For two weeks, a castle in the middle of Ireland became home to a rather unusual collection of people. They came from Ireland and around the world carrying laptops, ideas, half-built products and, presumably, enough socks to last a fortnight. They were founders, developers, engineers and assorted Web3 people, gathered at Slane Castle for CastleDAO, the brainchild of Superteam Ireland.
And if CastleDAO had a Pied Piper, it was Alejandro Gutierrez.
copyright Virginia Rimboi
Superteam Ireland conceived and ran the two-week residency, bringing together around 100 residents from crypto, AI and fintech, with more people arriving during the fortnight for workshops, institutional events and Demo Day. It sounds deceptively simple: find a castle, fill it with smart people and tell them to build. In practice, putting a 100-plus people through a working residency requires an enormous amount of organisation, from selecting participants and bringing in sponsors and speakers to accommodation, food, transport, workspaces, events, technology and the endless small logistics involved when a medieval castle becomes a temporary startup campus.
“The idea was coming from the lack of spaces for builders to focus on maximising outcome. There are tons of events, not too many residencies. There is something similar in Utah, called MtnDAO. So I thought it will be great to give it an European flavour and, the CastleDAO is the perfect cherry on the top. Nothing more Irish than a Castle, and Slane is one of more iconic in the country,” says Alejandro.
The Superteam Ireland were everywhere. Led by Alejandro, the core team included Diarmuid, Virginia, Henry with additional help from Ryan, Colleen and Vincent.They were organising, fixing, introducing, cajoling, opening gates and keeping a very unusual show on the road, while somehow allowing the residency itself to feel relatively unstructured. That was important. CastleDAO was not a conference stretched over two weeks. The point was to give people time and space to build, with enough structure to keep things moving and enough freedom for unexpected things to happen.
By the time I arrived for Demo Day on Friday, September 4, that work was about to be put to the test. Twenty-eight teams were pitching what they had built, with the presentations livestreamed to an international audience. Alejandro and Simon Molitor from Solano Bros hosted proceedings while those of us in the room settled down to watch from a collection of chairs, some of which appeared to have been designed for significantly smaller humans.
Mine certainly was.
copyright Virginia Rimboi
What followed was a rapid tour through what people are actually building in Web3 right now. There were payment applications, wallets, privacy products and financial infrastructure, alongside ideas that were much harder to categorise. This was not 28 versions of the same product with different logos. Some were serious infrastructure plays, some were already businesses in the making and some had clearly benefited from the freedom to experiment that came with spending two weeks surrounded by other builders.
And then there was the slasher game, developed during the residency, which used the laptop itself as the game box. No console and no separate piece of hardware: the computer became part of the physical game. It was clever, slightly mad and exactly the sort of thing that makes perfect sense after spending two weeks locked up in a castle with a group of developers.
Demo Day was the formal culmination of CastleDAO, but the pitches only told half the story. Ask people what they thought of the residency and the answers quickly moved away from technology. They talked about staying in the castle and around the estate, swimming in the river, working together, eating together and making friendships remarkably quickly. They also talked about opening the gates every few hours, a reminder that even the most decentralised community occasionally encounters a very physical single point of entry.
There was also the peculiar anonymity of Web3. People knew each other’s Telegram handles perfectly while occasionally remaining rather less certain about their actual names. A TG name could tell you exactly who had fixed your code at two in the morning while offering remarkably few clues as to the identity of the human being sitting opposite you at breakfast. After two weeks, online identities had become real people and collaborators had become friends.
Friends foreva, as one resident summed it up.
That sense of community did not happen entirely by accident. It was what Superteam Ireland had set out to create. The technology mattered, the products mattered and Demo Day mattered, but CastleDAO was also an experiment in what happens when you take people who usually work remotely, scatter them through an extraordinary old Irish estate and give them permission to concentrate on building and each other for two weeks.
Alejandro’s Pied Piper role was central to it. He appeared to know everyone, connect everyone and keep the whole thing moving, assisted by a Superteam crew doing the less visible work behind the scenes. There is always a danger with an event in somewhere as spectacular as Slane Castle that the venue becomes the story. Here, it was really the backdrop. The story was the community Superteam Ireland managed to put inside it.
Then came Friday night.
copyright Virginia Rimboi
The closing party, supported by Jito, began in suitably Irish fashion with Irish dancing provided by a local dancing team. Everyone watched enthralled at the sheer athleticism of the female dancers – from young to adult. This must have set the scene for the party afterwards. As the evening progressed, the Irish dancing gave way to what can only be described as a bro disco, with dancing, piggybacking and lads being bounced into the air. There may even have been some modern interpretation of jousting.
Slane Castle has been standing in one form or another for centuries. It is entirely possible that scenes like these have taken place there before, although perhaps not accompanied by electronic music and people whose day jobs involve building on Solana. Somewhere along the way, the distinction between organisers, founders, developers and visitors largely disappeared. It was simply a castle full of people celebrating what they had managed to create together.
There is a serious argument behind founder residencies. Startups are usually built in fragments of time, between meetings, messages, fundraising, travel and the ordinary interruptions of life. Superteam Ireland tried something different: bring the builders together, remove as much of the outside noise as possible, give them somewhere extraordinary to work and see what happens.
Twenty-eight Demo Day pitches were one answer.
The other was harder to put on a slide. For two weeks, people who might otherwise have remained usernames on Telegram lived and worked together in an Irish castle. They built things, broke things, fixed things, swam, danced, opened gates and made friends. Superteam Ireland created the circumstances, Alejandro played Pied Piper and the residents took it from there.
Which brings us to the missing sock.
Every great residency probably needs its own mystery, and CastleDAO had one. Somewhere between the building, the swimming, the pitching and the bro disco, a sock disappeared and then appeared on its own. A slightly grubby off white sock sitting unclaimed in Slane Castle.
Technology may eventually solve payments, privacy, identity and the future of finance. The sock, at the time of writing, remains unsolved.
