The Builders Club

The best place in the world to learn AI 🪄

Founder

Relevance AI

Chief of Staff

Haast

Pre-seed investor (lead) and board observer

Haast is on the mission to help organisations find and resolve brand or regulatory compliance issues in their live digital presence

Board Observer and Investor

Sahha

Seed investor (lead) and board observer

Sahha is on the mission to personalize the delivery of digital healthcare innovations and solutions to customers through unlocking the potential of behavioural health data (API bridging neuroscience and UX)

Aura Ventures

Please email me at annie.liao@aura.co to make sure I don't miss your message.

Investor, specialized in AI/ML, dev tools, Healthtech, Insurtech.
💎Track record of investments led and closed:
- Sahha AI: Healthtech API, $1.85m seed round (board observer)
- Haast: Regtech AI platform, $1.2m pre-seed round (board observer)
- Harvest B: [NDA] seed II round

Investment Associate

Archangel Ventures

Platform and community strategy / build and a few other projects

Contract Consultant

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Strategy consulting in Healthcare, Climate & Sustainability, Banking, Energy and E-commerce across topics such as new venture build, personalization / artificial intelligence, due diligence, growth strategy, GTM, decarbonization, and org restructure

Associate

Westpac Group

Accelerated promotion (fastest in WBC history)

Delivered high-impact projects combining advanced analytics, AI/ML and strategy in Business Bank

Data Scientist - Strategy and Experience

Accelerated promotion

Built and scaled the Banker App (OneView) Digital Venture. Cross-functional role working with developers

Senior Analyst - Business Innovation

Analyst - Analytics and Insights

Intern - Multiple teams: Group Finance, WIB, Statutory Reporting

KPMG Australia

Consultant Intern

University of Technology Sydney

UTS Startups Intern

Hi, I'm Annie! I love learning and working with good people. I'm the founder of Build Club, we are democratizing access to AI through building the best place in the world for anyone to learn and build in AI 🌏

Prior to this I did a few cool things including:
- chief of staff at a series A startup building AI agents
- strategy consultant at BCG in Australia, Singapore and Philippines 
- learnt to code on the job and fastest accelerated promote (x2) at Westpac
- AI focused investor in early-stage Venture Capital (2x board observer roles)
- top 1% ATAR

***

Find me:
✍️M: https://medium.com/@liao.annie.2000
🐤X: https://twitter.com/AnnieLiao_2000
💃Events: https://lu.ma/buildercommunityanz?k=c
🎨Art: https://annieliaoart.me/

Being a female founder is funny... 

The bar is somehow too low and too high at the same time.

I’ve avoided writing about this because the moment you say “female founder,” people focus more on that than the job.

But here’s the honest version:

Founding something is already hard.

Being a woman adds small, practical calculations you quietly factor in:
- thinking twice about 1:1 investor drinks
- keeping boundaries sharper than most
- choosing neutral outfits / to dress down so attention stays on the work
- navigating conversations where the intent isn’t always clear

None of this is dramatic, but it is real.

There are barriers. There is bias in how certain situations are read.

And you carry extra mental overhead that some founders never have to think about.

... And while all this is happening, the company still has to move.

This year we’ve basically been working 7 days a week.
- we secured a distribution deal with the second-biggest hardware provider in our space.
- we 4×’d MRR in the last two months.
- we grew our community to 50+ cities globally.

Those wins didn’t come from perfect conditions, just consistent work.

The stats don’t lie: female-only founding teams still receive a tiny share of venture capital.

I don’t dwell on it, but it does shape the environment you’re building inside.

If there’s a learning, it’s this:
The barriers exist. Some are obvious, some are invisible.
But none of them get to decide whether you build something important.

Your belief in yourself does, and the maniacal obsession to drag your vision into the world.

And honestly, what’s helped me most is community, supportive girl friends and women mentors who sometimes believe more then I do.

I’ve linked our women in AI community at Build Club in the comments that has meant a lot to me.

Feel free to share others - someone scrolling might need them :)

#startups #ai

Annie Liao 🇦🇺

Founder @ Build Club - Reinventing how the world learns AI | Ex-BCG, Forbes 30 u 30

Here's how we improved our team standups using AI.

(and how you can too - comment below and we’ll share the full playbook!) 👇

The nature of work is changing, we’re all trending toward becoming AI-powered versions of ourselves.

Our hot take: productivity in workplaces doesn’t just come from using AI tools like ChatGPT

… it comes from changing how teams fundamentally work.

Whole systems transformation (staged).

This means:
- How meetings and “jobs to be done” are run
- How teams are structured and interact
- How the core engine of a company works (the most exciting part)

Our team has had shorter standups with increased output using these hacks:

1. In the meeting: Use AI notetakers compulsorily - for us, we use Granola (no one is stuck writing minutes).

2. Follow-on: Our Granola feed goes into our AI Product Manager “Bill,” which means we never miss an action item.

(This runs across all meetings any employee has.)

