The Good Tech Companies - AI Founder Zirong Chi on What Makes an Idea Worth Building

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/ai-founder-zirong-chi-on-what-makes-an-idea-worth-building. NxCode founder Vivian Chi discusses AI entrepreneurship, product judgment and what separates a promising hackathon demo from a lasting product. Check more stories related to undefined at: https://hackernoon.com/c/undefined. You can also check exclusive content about #ai, #hackathon, #technology, #nxcode-founder, #ai-entrepreneurship, #vivian-chi, #zirong-chi, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @kevin-li. Learn more about this writer by checking @kevin-li's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. NxCode founder Vivian Chi discusses AI entrepreneurship, product judgment and what separates a promising hackathon demo from a lasting product.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. AI founder Zerong Kai on what makes an idea worth building, by Kevin Lee. As China's mid-year hackathon season accelerates, the NX code founder brings an operator's eye to She Nicest's motherboard event, and a track record spanning AI education, product development, accelerator backing and ecosystem leadership. As 2026 moves through its midpoint, China's artificial intelligence event calendar is crowded with hackathons, demo days and founder competitions. Model Surrey improving, prototyping tools are faster, and small teams can now produce in hours what once demanded weeks of engineering.

Yet the central question is changing. The real test is no longer whether a team can create a convincing demonstration over a weekend, but whether it has identified a problem worth solving and can turn an early prototype into something people will continue tauss. That tension was visible at Motherboard, a Mother's Day hackathon organized by she nicest, child. his largest annual women's technology hackathon. Held on May 9th and 10 in Beijing and Shanghai, the event centered on real human problems and asked participants to move from lived experience to a working prototype. The Shanghai Node, hosted at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Shanghai Industry Education Integration Center, brought together about 70 participants and approximately

12 project teams. Projects were evaluated on three dimensions, resonance, innovation and practicality. Among the judges at the Shanghai event was Zerong Kai, also known professionally as Vivian Kai, founder and CEO of NX code. In a written exchange for this profile, Kai reflected on her transition from computer science student to product designer, startup founder, and increasingly, evaluator of other builders. Her place on the judging panel offers a useful lens on what success ina entrepreneurship now requires, technical fluency, product judgment, capital discipline and a clear view of whom the technology is meant to serve. Choosing the less predictable path,

Che's route into entrepreneurship began with a decision not to follow the most obvious career path. She earned a bachelor's degree from Nankai University and later completed a master's degree in computer science at the University of Michigan. In that environment, she recalled, the conventional next step seemed almost predetermined, graduate, moved to Silicon Valley and become a software engineer. She tested that future through an internship and came away unconvinced. Festibility of a traditional engineering career did not compensate for the sense that the path had already been mapped out for her. During a difficult period at Michigan, a professor noticed the change in her and repeatedly asked a different question,

not what she disliked, but in she's recollection, what do you like? The conversation helped her recognize that choosing a secure path she did not want would carry its own risk. working at the intersection of technology, users and product experience, she began to see that her strongest interest was not simply writing software, but deciding what software should do and how people should encounter it. After graduation, rather than remaining in the United States to pursue a conventional engineering role, she chose entrepreneurship, with her journey taking her through the United States, Singapore and Japan. I have always enjoyed helping other people solve problems, Kai said. Every time I truly solve a problem well, I feel a

real sense of value. That preference for problem solving over title seeking became the foundation of her work as a founder. From AI literacy to AI creation, Cheez's product work has focused on reducing the distance between curiosity about AI and the ability to build with it. Her main product, Bibabeo, is a Duolingo 4 AI, an interactive, game-like learning product designed to make AI and coding concepts less intimidating. Nextcode's own learning materials present B-Babo as a platform built around debugging games and interactive challenges, emphasizing the ability to read, understand and correct code rather than merely copy it. Nextcode's current public platform extends that accessibility thesis from learning into creation. Users can describe an application

in plain English and have its AI system plan, build, test, and deploy the product. Its website positions the service for non-technical founders, and more than 5,000 of them are already building on the platform, illustrating the scale of the audience KaiIS pursuing. People with a product idea but without the time, capital, or technical background required to assemble a conventional development team. By mid-20206, Cheese Company had passed several of the external tests that often determine whether an early-stage AI venture can advance. According to company provided materials, NX code was selected for Miracle Plus's F-25 Accelerator cohort as one of roughly 30 companies from more than 5,000 applicants. What a founder sees from the judge's chair, the motherboard

judging framework closely mirrors the questions Kai has faced Aoson operator. Resonance asks whether a team has started with a real and sufficiently important problem. Innovation asks whether technology changes the way that problem can be addressed, rather than simply adding an AI label to an existing workflow. Practicality asks whether the proposed solution can survive outside the protected environment of a hackathon. For an experienced founder, the distance between a demo and a product is visible in details that are easy to overlook. Who will return after the first use? What happens when the model is wrong? Is the interface understandable to the person who actually has the problem? Can the team acquire users at a sustainable cost? Does the product create enough value to become a

habit rather than a novelty? A strong demonstration proves possibility. A company must prove repeatability. That distinction was particularly relevant at an event built around overlooked experiences. Motherboard asked participants to begin with everyday difficulties such as navigating health systems, remembering medication or using interfaces that were not designed with older or less technical users in mind. In that context, the best use of AI was not necessarily the most technically elaborate one. It was the one that made a difficult task more humane, more understandable or more accessible. The next measure of AI entrepreneurship, AI competitions will continue to multiply through the second half of the year, and the speed of

building will continue to increase. That makes judgment rather than raw access to technology, an increasingly scarce resource. Founders must decide which problems deserve attention, which model capabilities are dependable enough for real use and which early signs of enthusiasm can become lasting demand. She's achievements are best understood as an accumulation of those judgments. She moved from formal computer science training to product design, rejected a predictable professional route, built AI products around accessibility, secured accelerator and investor recognition, and began taking on roles in which she valuates the work of other innovators. No single milestone explains her standing as an AI entrepreneur.

The combination does, at an event organized around seeing overlooked problems, connecting people and expressing solutions, her trajectory offered its own answer to the question of what an AI founders should accomplish. The strongest founders are not simply those who know how to build with the technology. They are the ones who know what and whom it should enable. This article was published under Hackernoon's Business Blogging Program. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.