About Western Sydney Tech Innovators

Lailei Huang started WSTI because he could not sleep at night. He left his job at The Learning Space in June 2024, watching the intelligence explosion that pioneers like Ray Kurzweil had predicted decades earlier arrive in real time, and the AI digital divide widen with it. A few AI programs here and there were not going to close that gap.

What was missing was a community to join forces with, and Western Sydney did not have one. So in August 2024 he sat down with family, friends and colleagues, and together they settled on a name: Western Sydney Tech Innovators.

We launched that October at the Western Sydney Startup Hub, powered by Spacecubed, and the AI meetups and the community AI Lab followed. Then came the part nobody photographs: setting up the tables and chairs each week, buying the AI licences, running one session and then the next. None of that was one person's work, which is why we call ourselves community-led rather than community-facing.

Membership doubled every two to three months. By our first anniversary we had passed a thousand members, with programs for children, young people, women and seniors. If you have been to a meetup, an AI Lab session or a workshop, you are part of the reason it kept going.

“I needed a community to join forces with. But in Parramatta / Western Sydney, there was none. So I asked myself: why not start one?”