3. At the end of every week, we have a weekly wrap powered by Manus AI.

4. Surfacing back into our workflow: All insights flow into our natural work environments - Slack and Notion.

5. We’ve been using Gather’s new AI Slack helper, which acts as an internal company helpdesk.

A cool thing we’ve realized is that instead of presenting what we’ve done for the day, standups have become a show-and-tell for the AI workflows and apps we’ve built to get those jobs done!

Adopting AI is great, but if the systems and change management around it don’t advance too, you won’t get the full ROI.

Want our playbook? 

Comment below and we’ll send you some templates.

#ai #learning #workplace

Our community at Build Club is now in 50+ cities around the world! 

(making us one of the largest AI learning movements Globally)

It’s wild to think this started as a small group of friends who were simply excited about what AI could unlock.

Today, we’re running monthly events in Nepal, Malaysia, Singapore, Bali, Perth, Texas, and more.

Here’s what we’ve learned: most people aren’t limited by talent, they’re limited by mindset and environment.

AI is changing that. It makes learning faster, turning ideas into action possible.

But the real magic happens in community, a place where you feel safe to experiment, take risks, and level up.

That’s exactly what Build Club is creating, a space where you can start to see who you could become in an AI-first world.

Want to build with us? Check out our event calendar.

 And if you’re ready to bring Build Club to your city and lead the charge as a City Lead, apply (link below)

#learning #ai

Excited to announce AI Disrupt Summit - Perth December 2025! 🚀 

A new kind of event for a new era of builders.

On Saturday, Dec 13, we’re bringing together Western Australia's AI community - engineers, founders, and researchers who don’t just talk about the future of AI, they build it.

Hosted by Build Club Perth x Bloom  x Curtin Entrepreneurs, AI Disrupt Summit will be a full day of hands-on sessions, startup demos, and practical discussions shaping the next wave of AI in Australia.

Only 200 spots! 

Huge shout-out to Susannah Soon for leading the charge, and to our partners making it possible:
- Bloom
- Curtin Commercialisation & Entrepreneurship
- DDD Perth
- Blackbird
- WA Data Science Innovation Hub (WADSIH)
- Horst Maberly
- Lovable
- Matilda. Digital Endometriosis Care

This isn’t just another conference, it’s the start of a movement putting Perth on the global AI map.

RSVP in comments below

#startups #ai

How to choose the right AI tools to use at work:

(hint: stop trying to “pick winners”) 👇

There are so many AI tools - how do we know which ones to use is one of the hottest questions every enterprise faces with AI transformation.

The truth: you shouldn’t try to choose upfront. 

What we have seen: 

You need a test-and-learn system 👩🏻‍🏫.

Here’s what’s working across leading enterprises:

1. Build a portfolio, not a bet
Treat AI tools like experiments, not procurement decisions.
Run 2–3 tools per use case → measure productivity, adoption, and risk → scale the winner.

2. Enable pilot groups
Set up small, security-approved groups in each function (e.g., Sales, Ops, Marketing).
Let them test tools with real workflows for 4 - 6 weeks.

3. Create an “AI tool stipend”
Give each pilot team a small monthly budget to explore tools safely under governance.
Track usage and outcomes centrally.

4. Standardize how you measure success
Use the same scorecard for every pilot:
- Time saved
- Output quality
- User or customer satisfaction
- Compliance fit
Only tools that improve all four scale to org-wide rollout.

5. Re-run every 1-2 months
AI moves fast. What works today might be obsolete in 90 days.
Re-test, update your stack, and keep a living “AI tool map” for your company.
This isn’t about finding the tool.

It’s about building a repeatable system that learns faster than the market changes.

Would you want a template for how to run these AI tool pilots internally? 

Comment below! 👇

#ai #adoption

My favourite prompting tips?

Here are 4 hacks which have helped me complete tasks faster! (comment below your favourite!)

1. Let AI learn your actual tone of voice
Manus AI connects directly to apps, so I literally tell it: “Read my last 20 emails and LinkedIn posts and learn how I write.” Now every draft sounds like me without (too much) tweaking.

2. Use tools like Prompt Cowboy to turn prompts into systems. Instead of one-off prompts, I build reusable templates. 

Providing the right context to prompts and not treating chat interfaces like Google is key.

E.g.,:
- sales proposal skeletons
- tweet formats (this one is still a WIP)
- course modules for Build Club

3. Keeping a flexible tool stack: I use Claude Sonnet for front-end mockups, Gemini for image generation and GPT for copy writing. 

Each tool is still slightly nuanced and I am still experimenting with the best fit one for each task

4. Take 1 hour a week to turn repeatable tasks into workflows
The highest-ROI habit. Once a week I ask: “What did I repeat 3+ times?”. Then I turn it into a template, SOP, or mini-automation so future me never starts from scratch again.

