When Drew opened the House back in May, the hope was that Charlotte’s builders would find a place where they belonged. On Saturday night, that looked like demo tables in the back room, burgers on the grill, and a yard full of members, first timers, and families on Cleveland Ave.
Inside, people were showing what they’d made. You could walk up to a table and ask the person behind it how it worked. Outside, there was live music, and the two of us joined Drew and Charles to record Builders of Charlotte with the whole yard listening in.
Early in the recording, Drew asked who was building with AI. Then he asked who was building at enterprise-grade quality. The second question got a lot fewer hands.
There was plenty of excitement about what people could build. How to protect it was a harder conversation.
We talked about what happens when AI makes it cheaper to find and exploit weaknesses, and what that means for a small team without a security department. That led to a debate about responsibility: when something goes wrong, where does the model provider’s responsibility end and the builder’s begin? People in the audience weighed in, challenged the answers, and brought their own questions.
One person asked how you earn trust from users who already feel manipulated by the platforms they use. Colin asked which platforms he trusted most. He struggled to name one.
We had contradictions of our own. Colin talked about valuing privacy while being very susceptible to Instagram ads for hats. I explained why, despite my criticism of Meta, I still use its products and sometimes trust a large company’s controls on access to data more than a small startup’s. It’s a different conversation when you have to account for your own choices, too.
Near the end, a nonprofit volunteer told us about something he’d been building. People were emailing his organization offering support (even money) and some of those messages were going unanswered. He’d started putting together an AI agent to help get responses out.
It was a useful idea aimed at a real problem. But when he asked the tool to check for vulnerabilities, it flagged a possible way someone could manipulate the agent through an email and get information from the organization’s Google Drive. He paused the project.
Now he was sitting in the yard asking how to build the protections in from the beginning. Charles walked through layers of review and vulnerability checks. I talked about thinking through what could go wrong, what an attacker could reach, and where you could limit the damage.
We didn’t finish his project that night. But he was able to explain what had stopped him and hear how other builders would approach it. The same gathering where people showed off their demos had room for someone to say: this is the part I need help with.
That’s something worth looking for when you’re building. Bring a specific problem into the conversation: the unanswered emails, the tool you started, the risk that made you pause, and people have a way to help. You don’t need to wait until you have a finished product to have something worth sharing.
When the recording ended, Drew pointed everyone back toward the food. The demo tables were starting up again, and the band was going to keep playing. There was time to keep talking without a microphone.
That’s what Saturday gave us a glimpse of: a place where showing your work and working through a problem can happen in the same evening, with your neighbors around you. Thank you to Drew, and to everyone who showed up, demoed, grilled, or set up chairs. You made the House feel like a neighborhood gathering.
If you want to be around these people every week, membership at the House gives you a home base and a community of founders who get to know your name and what you’re working on.
We’d love to see you there. Bring what you’re working on, including the part you haven’t figured out yet.
Watch the full Builders of Charlotte conversation below, recorded live at the CLT Block Party.
- Alan, Colin & Torta Studios team
If you’re in Charlotte, apply for membership at the House or find an upcoming public event. You can also join a Wednesday Collision Day and follow the House’s newsletter for recaps and what’s next.