Edition 2: Humans of The Builders Club

An inside peak inside the arena, spotlighting top ANZ AI Builders, tinkerers and founders.

Humans of The Builder Club

[Edition #2] Written with by Jan Zheng, Rebecca Williams and Annie Liao

We are so excited to share the next installment of “Humans of Builders Club”. A series spotlighting what ANZ’s top AI builders are working on, life in the arena and what they are excited about looking forward.

This week, we’re chatting with Jan Zheng of Phage Directory, a community platform that finds life-saving viruses (called phages) for patients and has already saved Dhanvi’s legs from amputation 🚀 !

Let's start with your background! Can you share with us your career journey and what led you to what you're currently doing?

My career background is weird and windy!💨 I’ve loved playing (and making) games since I got my first Atari Commodore 64 when I was 6 years old… which led me to studying computer science and psychology. Though many of my friends ended up in places like Firaxis and EA, I ended up at Carnegie Mellon University to study a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction — since I wanted to apply “game design techniques” to hard problems.

I spent a lot of time at agencies launching campaigns for companies like Coca Cola and L’Oreal, and eventually found my way into startup land by working for Ubiquiti. While I was trying my hand at starting my own startup, I met Jessica Sacher at a swing dance💃, and started Phage Directory on a whim. Not exactly a “startup,” it’s a community platform that finds life-saving viruses (called phages) for patients, and eventually saved Dhanvi’s legs from amputation. So that led to a grant and a partnership to help run a phage therapy clinical trial at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research, where we’ve treated 14 patients since last October!

So, my life went from game development to product designer to a data scientist working to save lives and fight antimicrobial resistance! You never really know where you’ll end up in life.

What inspires you as an entrepreneur?

My gut reaction is to say “profits!” or “making the world a better place!” But I think it’s neither. Though we DO make the world a better place (or at least Dhanvi’s and others like hers), what inspires me is impact, passion, craft, and starting from first principles⭐.

I’ve found myself impressed by products, companies, and craftsmen (like chefs) who care about the product or experience, maybe even at the detriment of profits or product market fit. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily make a good company, but there’s something special about the obsession of craft, and discovering an entrepreneur (whether a product designer or chef) that endlessly pursues the perfection of that craft. That inspires me!

What are you currently working on?

If you’re dying of an antibiotic resistant infection, feel free to ping us on Phage Directory 🧬 we’ll happily save your life (or your leg). Otherwise, many of the internal products I’m building for our lab are being spun out into a separate product called https://labspace.ai, which is meant to be a fresh take on existing lab tools like Benchling. I also have a fun side project called Blogalog, which I started building and launching at Builders Club! This is a linktree or carrd.co style landing page for personal blogs, events, and even pay-gated content. We currently serve half a dozen sites with a small but growing waitlist.

How did you build up your technical expertise during a typical week?

I spend a lot of time prototyping (designing and writing code) during a week.

I try not to learn new technologies that much, as there are SO many new ones that come out every week, it’ll become your full-time job just to keep up! I try to stick with the ones my brain can grok easily, then move on. I’ll spend some time trawling for new frameworks and products (e.g. from reading Hacker News), then when I’m bored I’ll play with that tool or build a small project on it. This is how I discovered Svelte and other frameworks I love! It’s also how I discovered and rejected many other frameworks and tools — I appreciate that they exist, and that others find them useful, but for some reason they don’t fit my own workflow or the way my brain thinks.

It’s a tricky balance to strike between learning new tools/frameworks/tech and using your current tools. If you’re fresh out of school and don’t have any tools in your belt, your best bet is to just take a bunch of tutorials and find what works for you. 🛠If you’ve collected tools over time — stick to those! You’ve already learned them, they take no effort to use, and gets out of your way to help you make what you want. But sometimes you find some NEW tool that you just fall in love with — this was my path when switching away from React to Vue, then Svelte.

What are you most excited about right now?

Building on top of AI. Not in the “AGI is near!” kind of way, but in the “wow using Cursor.sh, you just ask it nicely and it’ll write code for you” kind of way.

Many multi-million dollar tools out there like Flatfile can be implemented over a weekend. It’s a wild world of new possibilities.

While most VCs are worrying about the moats of their SaaS investments, they’re missing the point — AI unlocks domains that were previously unsolvable, like biology and chemistry. Using AI to disrupt SaaS apps is like building a flashlight app on the first iPhone. There’s no moat, and the problem it solves is largely uninteresting.

Can you recommend any books, podcasts, links that have helped you on your builder journey?

I try to consume as little media as possible just to give me peace… but I listen to the podcast 💸 My First Million a lot. It’s reminds me that there are lot of very odd ways people make A LOT of money out there (like building ramps for tiny dogs…). It reminds me of how big and whacky and wild the world of entrepreneurship is — and much of it does NOT look like VC-funded blitzscaling startups.

I also try to stay on top of the runaway train called AI, and this includes reading the Ben’s Bites newsletter and listening to the podcast Latent Space

You can stay up to date with Jan’s builder journey by following his LinkedIn here and X here

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