Today, I'm connecting with Annie Liao, founder and CEO of Build Club. What began as a weekend AI project among friends has now evolved into APAC’s largest AI learning platform. Fresh off closing her pre-seed round and going all-in on Build Club, Annie shares what’s next for her and her team. In today’s episode, we discuss: Annie’s early career journey as a data scientist, consultant, venture capitalist, community builder, operator, and startup founder—and the lessons she gained from each transition; A nod to her recent crowning as a Forbes Australia 30 Under 30 honoree; Scaling the impact of why Build Club started: to empower everyone to build their dreams into reality; Build Club’s internal AI strategy and approach to building; Why providing clarity is the most valuable role a founder can play; Taking a leap of faith to build custom GPTs (a beginner's guide); How to upskill your workforce in AI; The rise of AI workforce manager roles—plus why operators are uniquely suited for this shift. And, of course, I ask the “stupid” questions to help us all accelerate our AI learning journey.
Today, I'm connecting with Annie Liao, founder and CEO of Build Club. What began as a weekend AI project among friends has now evolved into APAC’s largest AI learning platform. Fresh off closing her pre-seed round and going all-in on Build Club, Annie shares what’s next for her and her team. In today’s episode, we discuss: Annie’s early career journey as a data scientist, consultant, venture capitalist, community builder, operator, and startup founder—and the lessons she gained from each transition; A nod to her recent crowning as a Forbes Australia 30 Under 30 honoree; Scaling the impact of why Build Club started: to empower everyone to build their dreams into reality; Build Club’s internal AI strategy and approach to building; Why providing clarity is the most valuable role a founder can play; Taking a leap of faith to build custom GPTs (a beginner's guide); How to upskill your workforce in AI; The rise of AI workforce manager roles—plus why operators are uniquely suited for this shift. And, of course, I ask the “stupid” questions to help us all accelerate our AI learning journey.
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Connecting with Annie Liao, founder and CEO of Build Club:
Laura: Annie welcome to the podcast
Annie: Hi Laura Thanks for having me
Laura: you've landed in SF How are you feeling
Annie: Slightly jet lagged excited to be in San Francisco
Laura: let's start from the very beginning What's your origin story
Annie: grew up in a pretty strict household Parents wanted me to become doctor/dentist type good thing my brother and sister literally became that so I ended up doing what I wanted to do Watched a lot of Shark Tank did really well in school ended up taking like an accounting degree at UTS University of Technology Sydney I met quite a lot of people in the Startup ecosystem then ended up working full time during university for three years at Westpac and learned to code on the job [00:01:00] there and became like a data scientist randomly at the end Worked really hard there also did a stint in consulting and then also venture capital it was like halfway through my time in venture capital We founded Build Club which started off as more of a community and then three months ago we raised our venture capital round also worked as an operator at Relevance AI before going full time into Build Club
Laura: Everything's happening in your world going back to your childhood from the really early days who shaped who you are today
Annie: I'd say probably family has shaped a lot of how I've ended up I think my parents both worked really hard my mum didn't go to university they were both immigrants so I think growing up and seeing them hustle a lot so like children have good futures was very inspirational during university I didn't really know what I wanted to do so I think a lot of the people I met there really shaped who I am Julia Wells is one of the most like notable people where I was like in first year UNIVERSITY she used to [00:02:00] work at WhatsApp as one of the first employees and also at Airtree I was running like a student entrepreneurship social impact program And then she was basically just mentoring me and jumped on the board for the program I was running immediately And even though I wasn't working in tech and didn't work in startups until three years after we had first met she stayed in contact with me for all my career decisions and really helped me lean into what I wanted to do and help me end up where I am today essentially
Laura: there's nothing better than having someone behind you like that from day one where are your parents from you mentioned they were immigrants
Annie: So both of my parents are from China and then we moved to New Zealand So I was actually born in New Zealand and then grew up in Canberra
Laura: We'll dive into your early career in a moment but you've just been named in Australia's list of Forbes 30 under 30 how does that feel
Annie: to be honest it feels a bit weird I think like I've just been pretty heads down working so it was a bit of a surprise I guess I think overall it feels nice to be recognized [00:03:00] but then also I think it's got to keep going and doing when they do I guess
Laura: So for you personally you don't tie success on something like that It's not a huge unlock
Annie: Yeah I think for me success would be building a product which people like and want and more the impact driven I think Forbes it's good because it's a good recognition of how far we've come so far but there's also just so much more work to be done
Laura: Well congrats because I feel like you've really shown some grit and hustle and it's really seen in the ecosystem so you should be very proud of that moment and as you've mentioned and as Forbes mentioned in their piece you've had a few careers already so a data scientist a consultant an investor a community builder and now a startup founder What have you learned about yourself during each transition
