I joined a hacker house to build AI

I walked into 500 Global @ AICB on August 5th, 2025, expecting another coworking space.

What I found was something else entirely.

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 founders.

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 taken. Zero formal mentorship. Just space to build.

how builders actually work

Nobody arrives before 11am. Not because they're lazy - but 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. Just builders building when they actually want to build.

I show up around 11 most days. Grab a drink from the fridge. Check who's around. Pleasantries and asking what they are working on for today and 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, asks it to fix and then back to editing. They're building a product while documenting the process.

The common area

thursday changes everything

Thursday is demo day. Every single week. No exceptions. You show what you built this week. Live demo. The actual thing working, or the actual thing failing spectacularly.

Last Thursday, I watched a non-technical school headmaster demo 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. And I literally 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 specifically requested AI interviewers because they feel less judged. To me, that literally doesn't make any sense but I guess these are the times we live in now? 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 all your Lightroom photos based on your editing history. It learns your style, applies it consistently 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 mathematics are completely 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. This changes everything about how you build. You can actually iterate instead of racing your burn rate. You can throw away three months of work because you learned something. You can build the right thing instead of the fundable thing.

People here wear startup merch because they actually use the products, not because it's networking. They work until 4am because they're in flow, not because some hustle influencer said that's what founders do.

The view that reminds you why KL > SF (financially)

why this actually works

500 stumbled into something profound: 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 people solving adjacent problems right now, not people who solved different problems five years ago. No cohorts because artificial timelines create artificial pressure. No graduation because building doesn't have an 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 actually respect. People who can smell bullshit through a screen. People who will tell you your baby is ugly, then help you fix its face. Shit hurts.

what changed for me

A week ago, I was building in isolation. Comparing myself to Twitter founders with their perfect landing pages and growth curves that only go up. Wondering if I was moving fast enough.

Now I see what fast actually looks like. People shipping daily, not tweeting about shipping. Pivots happening 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 building things, surrounded by builders building things.

That's everything.

Where ideas collide and products get built

August 8th, 2025