pick up AI tools and build anything they want. So we have, I think actually more than 20 partnerships with dev tool companies. Most of them are based out of San Francisco at the moment. A few like cool ones we've locked in recently, I guess, would include like Cohere, where they're supporting us with credits and we're partnering on like an agentic RAG tutorial. Leonardo AI, we also have some really exciting stuff in the works with, and even more specific tools like Bland AI, where they are like a voice API company, really amazing founders, and we're collaborating on some like project-based learning tutorials with them too. 19:56 Georgie Healy: Oh, and when can we look at this library? I genuinely want to have a look. It sounds incredible. We're currently in closed beta. 20:04 Annie Liao: I'm not sure when this episode will come out. We will probably be live by then. 20:07 Georgie Healy: Yay! 20:08 Annie Liao: Touch words. But yeah, I think in earlier, in September, we ran like a closed beta bootcamp where we onboarded 100 people into our platform. And that was interesting, both for bug bashing and figuring out how people interact with our learning courses. So at the moment, we're just like building up more curriculum and trying to make it a very like good user experience for people that want to learn AI. 20:35 Georgie Healy: I'm very excited. That's, that's amazing news. And how do you rationalize what to offer? Do you do any pre-filtering in your mind of like, this is what's best for you at this stage based on your experience with the founders? Or do you just give them everything and let them play and choose for themselves? 20:53 Annie Liao: I think what we've learned with AI, because it's such a new concept, is people like to be put in very streamlined, like, this is what you should learn next. If this is like the role outcome you want to be. So at the moment we have like a few learning tracks in the platform. Probably the most popular one so far, or like in demand, is like the AI engineering career track where we take software engineers and help them become AI engineers. We also have like a product manager one where for PMs, that whole role is transitioning now that a lot of products which are built have to encompass some element of AI. So what we do when people join the platform is we have like an AI quiz, which people take when they join and we bucket them into specific categories. And then off the back of that, recommend specific career tracks. And we're partnered with, so our DevRel lead teaches AI at MIT. So our curriculum is very frontier and very up to date too. Wow. Okay. 21:48 Georgie Healy: Put your investor hat back on for a moment. Just a moment. I know that you and I both kind of threw those off a little while ago. 21:56 Annie Liao: Yeah. 21:57 Georgie Healy: Vertical AI, horizontal AI. I've interviewed founders in both areas. I ask VCs this. I can't seem to think one's better than the other, but I love to hear people's personal take. At Build Club, do you sway anyone? Do you direct them in any particular lane? 22:14 Annie Liao: Hmm. Very good question. I've seen both work. So for example, when we were at Relevance AI, we had a very horizontal focus where we were automating jobs to be done. I think that works well for very repetitive tasks. Seeing what's been happening in Build Club is that AI at the moment is still very, very early and has to be very customized for it to work effectively. So I'd say like, probably one of the most surprising things we've found is that more than 50% of people in Build Club do like AI consulting on the side. And the rationale behind that is because— Yeah. There is still an element of like AI nervousness with people and especially for small to medium businesses who have no idea like what AI is sometimes having someone like handhold and like guide you through that process and that's there to help service is very, very important. And I think it will be that way for a very long time in future. So I definitely say both could work, but they both have to be very customized and tailored for AI to actually do what it's meant to do and drive business value. 23:17 Georgie Healy: Amazing. Okay, well, this is perfect for my next question. Recently, quite a hot tech article was written about yourself and Build Club in Sydney Morning Herald, which, I mean, you're always in the papers, Annie. You're pretty famous these days. It was called Meet the Australians Leaving Their Jobs for AI, and it was published a little bit earlier this year. Do you see that trend continuing? Do you see people leaving their day jobs to have a play in AI? 23:44 Annie Liao: Through what I've seen at Build Club, yes. But I'd say it's more like a lot of people stay in their current companies and it's more reskilling or like changing jobs slightly. I think AI is happening now. Like if businesses don't adapt now, your competitors are going to be like leveraging AI and you are going to fall behind. And there's already really great like ROI, which businesses are seeing from AI. So I think it's