Annie: there's definitely been very very different learnings throughout each role especially because I was working in very different industries with very different team dynamics [00:04:00] Westpac I think I was still 18 years old at that time I was working in a team actually a all men team who are working with data science but super supportive environment they taught me how to code and like actually gave me real responsibility at quite a young age in terms of both doing data science but then also a good product management like a technical business analyst and I think I feel very lucky that they trust me with that really early on it was really good foundationally in terms of how to work in the workforce and I think the key learning from Westpac was just If you see an opportunity that you like just work it and something eventually will happen hopefully with a bit of luck then Boston Consulting very very different I think strategy consulting is and I kind of went in with it in the mindset of I'll just work as hard as I can and learn as much as I can and I think the biggest learning was when I was working in Southeast Asia with BCG just the different work environment It was my first time traveling to very different country all by myself and I think that was also a maturity thing in terms of self management especially when [00:05:00] you're working till 2am every single day learning care of yourself and also learning to speak up for yourself in meetings and things like that was BCG and learning how to work hard was the other thing I think that got instilled at a very early point in my career the transition into the third job Venture Capital I think VC was always something which was quite glorified in my mind Growing up I watched a lot of Shark Tank and a lot of my friends over time are founders so I think it was really nice opportunity to work with them and a very direct way I to give value through investments with venture capital I think it was really interesting I joined a small VC firm where the role description was almost you can really take the role where you want to take it and for me that was really leaning into the AI of things because I had been a data in the past life and also I really like community building so very lucky that they gave me the leeway to run with and see what I could do I think key learning from time in venture capital is almost similar in terms of going after what you [00:06:00] like sometimes you don't know how things will turn out Like with Build Club in the beginning it was actually called Aura's Build Club because we thought it would be an internal incubator almost for Aura but then we realized that it could be something so much more and more beneficial for the world essentially but we didn't plan it like that I think relevance The next career move and choosing to go into an operator role is very very different from all the other positions It's my first time working in a smaller team in terms of on the operator side it's a lot more teamwork and like alignment and getting to work directly with the founders when I joined relevance One of the things they told me was get to learn be a founder I think at that point I wasn't full time into Build club anyway so really lucky to have worked with Daniel and Jacky who basically treated me as someone like a C suite level person in their circle and we've got to drive forward a lot of really cool operational like sales strategy to HR and then Ops in general
I think I really enjo y learning I think probably across everything it's just [00:07:00] how quickly can I go into a role learn and level up and try to become lower class at it then when I'm at that point I usually think about is this really what I to be doing am I actually enjoying now that I'm in the role and in the zone for it is this something I see myself doing for the rest of my life
Laura: what did relevance in your time there teach you about going all in on Build club
Annie: I think in the beginning I remember it actually took me around a month to accept the relevance offer because I think part of me still was a bit confused about what to do because build club was growing really fast but then relevance was also a really amazing opportunity in the end I decided it was too early for build club essentially to go full time into it relevance was really good In terms of just understanding how startups worked and the dynamics So for example like all the board meetings I'll prep the board pack and craft the story of what we had done in the last quarter and I really think about how to position product and marketing and GTM and how to aligned teams and an agile work environment I think in venture capital all my other roles I [00:08:00] worked really hard and that's how I did well in the roles I think in startups it's different because you can always compare yourself to competitors but the only constant you can compare yourself to is yourself and like working on your own product and making that better instead of drawing comparisons to other people
Laura: so halfway through your time at Aura You spent essentially your nights and your weekends founding a community called Build Club honestly Annie I'm just so blown away by what you've been able to build in such a small space of time and how you've been able to bring a team together around you of leads in different countries or folks building hackathons It's been amazing to watch do you want to explain what Build Club is And essentially because it's gone through its own evolution what have been your standout moments from building this community turned accelerator turned AI education platform that it's become today