One thing we are experimenting with this week with Talin Roche, Kevin Zhu, David Osorno and Shuwei Guo 🐧  is blocking out a half day hackathon a week for this. 

...Will post how it goes. 

The picture is me similng while waiting for Manus to run :). 

Comment some hacks you have been using below!

#learning #ai

So wonderful to see our community growing. Shout out to Jun Xi Koh for fostering AI innovation in Brisbane and empowering the local community with the best AI exposure!

Founding Partner at Optiease AI | Building AI Informatic and Agentic applications and Data Infra with Cloud

Build Club Brisbane marked an incredible number of attendees and their satisfaction record with this Automation Night with n8n. This as our 5th event was a successful milestone, received 60+ booking, around 30 people showed up!

First of all, I would like to express my appreciation towards Artur Shapoval for his volunteering on speaking for the event, he was really well-prepared and calm, put all the stacks and resources required on the Notion and shared it to everyone. In the one and a half hour with him, attendees learnt invaluable knowledge in setting up the n8n basic workflows, telegram bot and AI agent. 

Personally, the ability to synchronise and make the attendees cohensive are the most crucial factor in good workshop experience. Therefore, I assisted all people with the technical building with n8n while Artur is presenting in case they have any confusion. I regularly checked them in to make sure they all made the progress and have the ability to catch up.

For the last part, I presented a workflow that I worked for Optiease AI. Then guide everyone to navigate a basic workflow about how to receive the gmail attachment trigger, extract the key information with AI agent through the structured output, and send the custom stunning confirmation email in the html template back to the sender. Luckily, I'm able to demonstrate to the last step despite being struggling with the ChatGPT for 10 minutes just for a correct email template!

As attendees including myself, we all really know that education and practical workshop upskilled our community; We even provided the pizzas and drinks for everyone to fuel them physically, all of them are pretty satisfied with the events quality and the values that they could get out of this experience; Such incredible growth couldn't be done without amazing City Leads that work behind the curtain including Pavel Zemnukhov, Ella Ferreira and myself. All of us paid considerable efforts on planning out the event, and really focus on driving the community growth with mission and ambition.

Thank you for our event partner The Precinct and Build Club Annie Liao 🇦🇺 Saanvi Yerawar to enable us to organise such awesome event experience. Last but not least, we are of course highly thankful for all the people who purposively make their way to attend our events!

To perpetuate this community spirit, we have already rolled out our next event -- "Build Your Own MCP Hands-On Workshop" on 10 Dec 2025 (Wed) at The Launch Event Space, The Precinct, the register link: https://luma.com/sq03cuk6. Register it to be part of the thriving Brisbane AI community before you forget!

If you are here, thanks for reading all these. If you are interested in sponsoring, speaking or attending for our future events, let's chat!

Huge congratulations Nilu! Incredible founder and company 🚀

Thrilled to announce Nucanon's acquisition by Indian Gaming Giant Zupee in a landmark Australia-India deal and what I think is the first gaming M&A deal between the two countries in history.

When we set out to build Nucanon, we had a simple but ambitious vision: to give Narrative Designers the tools they deserve to create truly interactive stories. Stories where player agency isn't an illusion, where characters actually remember your choices, where worlds evolve with you.

The holy grail of interactive entertainment has always been marrying the emotional depth of great storytelling with the agency of games. For decades, we've been stuck choosing between passive cinema and branching dialogue trees. We believe there's a third way - and that's what we've been building.

What excites me most about joining forces with Zupee is scale. Dilsher Malhi and the team share our conviction that the Pixar of the next century won't emerge through traditional film or animation, but through interactive experiences that blend video and games. With millions of users users, Zupee gives us the platform to take our AI narrative engine from concept to culture-defining product.

Our mission hasn't changed - we're still building a co-pilot for Interactive Storytelling. But now we're doing it from India, for the world, with the backing to truly solve narrative causality at scale.

To our investors who believed in us from day one -Antler, Skalata,, Outlier Ventures, Futureverse, Paperclip Partners 🖇, LAUNCH, Ambika Kulasingham (my mum), Mark Aubrey - thank you for taking a bet on an immigrant founder with a wild idea about AI and storytelling. To the Australian startup ecosystem that gave a immigrant founder a shot, I'm forever grateful.

Special thanks to Anthony Bekker, Janzyl Go, and Casper Xiao at Biztech Lawyers, and to Nina Hooper and Nick Ekanayake for guiding us through this process with such care and expertise. This deal wouldn't have happened without you.

And to my parents (Ambika Kulasingham, Kulasingham Ratnam, CPA) @ - thank you for believing in me even when the path wasn't clear. This is for you.

Here's to building the future of storytelling. 🚀

Thrilled to be building this with Brijesh Trivedi

Special thanks to our advisors David Yin, Nicholas Wong and Mark Aubrey

Also sharing a masthead with an Indian Gaming Giant is super cool.

taplio

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