very, very hot at the moment. And it's different to Web3 in terms of there's more push factor in terms of like people need it and there's real results. So I'd say like in Build Club, we've seen people go from having like no AI knowledge and being like maybe like a growth marketer to then getting a job at like Relevance AI, for example, as an AI engineer. So I think if there's any time to like get on top of like the AI curve and learn AI skills, it should be now. 24:37 Georgie Healy: Yeah. So this is perfect because you yourself, Annie, seem to get on top of curves. Before we even know that they're curves. I feel like you were in very prestigious consulting when everyone wanted to be in the top 3, and then you switched from that to VC before, you know, VC exploded here, and then started an AI accelerator from a very, very sought-after VC role, which you were killing as well. How do you keep predicting these curves ahead of time, honey. And what is your advice to people out there like that might have a really good stable job, but there might be opportunities? How do you approach it? 25:19 Annie Liao: I think I'm always like learning and making mistakes behind the scenes. I think for me, like everything I've done, I've just worked really hard at everything. The one thing which is in my control is like effort and like putting effort into things and doing them well. And I think when you prove that you can execute on things, and even if you might not be, like, for example, for me, I didn't know much about community building before. I think if you can outwork everyone, you can always, I guess, like, growth hack your way and make things happen. So I think, like, really cool, like, how I like to work is always trying to do things, like, as well as I can. And also a bit of luck sprinkled in there too. Like, I was very lucky that the role at like Aura Ventures came up when it did and to get like a referral into that role. I was very lucky again to like build like more relationship with the relevant AI founders and then have that role open up. And then again, with like the capital raise and everything with Build Club, having investors who just like believed in the journey and what we were building, I think there's always like an element of luck there along with like work. 26:23 Georgie Healy: A lot to unpack there. Definitely can vouch for how hard you work and people seeing that. And, and sometimes that can just be enough. You only have to work, what, 20% harder than everyone else, and then the opportunities really do open up, right? I say only, I know that you probably work weekends, most weekends and things like that, but still, like, your, your career has been absolutely incredible. Would love to hear a little bit about the Build Club raise. Was that on the cards? Was that part of your goals for the business, or or it kind of just one thing led to another? 26:58 Annie Liao: Yeah, it was definitely more along the latter lines. So one thing leading to another, I guess, like stemming back to Build Club's origins, like it just started out for fun as like a fun coworking thing for me and like a bunch of friends on Sunday to do. It then grew into like a weird AI accelerator where we were running accelerators, but weren't taking equity and just doing it for fun. I think where we're heading with Build Club now is very much what will enable us to have like the most impact for the people in our community, like the builders and like people that want to learn AI. We actually had the opportunity to take on like a small, yeah, like angel round earlier in the year. I didn't think I was ready for that. And we were still experimenting with like what we wanted to turn Build Club into. And I knew that if I wanted to go like full time into something, I wanted to like believe it 100% that we could build like something really big out of it. I think with the raise itself, again, a mix of luck and I guess just like BuildClub's community growing quite a lot and us getting more conviction in what we could grow BuildClub into, which is like democratizing access to AI. So very lucky to have like the investors we have buy into the journey early. A lot of them were part of BuildClub's journey, even from when we were still coworking on Sundays. It's, yeah, really lucky to just have that. For example, like Alicia from Airtree, like the first meeting I had with her, she said this could be something big. It could be something similar to like Cloud Hero. And I think actually at that point in my head, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go full time on it, to be honest, but just having people who went like, oh, this is going to remain like a small community and have them actually like back me to see like the bigger vision, I think also helped me build a lot more conviction like myself and like what it can be. We still do have like a really long road ahead. I know like there's going to be a lot more mistakes made on the way, but for now we just have like a really strong vision, which we're chasing and excited to like build