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“Ambitious people” certainly describes Liao. Build Club may be a modest physical space of around 100 square metres for now, but she wants to build it into something globally significant.
“There’s a million things we would like to do but in the immediate term we want to build up our brand, which is really more of a movement, so that it’s known globally,” she says.
“There are some really smart, ambitious AI founders in Australia tinkering on nights and weekends and we wanted to give them all a space they could go.”
Annie Liao
“We want to scale this up to be a global community and keep the hub in Sydney. When I was in San Francisco last year no one knew really who our venture capital firms were, to be honest. I want to help bridge that gap.”
Liao was born in New Zealand and raised in Canberra. Her somewhat strict upbringing led her down a traditional corporate pathway, she says, including four years at Westpac when she was 18 followed by a stint as a strategy consultant at Boston Consulting Group.
In March 2023, she joined as an investor with the Sydney-based Aura Ventures, an Asia-focused growth equity fund.
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“What drew me to that was working with these amazing superstar technology founders every day. I thought it’d be one of the most amazing things to do in the world and it was,” she says.
“But on the weekends, me and my friends would to want to work on our side hustles, and we would just do that randomly at Starbucks. There wasn’t a proper place for us to do that.
“There are some really smart, ambitious AI founders in Australia tinkering on nights and weekends – and we wanted to give them all a space they could go.”
Leaving Aura was a tough decision for Liao, but the pull of working with some of her best friends while building Australia’s future tech companies was too great to ignore.
Build Club is self-funded to date and received the physical campus space as a gift from the Stone & Chalk fintech hub. Liao is also launching a crowdfunding campaign to help raise capital for the club.
“We’re at this really crazy moment with AI right now, new categories being created and industries are being disrupted,” she says. “I’m a big believer in what AI will do for people, so I had to go all-in with it.”
Build Club in March will welcome 10 full-time AI engineers who will partner with start-up mentors to help build out their companies. The engineers will also benefit from a tour of San Francisco, thanks to a partnership with Nvidia and AWS.
Australia is running behind in the AI rat race, as Liao puts it, but she’s bullish on the nation’s potential. She says Australia has no shortage of the technical talent required to produce globally significant AI start-ups, even if the US will still command the majority of market share through the likes of OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.
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Startup industry veteran Julia French has mentored Liao for the past five years, and is equally bullish about both Australia’s AI potential and what Liao is building in Sydney.
“It’s been amazing to see the impact of what she’s built so far, but I know we can do so much more for our founders at the grassroots level in Australia,” French says. “Build Club can be a global brand and I think the best place in the world for anyone building in AI.”
Build Club resident Graham Herdman has recently returned from the AI Engineer Summit in San Francisco, and says he’s now dedicating the next 12 months building his AI start-up.
“The ChatGPT moment felt like the early stages of the dot com era,” Herdman says. “That compelled me to quit my job and marry my interests in self-development with my passion for AI.
“It’s a significant opportunity to be accepted into this residency at Build Club, and I’m grateful to be surrounded by such an inspiring group of peers dedicated to pushing the boundaries of AI.”
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