Annie: today We are building a platform there's few key pillars in the platform but at the core [00:09:00] our vision is to empower everyone to build So it doesn't matter if you're technical or not technical We think AI is super exciting and everyone should have access to it And we also think the ways of working are changing So our thesis in the area is that future maybe all jobs to be done will be done through this mechanism called bounties where it's just people who have a little swarm of AI agents working for them bidding essentially to do work and moving almost like a gig economy approach to the market and that's something we didn't really have at the start of Build Club so if we like wind it back to the very very beginning just started a small co working community A lot of my friends were founders we usually worked out Starbucks on the weekend So we're just like why don't we just co-work together Annie has her VCs office we can use on Sundays So then we just like did it every Sunday and all of us were like building and like working on that little like side project gigs But it turns out a lot of people were just building AI projects so then when we like start to run it but then other people want to join um we So we're like okay maybe we should scale it at the same time I was also working in venture capital so I was like oh okay there could be good synergies here so we started [00:10:00] experimenting with things like accelerators I wouldn't really call it an accelerator because all we were really doing was putting together like minded people who were at similar mindsets or really passionate technical founders or side hustling
on something
and that did really well So then we put everyone in a virtual Slack community and then there'll be people in like Melbourne was the first city where we expanded to who like reached out it was actually a founder who wanted to have a similar community around him So then we started to almost franchise it into a type of playbook where you could bring Build club co workings to your city and at the same time just try to scale that side of things none of our city leads we outbounded to be like Oh do you want to run in your city They're all inbound I think that was like a very key point of our journey in terms of everyone who we worked with in Build Club as like a city leader was like in it for the right reasons and just did it because they genuinely believed in what we were [00:11:00] doing I think it was mainly at the of this year we started realizing that Build Club wasn't serving everyone There was a lot of people where initially I had a filter in the community where you can only join if you have like a software engineering background but that excludes a ton of people And then in the market you can see a lot that non can now code because of all these new AI the market so I think our I guess criteria of who a good builder is changed with time and also in my time at Relevance AI we hired six AI engineers good AI engineers are hard to find and the career paths for them are also super undefined at the moment cause the underlying tech stack for AI is changing Almost every single day it's impossible to track almost what good AI talent looks like it's a few things kind of coming together and then on LinkedIn people would be inbounding me every day about AI projects they want built but then they want access to builders So lot of it was a pull in this direction to design V2 or build club into what we're building today I guess three months ago ish I had a few conversations with people obviously like Co Ventures [00:12:00] Maxine like she was a really big supporter even from the beginning where I chose to do Relevance pathway but I think it was VCs that believed in the big vision where I think if they hadn't gone oh it could be something big I probably wouldn't have raised a round tried to do what we're doing today
Laura: you said something there called bounties which I know in San Francisco which I keep referring to as SF is a very well known term but I don't think it's fully understood in the Australian market I know you did briefly provide a definition there but just for clarity's sake how would you describe a bounty
Annie: probably the simplest way to describe it is an AI tool which people can build for their business that could be anything I think what we found and what you can probably see on our landing pages for build club is we don't actually use the term bounty for business users It's mainly like you have a problem in your business you want solved and AI is probably the best solution for that problem because with AI you can solve things at a lot lower costs than you could before and a lot faster Gen AI has unlocked a lot of new things which couldn't be done we've a lot of bounties come through [00:13:00] Build club for example we've had a venture capital firm use us to build a bounty on all on all these PDF pitch decks they used to receive And converting that into written memos which is usually what capital associate would prepare manually there's people using it For example Encour Jessy Wu she's used Bounty to create different versions of press releases things like that would take people a lot manual boring labor sitting there copywriting for a long long time so I think Bounty is a really sweet spot where a lot of people don't know what AI do But it costs around like 5k to 10k max And you can get a really fast AI proof of concept build which you can actually use very very quickly So good for businesses who maybe are a bit scared of AI and don't know what to but kind of want to try something in the field we help manage the whole procurement of like what AI engineer do I pick How do I manage invoicing and everything like that we manage that for everyone and provide a very simple way where people can adopt AI easily
Laura: we're now going to dive into your role at Build Club and what [00:14:00] building V2 of Build Club looks like for you as a founder and an operator how are you finding that leadership transition from building a community to leading a fully fledged business
Annie: I'd say it's been interesting I wouldn't really call it too much of a transition because we are still building community if anything the community is even more important to us Now probably the things which I've found surprisingly harder than I thought they would be raising as a solo founder and for me I had a very operational mindset before and then because we're a two person team at the moment it's been learning to fill in the gaps one of the biggest hurdles our team's working through at the moment what does a good product planning process look like what we've done is just approach it with a operator mindset in terms of like scoping out the task and figuring out what can be done even though we'll probably never be best in class at product management it's definitely a skill we could learn that's probably the biggest change is having something where you have to figure out the answer because it's like you don't figure out the answer no one else will and taking responsibility