that out. 28:56 Georgie Healy: Yeah, just a few more questions on it because so many people would love to know. We see the articles, we see the success stories, and I haven't seen anything like it in the Australian ecosystem. So it's, it's genuinely a fascinating story. Number one, whatever you're comfortable sharing, it all looks so positive and so like success after success, hockey stick graph, you know, classic, classic story. But what was the most challenging part about building it? 29:27 Annie Liao: I think because we started off as a community and then have like evolved in terms of like, we're not just serving founders now, we're serving people that want to learn AI. I think me navigating that aspect was like pretty confusing personally, because I thought we were just going to have like a small community and now like we're a founder trying to build like a movement of like helping people access AI. I think that's been like rewarding, also slightly confusing along the way. I think another big area which we need to pay more attention to is definitely like diversity and inclusion. I think because Build Club in the beginning, we focused a lot on technical founders. Who we tried to make like go hardcore and like work as hard as they could on like a project and dropped everything else in their life. Like diversity, like wasn't front of mind for that. And we didn't make as much space as we should have been. I think now with a vision where we're more about like equal access to AI, diversity and inclusion is like a big area we are fighting to make a bigger impact in. Yeah. 30:32 Georgie Healy: Yeah. Amazing. And finally, do you have a, ugh, consulting terminology, a north star for the company? What kind of mark would you hope to leave on the Australian startup ecosystem? 30:48 Annie Liao: For Build Competition, we want to be the go-to place for anyone that wants to learn AI in the world. We think that we can reskill and upskill as many people as possible so they can be empowered by AI. Not just sitting on the sidelines. I think as a side effect of that, we are working towards a world where we think that jobs to be done in future will be done through what we call like bounties and that everyone will have to use AI in their roles. And we just know that we wanna play like a very big impactful part of that and also move the world towards like safe AI too. 31:20 Georgie Healy: Amazing. Goosebumps. Okay, so I like to always finish the Blink of AI podcast with some rapid fire questions. I say something, you tell me the first thing that comes into your head. Some of them are spicy, some of them are not. How does it sound? 31:35 Annie Liao: Sounds good to me. Okay. 31:38 Georgie Healy: Open source or closed source? 31:39 Annie Liao: Open source. Oh, that was easy. Okay. 31:42 Georgie Healy: Easier than I thought. AI chatbot of choice? Yeah. 31:46 Annie Liao: Claude by Anthropic. Very, very popular at the moment. 31:50 Georgie Healy: Why do you like that one? 31:51 Annie Liao: All the devs we work with say it is magical what it does and can generate almost like whole apps end to end. 32:00 Georgie Healy: Incredible. Angels or VCs? 32:04 Annie Liao: Both. 32:06 Georgie Healy: It's too mean. Stealth mode or building in public? We did touch on this. 32:11 Annie Liao: Building in public. 32:12 Georgie Healy: And finally, what would you like to shout out for the people that are listening that they need to know about Build Club? 32:19 Annie Liao: I'd probably say if you're looking to be more aware of AI or really want to get a grasp of it, or if you're like feeling scared by it, come hang out with people at Build Club. We're very, very friendly and just like an open community and like place where you can go to like learn what it means for you. Amazing. 32:38 Georgie Healy: Annie, thank you so much for speaking with me. Absolutely love learning about, you know, whether to stay in Australia, go to the US, persona that you're going for with the solo AI founders. You know, so much I learned in such a short space of time. I'm pumped to see the library of resources. I think I have no excuse but to get a little bit more involved in learning about AI. And I don't want to wait until it's actually gotten too far ahead where I'm going to get a little bit scared about getting involved because everyone seems to know about it and I don't. Thank you so much for joining me. 33:14 Annie Liao: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. 33:17 Georgie Healy: Chat soon. 33:18 Annie Liao: Thank you. 33:21 Georgie Healy: Bye. Thank you for listening to In the Blink of AI. You can check out the show notes for anything discussed in this week's episode, and we will be back next week. This podcast was produced by Day One with music by Dan Hansen and visual artwork by Sophie Tyrell. If you loved the episode, please tell your mates. And I love AI news. Please share your thoughts and suggestions to [email protected] . 
In The Blink Of AI with Georgie Healy
Presented by Deel & Stripe 
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