THE SEARCH / LONDON
The best founders
do not apply.
They are running a VR club out of a basement on a Wednesday night. Maintaining the open source library a thousand companies depend on, for nothing. Four years into a PhD that six people have read. Building a compiler, a robot or a renderer because the existing one annoyed them.
It has genuinely never occurred to most of them that they could start a company. They are not at demo days and they do not read VC newsletters, so every fund in London keeps fishing the same small pond and calling it deal flow. We go to where they actually are, and we prove in public that they can be found.
THE FORMATS
We are looking for one thing. Serious intelligence, aimed obsessively at something nobody asked for.
01
THE HARD PROBLEM
Everyone in the room gets the same genuinely difficult problem at the door and three hours on it. We are not watching you pitch, we are watching you think. No deck, no startup idea and no interest in business required.
02
WHERE YOU ALREADY ARE
We run these inside the rooms you already go to. VR and robotics clubs, university labs, hack spaces, demo nights, the Discord you have been in for six years. We are not asking you to come to us.
03
THE BLIND ROUND
No name, no university, no employer, no photo. Only the thing you made. London keeps funding people who look like the last person who got funded, and we would rather be surprised.
04
THE REVERSE PITCH
We pitch to you. You have never once sat down and thought about founding something. Let us make the case properly, and ask us the questions nobody usually has to answer.
THE PROOF
Anyone can say they have an eye for founders. We would rather show our working.
After every event we publish what we found. Who stood out, what they are building, what we did about it and what happened next. Including the ones we passed on who went on to do well, because a search you only report when it works is not a search, it is marketing.
That record is the point. It is how an entrepreneur decides whether we can actually find people of this calibre, and it is the thing we want to be judged on.
THE LIST
Dates go to the list first. Rooms are small and we would rather they were full of the right people.
Joining the list costs nothing and commits you to nothing. We use your details to tell you about events and nothing else, and we do not pass them on.