Laura: and bringing on your first Founding team [00:15:00] member any challenges going from bringing teams together to then managing a new team and building out a team
Annie: One of the coolest thing about a startup is you can choose who you work around and like filter really highly culture fit and then being able to build it in the way I would want to In terms of like if I want to build a unicorn with this team who are the people I really want in the room with me at relevance I did a lot of the HR there and like the processes around it and I contributed to hiring decisions a lot but knowing that this person is someone I have to work with for the next 10 years or maybe less of the next years in my life I've made some mistakes with hiring already one of the biggest pieces of advice I've been given is to hire slow fire fast So a lot of it has been just listening to what other people are saying and with HR probably if there are like red flags about a hire Not just ignoring them has been one of the biggest pieces of advice
Laura: what's your tactical or the operating principles that you live by for getting everyone rowing in the same [00:16:00] direction
Annie: Probably providing clarity is the biggest one in terms of you didn't have a clear vision and Roadmap that you validated that you want the team to be driving towards it's very hard to get them to go in that direction And for Build Club we've indexed heavily to only hiring people who actually believe in our thesis in the market one of the questions we ask in the interview is what do you think we should do with Build Club And if they can't answer that question well it's Probably not the type of person we would want in the team I think our product vision has been like co developed at the moment Tom for example like he joined our community I think like last year actually So we actually hired him fromh Build Club knew he the beginning cause he's joined build club for a reason so obviously it's saw value in it and it aligns to our values
Laura: and strategy wise where is V2 of Build Club going Where are you heading
Annie: it's very exciting We're building a scalable b2b SaaS product what we're building is we just want to build a product For the builders in our community it's like the number one thing the [00:17:00] key metrics we're looking at at the moment is like can we build a product which our builders get value out of and will visit two to three times a week so that's what like literally like the one thing we're focusing on is building something which they want we're doing a lot of customer interviews every day and co designing like design sessions focus groups and to make sure we really nail something for builders first and to be honest we are still at that stage of testing and iterating really but in terms of like general product direction we're building like free core pillars at the moment we're wrapping up a big e learning and building work class e learning curriculum could look like for someone that wants to learn AI we're also now moving on to more of like a bounties sprint So can we like really get the up and running for if anyone wants to adopt AI if you're a builder who wants like real world projects and get paid can we like always put that on autopilot encompassing everything is It's always that concept of community I think e learning and bounty marketplaces they're both things we've seen in the market before whether it be like e learning there's like Coursera Udemy [00:18:00] we put our spin on it to make it a bit more ingestible With bounty marketplaces s there's like Fivr but we're very AI verticalized like specific for AI I think one of the biggest things which hasn't been yet is like how to scale community and that's something which we're working on at the moment in the background And that's what we think will unlock of the flywheel
Laura: Interesting problem to solve Annie
Annie: Yes Yeah It's a hard nut to crack but there are like a theses for like playing around with
Laura: and what's really incredible is that you've just got this unique vantage point into how the best AI builders build with AI what has this taught you about building and shipping products
Annie: probably one of the biggest unlocks with build club has been actually talking to customers I think I have like a lot of assumptions about what people in Build club wanted cause coworking and people come to them And I kind of like take guesses at Oh we should run more co workings then but then when you actually ask a builder what they want and what their pain points are I think that was a massive unlock [00:19:00] for us especially when we were designing the products having Really strenuous customer testing actually proactively outbounding every single builder in our community and like asking them about like they joined Build Club if they could wave a magic wand what would we turn Build Club into I think questions like that have really big unlocks shortcutted a lot of beating with product decisions too and like even with build club what we're is just shipping fast and iterating quickly and keeping a really tight feedback loop on things We're keeping our team super super small we're scaling through AI So for example Tom he uses Claude for a lot of his code so Claude's like a coding assistant Even for myself when I'm editing e learning content we have custom GPTs which we're using to make it really automated And we even a little we're going to deploy in our Slack community soon for us we're planning to be an AI first company So we want to be a very small team So I don't think we'll grow our team past probably like a headcount of five for the foreseeable future And when we scale it'll just be with AI [00:20:00] where maybe instead of hiring a full community manager we're just going to eat our own dog food and lot of our e learning content we're literally just putting it up as bounties in our community for the community to solve Because I think if our community is not good enough to solve problems like that maybe our product's not working
