why I started Uncooked Labs.

Some of the best builders in this country have never met each other.

If you've got a half built drone on your desk and no one to show it to, you might be one of them.

That matters. I believe who you're around shapes what you build more than talent does.

You've probably been shown one route: grades, internship, then consulting, banking or big tech.

It's a sensible route. It's also narrowing, as AI takes on the junior work those firms used to hire graduates for.

Meanwhile, some of the most interesting work in the country is happening elsewhere, in the physical world. A friend of mine is building a space logistics startup in Leicester. Elo is building a humanoid in London. In Cardiff, Space Forge put the UK's first satellite built to manufacture in space into orbit.

Most people never hear about it, because nobody around them is doing it.

I've always been the one with something half built. At college it was circuits, machinery and 3D printers.

The hard part was finding everyone else.

At my first big startup conference in London, on a ticket my manager gave me, I met founders for the first time. Soon after, I joined a startup.

Later that year I got into the Silicon Valley Fellowship. I went a year later on money I'd saved, and met the Cambridge student who's now my cofounder.

I didn't plan either of those. I just kept taking shots, and each one was a chance to meet the right people.

Hardware builders get the fewest. Software people have meetups in every city, and deep tech has its summits, but hardware builders are scattered. And hardware is harder to learn on your own. It helps to have someone nearby who's burnt out the same motor.

That's why we started Uncooked Labs. I wanted to give other builders more of those chances: to meet interesting people, and to work on interesting things together.

Two years after that borrowed ticket, we ran the hard tech session at the same conference. Founders brought a humanoid and a drone with a robotic arm.

The session ran almost an hour over.

One member built a Discord bot used by millions. Another turned PhD research at Oxford into two patents. We come from London, Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff, and as far as Waterloo in Canada.

You don't need the right university or a perfect CV. You need to want to build, and to show up.

Proximity compounds. A conversation turns into a follow up, then a project. Sometimes a company.

My long term aim is a space of our own, where builders come in to work on hard problems together, and where we back what they build.

You've been building on your own long enough.

Come and build with us.