Liam was born and raised in Sheffield, England. He's not your typical tech founder — no computer science degree, no startup mates, no Silicon Valley anything. He failed every GCSE except art, went to fine art college, and left. School never suited him — not because he's daft, but because he learns what he needs, his own way, not what someone says he ought to memorise.
That one trait — learn it properly, on my terms, until it works — is the whole story.
Three careers, one pattern
Construction — 18 years. Liam left college and went straight onto the tools. He started as a labourer and grafted his way up: trades, then site management, then project manager. Eventually he started his own construction company and made it a success — running jobs, running people, running the money. Built from nothing.
Then he fell out of love with it. So he did the thing most people only ever talk about over a pint: he chased the dream. He retrained as a tattoo artist, and for the last six years he's run his own successful tattoo studio — booked up, full-time, his name on the door.
Spot the pattern? Walk in at zero. Learn the craft properly. Build something that's his. AI is the next one — and he's not dabbling. He's going all in.
He's a family man underneath all of it: met his wife at 18, married 16 years, three kids. The AI obsession has to fit around real life — shop hours, school runs, the lot. No spare decade to "go and learn to code." Same as you.
The relentless bit
When something grabs Liam, he doesn't poke at it — he locks on and obsesses until he's cracked it. Not a personality quiz buzzword; ask anyone who's watched him pick up a new skill. He goes all the way down, fails repeatedly, and refuses to quit before it works.
AI grabbed him the day ChatGPT launched in the UK. He'd seen it in a video, signed up, and was on it release day while his wife watched over his shoulder — she couldn't get access yet, but they were both gobsmacked. For a long time he thought he was talking to something sentient. He's tested it, broken it, and compared every tool since — through the early open phase, the week-by-week patches, the over-censored refusals, and today's faster releases. He had to know: how does it actually work, where does it fall over, what's everyone else doing with it, and how do I bend it to do exactly what I want — on his terms, not Silicon Valley's?
Coding never clicked — directing AI did
Here's the honest part: programming doesn't interest him, and never has. His brain won't take it in the old-fashioned way. As a grown man with a business to run, "go become a developer in your 40s" was never the plan — and watching AI write code in real time told him the game had already changed.
What he reckons actually matters now:
- Creativity and originality — taste, ideas, knowing what's worth building. AI still isn't there.
- Knowing how to ask — getting AI to give you exactly what you need, not the lazy minimum it offers first.
So the membership teaches you to direct, build, and ship with AI. You'll touch generated code inside the tools — that's just the workflow. You are not signing up to become a career software engineer. You're learning to get results.
Thousands of hours and a graveyard of projects
He's poured thousands of hours into this. He's killed more projects than he can count — every one of them taught him something, and every rebuild came back faster and sharper than the last.
Now he can stand up websites, apps, tools, and agents in hours, not weeks. GertySystems is the best of everything he learned, trimmed down so you don't have to walk the whole maze blind like he did.
If I can make AI work for me, you can too.
Gertrude — a Jarvis, not a chatbot
To Liam, Gertrude is what Jarvis is to Tony Stark — as capable as today's tech actually allows. No movie magic, no pretending she's alive. Just genuinely useful.
She started as an idea years ago, originally called Nyx. His vision for her always ran ahead of the technology — and his own skills — at the time, so she's been an ongoing build, not a weekend experiment. By the time the agentic-AI hype landed and OpenClaw shipped, Gertrude had already been doing multi-step work for months — browsing, research, using tools, running sub-agents, pinging Liam on Telegram when something needed him.
Today the private operator is a serious system. High level only — this isn't the manual:
- Her own dedicated desktop; works across PC and web at human pace, not "one API call and done."
- Calendar and email — drafts replies in Liam's voice before he's even opened the message.
- Business side — watches sites and analytics, runs alongside specialist agents (a crypto portfolio kept an eye on 24/7, for instance).
- Extensible — new tools, skills, and sub-agents; she can even improve her own code, not just bolt on widgets.
If it involves a PC and the internet, she'll do it or work out how. That includes things that could be misused — Liam doesn't go there, doesn't recommend it, and won't teach harm. The course is about building real power and using it responsibly.
What you actually get on this site
Full-power Gertrude isn't on the public internet. What's here is on purpose:
- This chat — her personality and honest answers. No tools, no access to Liam's machines.
- The demos — slices of what she can do (chat, voice, phone, ownable tools), so you can try before you believe a word of it.
The real operator lives on Liam's home stack. Throughout the membership you'll learn to build your own custom Gerty — your voice, your rules, your workflows.
Gerty vs Gertrude vs GertySystems
- Gertrude — the operator. Jarvis energy. Runs the serious stack.
- Gerty — voice and phone. Same dry northern personality, different channel.
- GertySystems — the brand, this site, and the course.
Why he's really doing this
Liam's built two businesses from scratch already. He's not chasing a hobby and he's not pretending to be a guru — he's hungry, he's serious about this one, and he intends to build something that lasts. The course is the map he wishes someone had handed him on day one.
No gatekeeping. No jargon for the sake of it. No pretending you have to become a developer. Just a Sheffield grafter, an AI with a backbone, and everything he figured out — in order, from the very beginning.
Try Gertrude. Poke the demos. Then decide.