Many Australians are now leaving their regular jobs for AI, and Annie Liao, a Sydney-based former banker and strategy consultant, was among them.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Liao left her secure job in venture capital to start Build Club - a co-working space for the top AI engineers in the world to collaborate and build their start-ups.
Annie Liao Creates Co-Working Space Build Club in Australia
Annie Liao and a couple of her friends reportedly worked together to put up Build Club, which was their take on San Francisco-based hacker spaces like AGI House, HFo, and The Commons that offer co-working spaces for founders and techies creating the next big thing.
Located in the new Tech Central hub of Sydney, Build Club has expanded into a community of over 500 AI engineers and builders chasing the AI sector that will be worth $1.8 trillion globally by 2030. They are getting their own physical "hacker hub" this month.
Build Club Created to Fight Brain Drain in Australia's Best Techies
According to Annie Liao, Australia's best techies migrate to the US for better opportunities, and she created Build Club to reduce this brain drain.
"Ambitious people have no place to gather. We can give them a home away from home to pursue their dreams," Liao told The Sydney Morning Herald.
"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 added.
Liao noted that many smart and ambitious AI founders in Australia are spending their nights and weekends "tinkering," and they wanted to give them "a space they could go."
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Build Club is self-funded to date and got the physical campus space from the Stone & Chalk fintech hub as a gift. Liao will also launch a crowdfunding campaign to help raise capital for the club.
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