I joined a hacker house to build AI
August 8, 2025
I walked into 500 Global @ AICB on August 5th, 2025, expecting another coworking space.
What I found was different.
500 Global @ AICB - where it all happens
the experiment nobody advertised
500 Global, Southeast Asia converted half their office into an AI residency and told nobody. No Medium post announcing the future of accelerators. No application form with essays about your vision. No demo day for VCs to pattern-match.
The founding residents invited builders they knew. Those builders invited others. Word of mouth only. The deal was stupidly simple: free space, free drinks, free snacks, dedicated desks. Show what you're building every Thursday. That's it. Zero equity. Zero formal mentorship. Just space to build.
how builders actually work
Nobody arrives before 11am. Not because they're lazy - because they were debugging until 4am (same). The office stays lit all night, no security guard asking why you're there, no automatic lights that shut off if you don't move enough.
I show up around 11 most days. Grab a drink from the fridge. Check who's around. Pleasantries, ask what they're working on, then start cooking. There's this person who edits TikToks on one screen while writing prompts in Cursor on another - edit video, switch tabs, test prompt, laugh at what Gemini coded, ask it to fix, back to editing. Building a product while documenting the process.
The common area
thursday changes everything
Thursday is demo day. Every week. No exceptions. You show what you built. Live demo. The actual thing working, or the actual thing failing spectacularly.
Last Thursday, a non-technical school headmaster demo'd an internal tool he built for teachers to generate practice exams. He'd taught himself Cursor over three weeks. The tool saved his school a 100k quote from a software house. His code was terrible. His solution worked. That's all that mattered. I went wtaf.
Then someone showed an AI interviewer with a Malaysian accent. Zero latency, handles interruptions naturally, doesn't break when you talk over it. Gen Z users requested AI interviewers because they feel less judged. That doesn't make sense to me, but here we are. They'd rather fail in front of a machine than a human. ???. Same pattern with the language learning app using Malaysian celebrities as tutors. Kids want to practice English with AI versions of their favorite stars because there's no embarrassment in mispronouncing words to a bot.
Someone else demo'd an agent that edits your Lightroom photos based on your editing history. It learns your style, applies it across shoots. Wedding photographers have already reached out to her.
Thursday demos - "yell to earn" in action
sf energy, kl mathematics
It's not about the city - it's about the concentration of people who believe impossible things are possible. That energy is here now. But the math is different.
Your SF rent gets you a luxury apartment here. Your SF coffee budget feeds you for a week. A seed round that gives you 18 months in the Bay gives you 5 years in KL. That changes how you build. You iterate instead of racing your burn rate. You throw away three months of work because you learned something. You build the right thing instead of the fundable thing.
People here wear startup merch because they use the products, not because it's networking. They work until 4am because they're in flow, not because some hustle influencer told them to.
The view that reminds you why KL > SF (financially)
why this actually works
500 stumbled into something: remove all structure except the one that matters.
No curriculum because builders don't need to be taught - they need to build. No mentors assigned because the best advice comes from peers solving adjacent problems right now, not from people who solved different problems five years ago. No cohorts because artificial timelines create artificial pressure. No graduation because building has no end date.
The accountability hits different when it's peer-driven. You're not disappointing some program director - you're showing up empty-handed in front of people whose opinions you respect. People who smell bullshit through a screen. People who tell you your baby is ugly, then help you fix its face. Shit hurts.
what changed for me
A week ago, I built in isolation. Compared myself to Twitter founders with their perfect landing pages and growth curves that only go up. Wondered if I was moving fast enough.
Now I see what fast looks like. People shipping daily, not tweeting about shipping. Pivots in hours, not months. Failed experiments celebrated because they closed off dead ends.
The question changed from "am I good enough?" to "what am I shipping today?" From "is this the right approach?" to "let me show you what I tried." From "I need to figure this out" to "who here has solved this before?"
For the first time since I started building, I feel normal. Not special, not behind, not ahead. Just another builder among builders.
That's it.
Where we build
August 8th, 2025