This episode of MY Interface Podcast features an insightful conversation with Andrew Zhang, the co-founder and CEO of Azure Partners, exploring the rapidly shifting landscape of AI education and why traditional learning models are becoming outdated .

Andrew Zhang left the world of "Big Tech" giants like Amazon and IBM to solve a specific problem: the gap between academic learning and practical AI implementation . He argues that we are entering an era where AI doesn't just improve productivity by a small margin but can amplify individual capability by 10x or even 100x .

Whether you are a "digital native" student or a finance professional, Andrew breaks down his methodology for becoming a domain expert in just 30 days and why the ability to "ask the right questions" is now more valuable than the ability to write raw code .

What You Will Learn

The Startup Freedom: Why Andrew left Amazon Web Services to pursue a "dream job" where he chooses the team, the technology, and the daily priorities .

AI Education Modules: A deep dive into Andrew’s three-weekend roadmap, covering everything from content generation (Gemini) to intelligent knowledge libraries (NotebookLM) and "Black Box" AI coding .

Financial GPTs: How Azure Partners is researching and training specialized models to act as a "Bloomberg GPT" using reinforcement learning .

The Coding Revolution: Why tools like Cursor mean you no longer need to master the syntax of Python to build functional applications .

Advice for Young Founders: The simple, "bland" but essential secret to a successful startup: identifying a specific problem and building a sticky solution .

Chapters

00:46 Welcome and mission of the Interface Podcast .

01:13 Guest Introduction: Andrew Zhang's background in academia and tech .

01:43 Inside Agile Partners: AI for Content, Coding, and Finance .

05:00 The "Big Tech" Exit: Why Andrew left Amazon to write and innovate .

07:23 Corporate vs. Startup: Specialized niche markets vs. cloud generalists .

09:23 The 100x Productivity Boost: Methodology over domain expertise .

10:32 The AI Roadmap: Learning models that won't be outdated by graduation .

12:17 Digital Natives: Why the young generation is "AI native" .

14:52 Gemini and Beyond: Understanding the three core learning modules .

17:35 Deep Processing: Why "feeling the pain" of learning helps information stick .

20:13 Startup Advice: Finding the problem that people will pay to solve .

22:03 Host Reflection: Coding without characters and the power of cursor .

Quotes from the Episode

"People can amplify their capability 10x or 100x times... I can learn anything in 30 days."

"You no longer need to remember all the details about Python. You just need to ask the question how to use it."

"Challenge is the real opportunity... explore as much as possible. Read a lot of books, travel, meet people. That will give you the lifetime energy to move forward."

About the Hosts

Yvonne and Miya are high school sophomores on a mission to educate students and professionals on the impact of AI across multiple subject matters by providing insights from top experts.

Where to find Andrew Zhang and Azure Partners:

Andrew Zhang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-zhangg

Upcoming Gemini Masterclass: https://course-website-delta-seven.vercel.app/

Music credit: "Modern Situations" by Unicorn Heads

New episodes drop every Friday at 3:00 PM