Laura: I love it so as you're building your company strategy and your internal capabilities and systems how are you assigning work IE Annie Is going to be owning this piece actually AI is going to take up 60 percent of the resourcing for this piece at a really tactical level how are you thinking through that
Annie: It's interesting It's like our own internal AI strategy And I think like one of the weird things about like employing AI employees at the moment is how will all companies differentiate themselves if we're all run by the same AI employee like AI sales agent But if we all have the same one then how will you be better at sales than your competitor so what we do is like be really hands on and do everything first And then when we get a process that works then actually [00:21:00] CTO mentioned If you do a process three times then should automate it so hat's the rule of thumb of what we do And like a lot of the manual stuff you're like oh my god I don't really want to do it anyway automate it away from me so a lot of it is what do we find like the most painful we know we could replace with AI and then we go out and automate that we are also thinking through because AI is getting quite good If there are processes where we don't we just like start with the AI tool in the beginning probably an example of that has been I think we're looking at automating outbound sales at the moment haven't got something super repeatable yet but a volume game sometimes I think that's like an okay use case another one which Tom built a little AI product manager for us over the weekend is both of our weaknesses or one thing we're working to fill In the team at the moment which we don't just have focus on we're dedicated resourcing is the product management side of things we realized a of things in our meeting could go into like a product roadmap [00:22:00] but we weren't really super focused about it so he built like a AI product manager which literally can spit out a roadmap and keep track of all these things in the background And now we don't have a product manager hire on the team
Laura: and then for the folks that are listening that don't know how to build a custom GPT what's your advice
Annie: Come join build club AI is actually very very easy to use Like custom GPT you're literally just dragging and dropping a few things Sometimes it's just taking a leap of faith to start and you'll be surprised at how easy it actually is to do for example we built a South by Southwest chatbot literally in less than 10 minutes Just using like drag and drop and some English I was pretty surprised about the uptake it had on LinkedIn because it was such an easy process a lot of the more technical AI engineers would be like Oh God she's just like drag and dropped a few boxes But think it's interesting in terms of would probably build it if they wanted to build it from scratch would take longer because they have do all integrations themselves but now out of the box you can get a good [00:23:00] products built very quickly And works which is probably the funnest thing about AI at the moment
Laura: Yeah And anyone that's been to South by Southwest website would just be rejoicing with V2 of Build Club you're really passionate about building solutions for non technical and technical leaders what advice do you have for operators in the trenches building and scaling companies on utilizing AI tools
Annie: I think a core part of it is empowering people to better understand AI because people currently in the business they know the business best and hold that domain expertise And a lot of it is how can we use to empower them seeing like a lot of HR managers and just just adopting tutorials and upskilling programs to help their workforce upskill in AI AI is still quite early and I don't think you can replace like a full employee's job At the moment For now it's very like an enhancer and like a co and I think it will be the people that are able to leverage those co pilots who will be most successful in the workforce [00:24:00] too I think the first thing would be to Do an assessment just like see what's possible I think sometimes AI is quite a scary black box but a lot of people in your company are probably already experimenting with AI probably doing things they shouldn't be doing like sending data illegally with AI to different systems So I think it's very much like a hair and fire problem which leaders should address right now And I think as operators you have insight into a lot of the processes in the company and you're also on top of a lot of the strategy on how things should be done what I would is if we were to rebuild the company from today what could it look like if we really be AI and then working back from that working with departments like one by one in of can we reskill and upskill this to like optimize their AI I think what we're seeing which has been like quite interesting is a lot of companies are now running proof concept like hackathons where they're like trialing like little projects in a lot of different like And I think like that are really eye opening because can [00:25:00] like tangible it is It so I'd say like things like that and then more about like how can embed it in all the different processes too
Laura: Yeah I love that actually building it into culture activities to rally the team around it you mentioned the word security there's going to be some teams that have not thought about having a security person on the team How should they be thinking about security in a time of AI with employees using AI to get tasks done Um
Annie: I'd say it's very very important I feel a lot of the people we talk to they say their employees are just Googling things but I think like the good thing is a lot of people are really aware of how data and things that could get leaked I think even in some AI services at the moment it's not super clear where exactly your data is going So it's very important to say on top of it I think like best practices from what we've seen is top down approval of specific vendors and then using a training program or like e learning program to [00:26:00] then roll it out in a structured way I think when things go south is when it's just not addressed at all and then people kind of like work to their own devices to do what they want to do safe AI and AI ethics it's very important address we're also doing some courses on that at Build Club coming out soon but it should be at the forefront of everything
