- Saw a big difference in the way community AI events were held in KL versus in London
- Support and guide others to become ecosystem builders with an ethos of sharing for the greater good
This is not a founder story, although Joseph Chin (pic) did return home to Malaysia to start an AI company as a solopreneur in Jan 2024. That was not the main reason the software engineer came back. Love and fear played equal roles in his decision.
Living in London, Covid-era restrictions had already made him re-evaluate his distance from family. “Really, how many times am I going see my parents who live in KL,” he asked. “Like, once every two years?”
And then there was fear from his interpretation of generative AI’s arrival. “These AI tools like GPT-3 were coming out,” he said, and he found himself thinking, “there’s not long for us software engineers… how much longer till they (AI) replace us.”
So, in Jan 2024, the software engineer who studied AI and Machine Learning, quit and moved back, deciding to “try and build a company” and launched DocuAsk, an AI-powered document management platform. But more on this later.
As someone who doubted the value of a university education, where the academics teaching you have never built anything themselves and where 99% of what is learnt is not relevant to the real world (mind you this was before AI came into the picture), Joseph however realized the value of community events where like-minded people gather. In London, where he worked, he saw what happens when communities have routine meetups. When this happens, these meetups are not “special events” but part of the weekly rhythm. People show up, not just to listen, but to contribute. This results in the benefits compounding quietly.
But back in Malaysia, he saw something else. AI was being treated as a topic for panels and as an opportunity to issue press releases and get into the media, rather than as a capability that builders could learn, stress-test, and apply to real business problems.
So, in May 2025 Joseph launched the KL Chapter of AI Tinkerers, a movement that began in the US and is now in over 60 cities around the world and started convening people around the work: the practical questions, the demos, the uncomfortable failures, and the small wins. His emphasis was less on “AI evangelism” and more on building a culture of doing. That distinction matters. Communities that form around hype burn out. Communities that form around craft endure.
The ‘five people’ origin story
Joseph had to endure too. It was not like the KL chapter of AI Tinkerers took off like a rocket. “Very, very small, like six people, If I count myself,” he said, recalling the first event. Still, that meet at Multimedia University (MMU) Cyberjaya in May delivered a backstory: 30 RSVPs, five attendees. He does not call it a failure. It was “meaningful”, and it “grew from there.”
The struggle, early on, was basic. “We started from such grassroots,” he said, “begging for venues and all.” Organising, he admitted, is not a side hobby when you take it seriously: “It takes a lot of my time… blood, sweat and tears.”
Yet he described the emotional logic that keeps him in it: “If you put in this much time and effort into something, you have to love it.” The moments that still land are the demo days, where he watches local builders present their work and thinks, “Oh my gosh… I can’t believe this is happening in this place (KL).”
And he was saying that a lot last weekend at the Cursor x Anthropic Hackathon Malaysia that was organized by the Cursor Community, of which AI Tinkerers KL is part of.
The 24-hour event, held at Monash University Malaysia, demonstrated Joseph’s conviction that magic happens when the AI ecosystem, ranging from individuals (tech savvy or not) to small and global AI companies come together with common purpose, with 684 participants dividing into teams that submitted 140 projects after 24 intensive hours of coding.
Although only 28, Chin is quick to credit the younger leaders in the AI community. “I kind of took the ball and I gave to these guys,” he said, and “they really took it and ran with it further than I could have ever expected.”
Prior to this, Joseph’s online sharing of his journey as a fledgling AI community builder caught the attention of the 500 Global team in Malaysia and he was introduced to a group of community managers who would meet at the 500 Global KL office monthly to share ideas, energy and experience. Pooling resources also allowed them to plan bigger events together – hence the Cursor x Anthropic Hackathon Malaysia.
Joseph’s ethos as a community builder is to share, not hoard. “Start your own community. Let’s do this together. Anything you need, I’ll share,” he would encourage to those who shared ideas and pain points with him. “I’ll connect you with whoever you want to connect to.”
The (brief) DocuAsk journey
Chin is building DocuAsk which he launched in Jan 2024 as “a solo founded project” trying to solve a pain point he encountered when working as a software engineer. Not surprisingly, he ran into the classic founder whiplash: from engineer to operator. “As a software developer you’re obscured from many of the aspects of a business, of the problems,” he said. “I had to definitely go through some growing pains,” and “definitely got a few slaps in the face,” he said.
It has over a quarter of a million users worldwide and hit a “peak US$40,000 in monthly recurring revenue,” he said.
Unlike most founders, he does not talk it up like it is the next big thing in the enterprise world. And while he hopes to hit US$1 million (RM4.1 million) in annual recurring revenue, he is candid about the bottleneck to hit this mark. “It is becoming a bit difficult with the customer service side of things in handling current growth even, and I’m thinking of hiring.”
The more we mobilize, the more we feed, the more we enable, the faster that scene is going to grow
The conversation comes back to AI community building and the role of the government with Joseph surprised by how responsive and execution-oriented the government has been, particularly National AI Office (NAIO) and MyDigital.
According to him, Sam Majid, the CEO of NAIO, “is everywhere all the time,” showing up, staying close to the ground, and pushing things through rather than letting them die in process.
Joseph proposed a live experiment he wanted to run with them. The “hypothesis” was not simply that Malaysia has interesting AI initiatives, but that the tech talent is ready to be mobilised at scale if you give people the right tools and the right problems.
He wanted to take fresh grads, early-career talent with software skills, even people without software engineering backgrounds, equip them with modern AI tooling, and get them to build credible solutions that matter at a national or corporate level.
“So we wanted to begin this cycle of questioning and experimentation to enable and mobilize this existing technology. Because the more we mobilize, the more we feed, the more we enable, the faster that scene is going to grow, and more people are going to be brought into the gravitational field, right?”
To his surprise, NAIO and MyDigital were willing to try it. “It’s not often that you get people in positions like this, from the Ministry of Digital, that listen to grassroots community and say, let’s give it a go.”
The Ministry of Health has been supportive as well, sharing problem statements and sending its officers to judge at events.
Such support and enthusiasm from government creates the momentum for a positive loop to emerge between community grassroots groups, government and private industry with Joseph hoping the community can eventually become “self sustaining” and for him to “step away from the operation side of things” and be able to spend more time on DocuAsk.
But there’s no chance of him stepping back. Because, beyond the Klang Valley, there is still Sabah for the Kota Kinabalu-born. “One of the big dreams is to actually take an event out into KK and then into the smaller towns,” he said, because “teaching people how to do things really, really can make a material difference.”
AI was used to generate the first draft with an editor responsible for the published version.
