From the King Charles III Space Station, Tom and Calum descend into a drone-filled kitchen in West Oxford — the home of HomeDAO, a startup programme that’s part incubator, part monastery, and part answer to a question British universities have stopped asking: what do you do with the most relentlessly ambitious young people in the country?
Josh, HomeDAO’s co-founder, has been running the programme since he was 21. The model is unusual: 18 members per year, $350,000 each, no requirement for a fleshed-out idea or even a co-founder. What HomeDAO selects for above all else is commitment — the willingness to go all in. The results so far include Pump.fun, now essentially a Twitch competitor built on meme coins; ExoLabs, a distributed inference company attracting serious AI investors; Rhinestone, Ethereum infrastructure born out of a hackathon; and Footium, a virtual footballing universe that raised over $3 million in an NFT sale in under an hour.
The conversation turns to why Oxford’s universities have become hostile to the disagreeably ambitious, what it takes to build institutions that endure, and whether Britain could capture the next generation of global founders simply by opening the door.
The episode explores:
Why HomeDAO selects for commitment over raw intelligence — and what that looks like in practice
The idiosyncratic origins of Pump.fun, ExoLabs, Rhinestone, and Footium
How universities have excluded the maniacally ambitious in the name of openness
The Coase theorem applied to startup formation and why coordination costs are falling
Oxford vs Silicon Valley vs Bali: what makes a place magnetic to founders
Whether Britain has a massive immigration arbitrage opportunity — and why problems of taste don’t scale