Laura: And then so zooming out what would you say your standout strengths are as an operator
Annie: I remember when I applied to my job at Relevance I said I was strategic but also just someone that could get things done I think like strategic from the sense of I have a background in strategy consulting where we like worked on a lot of really big cases under really tight time pressure where we had to think critically and solve a lot of like unknown unknowns for things And I think strategically learning a skill set of problem solving and like how to break things down And I think a lot of that just comes from honestly just like muscle repetition of getting chucked problems and expected to solve them a lot time there's frameworks for how to solve them think hypotheses and then talk to people to validate And then you come up with an [00:27:00] implementation plan I think having that set has been really helpful And I think the second thing is just getting things done there's always gonna be tasks where you're like Oh I don't really want to order the toilet paper for the office things like that But if no one else does it it won't get done and the whole team will be upset Um I think it's a lot of it is just care of the smallest tasks which like for me one of the things I tried to really focus on when I was Chief of Staff at Relevance was how could I clear up the founders time that would be like a lot of tactical things but then also strategic so I think like also figuring out As an operator how you operate is being one of my biggest things to unlock I knew when I went to Relevance I wanted to do some strategic things but then also wanted to help with the operational day to day and that was just something with Daniel we like worked through every day to balance out
Laura: it would actually be remiss of me to ask this when speed and getting shit done is one of your superpowers How do you look after yourself
Annie: for me as [00:28:00] someone that likes to work hard and I think when I'm not working that's when I start to feel like a bit anxious and stressed there were times at Boston Consulting Group where I did burn out but I think that's probably like one of the safest environments to test how hard you can work without burning out because I think a lot of people consultants or when you're working high pressure industries there are a lot of good systems in place where they're like okay go take like a week off and just reset completely I think a lot of it is clean cutting or like changing in environments which help a lot but even for me now in San Francisco I was like pretty burnt out last week to be honest needed a change And I think being in a different spacewhere you can start to breathe again and start to think through decisions it's super helpful And I think just surrounding yourself with people too who get it and like they don't have to be in your line of work Sometimes it's good if they're like like my sister she always shits on me puts me in my place a lot when I act kind of bratty having people like that are super important in life
Laura: go your sister we're going to look ahead to the future now And I'm very interested on [00:29:00] your take on this one what emerging trends do you see shaping the future roles of tech operators
Annie: I think the world is moving to a place where I guess AI is going to be affecting each and every role in the workforce one thesis that I'm actually really passionate about in the market is that there will be like the rise of a role of AI workforce managers where operators are going to be because they understand a lot of the processes that In every single company they're going to be like at the helm of almost becoming workforce managers for AI in terms of where do we AI into this process to like unlock the next 10x in business efficiency operators are definitely the best position to do that because you do have to be across everything and be both in the details but then also looking at things strategically so I think there's a big opportunity there for operators to jump on that AI curve learn about the potential of AI and like start to see where it could be realized in their current job
Laura: it's just so exciting what's your vision for the future [00:30:00] personally and professionally
Annie: for me my life and work are very much entwined at the moment I'm very obsessed with what we're building I want to build Build Club into the biggest thing it could be And we're going to work on as hard as we can to get up there essentially and for us that means probably the impact we make with Build Club will be the biggest measure of success so it's just tracking to that North Star metric every single day in everything we do So at the moment it's very much like builder/founder mode in terms of We really want Build Club to work because we believe in what we're building there's a opportunity to make change personally just continue to hang out with friends and have a fun outside of work too but to be honest everything's quite interlinked now which is fine because it's enjoyable
Laura: What do you do outside of work
Annie: I used to build and tinker in little projects outside of work but now it's all interlinked honestly just go on walks and get coffee with friends and gossip like the usual things to de stress.To be honest works a lot of fun like right now [00:31:00] our team is very vibey There's like a lot of really good banter and doing stuff because we think it'll be fun to do and oh let's do a one week sprint on this cool feature because we want to do it and like see what happens so get a lot from that at the moment
Laura: And I know that you've worked in consulting and now that you're company building what are the go to frameworks that you use to help you with strategy or to help you build a business
