Tony Siu founded one of Philly’s fastest-growing tech meetups, built on a career spent bringing people together.
Siu, an AI engineering consultant, founded Code and Coffee Philadelphia in 2024 when he was looking for a group of fellow engineers to learn from. Now, the community has grown to multiple events per week, more than 3,500 members on Meetup and even its first pitch competition with Pennovation Works in January.
“It’s not just my meetup. It’s made up of other people’s expectations, hopes and what they want out of it. That really brings out the value.”
Tony Siu, Code and Coffee Philadelphia
“It’s organic, it’s spontaneous and it’s welcoming of many different people from diverse backgrounds, from different walks of life, from different technical expertise, subject matter expertise,” Siu told Technical.ly.
But Siu never anticipated the group gaining that much traction, he said. When he started it, he was trying to recreate the casual collaborative atmosphere he experienced when he was first learning to code abroad.
Originally from Hong Kong, Siu moved to Taiwan, where he began a tech career and got involved in the local meetup scene.
He moved to Philadelphia as part of an exchange student program, and while he briefly tried out living in the Bay Area, it was ultimately a strong support system that landed him back here.
In this edition of How I Got Here, Siu discusses how he got into tech, the backstory behind Code and Coffee Philadelphia and why he is an advocate for casual meetup culture.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you first get into the tech world?
In 2019, there was a lot of political unrest in Hong Kong and I wanted to escape, so I went to Taiwan. I had no high school diploma and had just recovered from my debilitating spine issues.
At that time, I went to different coffee shops and technology meetups in Taipei and met all these full-stack, AI and blockchain engineers. I just tried to absorb as much as I could every day.
Eventually, I picked up how to program and code with the knowledge I learned from the coffee shops and meetups and started teaching as a freelance gig in Taiwan. I started landing jobs as a computer vision engineer, and then went to a top university in Taiwan and became a computer vision research lead at Google University Research.
You briefly moved to San Francisco to work for a16z Speedrun. What did you learn from that experience?
I wanted to take risks, and there’s no better risk than going to San Francisco and seeing how well I would fare there.
I learned that a huge portion of launching a startup has nothing to do with engineering, skill or merit. It has everything to do with how well you communicate and read between the lines and present yourself to other people, even if you have nothing to show.
There’s always this conflict between engineering, sales and marketing. The investors really want you to focus on the go-to-market and the business and the distribution, and then we, as engineers, really want to make a good product and make a good demo.
Based on your experience in different cities, what do you think of Philly’s tech ecosystem?
Philadelphia is very risk-averse, but the talent is there. Philadelphia does more with less, and the talent here is a lot more scrappy. It finds different and creative ways to get things done.
However, there are undefined incentives. The city asks how it can use technology to combat crime, or better the culture in Philadelphia, for example, but maybe technology is not the correct tool to use.
Why did you start Code and Coffee?
I came to Philadelphia for an exchange program at Temple University, where I was continuing my Google research and publishing papers about multi-modal generative AI. During that time, I founded Code and Coffee Philly, mainly so that I could bring that environment that I had in Taiwan with me.
I needed a group of people to bring the best out of me. I needed that support group as a foreigner. My friends agreed that we all want this environment to grow our skills, our careers and as a person.
I never really meant for Code and Coffee to grow to how big it is today. My rule of thumb is if I am responsible to myself and hold myself to the utmost excellence, and as a consequence, it helps other people, that’s cool. That seems to be what happened with Code and Coffee.
How do you hope to see Code and Coffee grow in the future?
It’s not just my meetup. It’s made up of other people’s expectations, hopes and what they want out of it. That really brings out the value. In that sense, it really depends on the community and what they want.
Code and Coffee is growing and we’re really trying to formally become a nonprofit organization. So, we would highly appreciate any feedback from the community and ecosystem.
Do you have any advice for people in the tech space looking for community?
That engineer or mentor that you really want to learn things from is probably closer than you think. You just have to reach out. You’re always just one person away from another 10,000 in your support group.