Annie: the biggest learning from relevance and also starting a more early stage startup has been goal setting with relevance we're at the stage where when I joined there were like 15 people and then when I left we had 30 So it was very much the stage of going from a startup to a scale up one of the things I implemented was OKRs So how can you keep the whole team in line when you're all sprinting really fast and you all really want to run forward quickly but you have to make sure you're all running in the same direction OKRs are really for that and there's a lot of framework workshops you could run sure you implement OKRs correctly for us it was a iterative approach we started with a [00:32:00] quarterly OKRs but then we're oh things are changing really quickly so then we moved to a six week one w which worked a lot better But then also learning that things change and like iterate are really important At the moment for Build Club because we're still more early stage It's more just having a really clear North Star metric which we're working to Um and A lot of that is also having visibility on the metric So Tom's done something really cool for example when someone new joins our waitlist we get like a little ping in the Slack and that's always very exciting and keeps the whole team really motivated and engaged with visible metrics IS also very important I think it's hard to handle the unknown unknowns for strategy So it has been interesting and like a change of mindset in terms of we're going to sprint at these things now and like the next sprint will depend on what happens in this sprint It's always a bit scary but for us we know our thesis in the market and everything's just working towards that it doesn't matter try something and it fails long as we're slowly compounding towards the North Star metric which we want to get to think it's fine to try things fail and sometimes there are things which will take longer like if [00:33:00] easy I think everyone would do what makes more exciting to build
Laura: this podcast is all about lifting other operators up So who would you name as operators in the ANZ ecosystem who are doing incredible things
Annie: Probably Mitch from NextGen Ventures So he's pretty new I'd say in our ecosystem full time but he runs NextGen which is first student venture capital fund in Australia What stands out about he's just a hustler it's very hard to get things to happen sometimes in the Australian tech ecosystem And he's literally like founding the first student led VC fund which is very hard also in a time where where capital raising for money is also extremely hard his proactiveness Getting shit done mentality it's like 10 out of 10 probably in my day to day I also work with Clinton who's volunteers Build Club currently and he is very good at getting things done too So he'll reply to emails he's proactive with comms and good at juggling multiple at once I think the thing with is he also checks in with me quite lot and we ask each other how we're doing and genuinely care [00:34:00] as a human I think one of the biggest about being an operator is probably getting someone to trust you to that level it's like probably the biggest unlock on the job And I think having Clinton and being able to trust him with things know that he will get it done and if he can't get it done he'll communicate it back has been really nice to work with
Laura: talking about having an unlock Do you have mentors in the ecosystem that have just been your go to's and saviors as you're trying to build a product that no one else has built before etcetera
Annie: It may sound a bit cheesy but I think a lot of the VCs are on our team are actually really good mentors I think we're very lucky to have Honestly a external team of people who I can lean on and trust even though sometimes I'm not sure if I should be oversharing things to them I think it's really great that they're always willing to look out for the best for the business And like having someone who has seen other startups go through similar journeys has been really helpful Julia Wells who I mentioned before who's been through with me before tech Annie and having her there has been really supportive And then also Daniel Ghilardi is always willing to hop a [00:35:00] call at any time and also has like reached out to check in on things having him there I don't know It helps a lot you have someone there
Laura: I'm so glad that you've got people in your corner that are helping you build So tech Annie tell me this is our last question of the podcast a piece of advice or a tactic that's helped you stay grounded
Annie: talking to other people about what's going on in your head helps a lot when you're trying to make something happen I think a lot of perceptions of things can get distorted if you're just overthinking about it in your own brain But honestly just talking to someone who they don't even need to know the full details of the situation and like talking to them about it provide a really good perspective on what's happening and really help ground you
Laura: Well Annie thank you so much for your time today congrats on the fundraise delighted to be in your corner as part of our work at Co Ventures where can people find you and Build Club
Annie: you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter We also have a Slack where you can DM me for Build Club And Build Club we run co working in 20 cities around the [00:36:00] world so if you want to come build with other people shipping really cool AI projects or just want to learn about AI we're a really safe fun environment to go learn AI
Laura: And I noticed you published a piece on Medium as well this morning around Build Club's story Is that something that you're going to continue doing And Almost like document that journey
Annie: Yes Yeah I think we gotta eat a bit of our own dog food because think in Build Club one of the core things It's like building in public so we'll be sharing more of our story as it unfolds on LinkedIn the highs and lows maybe you guys could like put me in my place when I get out of line too