‘My childhood was horrific but it made me’: Mile End tech bro Joseph Michael Daniels on being included in Forbes 30 Under 30
Joseph Michael Daniels controversially credits his abusive father and his struggles with homelessness as a teenager for the resilience that enabled him to smash the glass ceiling and become a successful entrepreneur.
Joseph Michael Daniels careens into the co-working space in Aldgate where we’re meeting. His movements and speech are a flurry of kinetic energy – twitchy and charged.
He chose the spot, which seems suitably transient, with primary coloured avante garde decor and corporate hipsters breezing past. He plonks on the intensely uncomfy fluorescent orange sofa that clashes with his closely shaven red hair. His bespectacled face frames wizened eyes that flit around, sizing up his surroundings, and me.
Daniels has traversed socioeconomic extremes. He struggled with homelessness as a teenager, dropping out of school without any qualifications, before striking gold with a housing tech startup, which got him named in Forbes 30 under 30 in 2020.
Born in Edgware, his family moved out to Essex when he was 10 because he was getting into fights at school. At fifteen he fled his father who was an abusive alcoholic and returned to the East End. His mother was sectioned for mental health issues. Staying on sofas and park benches he eked out a meagre existence picking up intermittent electrical and construction work.
Social services lost track of him and he didn’t attend school after he returned to London. Despite this Daniels is a self-professed nerd. He devoured books at the local library and self-educated himself in the cripplingly complex intricacies of thermodynamics, with the majority of his education from sites like Udemy and FutureLearn. He said: ‘I’m lucky I’m intellectually gifted, I’ve read a lot of frigging books but I combine it with practicality.’
By the age of 22, his mother was stable, had re-married a man ‘that saved us’ and he moved into their garden shed.
There he cooked up Etopia. Using cutting-edge technology to make eco-homes constructed from mineral board-faced foam-filled structures. Like super-sized Lego bricks, they were to be manufactured off-site at a factory and slotted together. He won the Essex Entrepreneur of the Year competition, putting him on the map. Former Conservative Chairman Lord Fink and The Reuben brothers, both fixtures on the Sunday Times Rich list, contributed to him raising £40 million from investors by 2020.
Daniels attributes his resilience to his father and struggling to survive in Hackney and the streets of Tower Hamlets.
His father made a point never to beat his mother, but he ‘beat the crap,’ out of Daniels.
‘It was the making of me, it’s a weird level of resilience I have.
‘He was a brilliant very ill man; incredibly intelligent that was part of the problem.’
Addiction is often inherited, and he admits that he has obsessive tendencies. Vague on the specifics he owns he partied hard in his teens but admits that he has channelled his addictive tendencies into an obsessive work ethic.
He said: ‘I’m addicted to work a healthy way. The thing is I use my issues as fuel. In the beginning, it was about climate change, yes, but it was also a conversion of the pain I had experienced and saw every day. The need to provide good quality, energy-efficient housing.’
When we chat he has just come from therapy and he does worry that working through all his trauma will rob him of his drive.
I asked what he was like at school. He said: ‘I was the shy ginger kid in the playground, I started getting gobby at 9 or 20 when I realised I had to fight to survive.’
This was also when the beatings ramped up.
From 10-15, his father would send him in his stead to work as an electrician, whilst down the pub.
‘I hated it it was terrifying, there were holes in the roof and sometimes it was over 30 degrees, I could barely breathe.’
When his Mum got sectioned for the third time, he fled back to East London.
‘Karl, he’s like my big brother. I felt safe with his family who welcomed me in when they could.’
They partied hard, and he wistfully recounts shenanigans on Roman Roads grime hotspots and Hackney recording studios. ‘We were proper into grime, we’d be in the ends. I frigging loved music. The East End has lost quite a lot of its lustre since then, a lot of the indigenous people have been pushed out.’
Although marred in poverty he loved the area and London. ‘I loved the streets. Every day I would wander. London is chock full of fabulous people. It’s wild and rough and I love that.’
Daniels developed an antenna for reading people which proved useful in his corporate ventures. ‘I can smell bull a mile off. I’m not scared, when you’ve had nothing, boards and investors are nothing.’
The glint in his eye is back when he announces that he plans to run for London Mayor in 2032; with unflappable confidence he will win. He then pauses, worried about how he comes across. He claims to was approached by a major political party, which he would not name, to run in 2028.
I loved the streets. Every day I would wander. London is chock full of fabulous people. It’s wild and rough and I love that.
Joseph michael daniels
‘I’ve been in meetings with investors where there’s a lack of reality, a lack of appreciation of the humans at the end of their grand plans. It’s not that they’re not humans or that they’re psychopaths. They’ve never lived the problems they’re trying to solve. I inject reality.’
Daniels does however admit: ‘I’m a shit CEO. The problem is I won’t play the game. I don’t like the politics. I don’t like the rules. I like getting my hands dirty.’
Etopia, touted in 2020 as the Tesla of housing, has all but evaporated. That year, a flurry of profiles on Daniels, casting him as a new hot shot, appeared online and in print. Barclays even made a documentary/ promo video about his life that won a gong at the London Film Awards.
When KMPG analysed Etopia for The Times in 2020 they found the build price was slightly higher than traditional construction techniques but the running costs were almost minimal. They warned that the established building firms would try to sink the company and that Daniels shouldn’t spread himself too thin with lots of projects.
In the first few years of operation, Etopia’s Sheffield factory produced builds in Newmarket, Newport, Rippon and Cambridgeshire.
Yet, in 2023 Daniels left the company due to ‘creative differences’ with other investors. He didn’t like the direction they were taking it in. The company has literally dropped off the radar. Etopia is still officially active but has no discernible product. Its website hasn’t been updated for years.
Of his exit, about which he can’t go into detail for legal reasons, he muses: ‘If you lose your integrity you’re f**cked. I was on the journey to be a billionaire. They thought I was mad.
‘I stepped away and the company has sunk. Like most fast-growing start-ups they collapse without the founder.’
Inspired by rap videos, he bought Rolexes and Picasso after his exit payout. Pretty quickly the buzz of bling felt hollow and he bought his mum her dream caravan and a house in Mile End. Daniels claims he’s become a bit more sensible, investing most of his earnings these days.
Since leaving, a whistlestop tour of Daniels’ ventures ranges from special advisor to the UK Department of Energy Security to setting up a net zero CPU manufacturing facility in Neom, Saudi Arabia. He is also retrofitting a net-zero tower in New York using data technology he invented. These are through ELIXR, which he founded in 2022, which moves on the technology to build net zero interconnected cities.
When challenged on his links to the Saudi government he pushes back. ‘Democracy is broken, British democracy isn’t true democracy. You can’t have it all and democratic short-termism hamstrings real innovation especially when talking about climate change.’
I bring up their human rights record. ‘People are dying of mould and dampness because budgets are being cut. Is social housing here any different to prisons these days,’ he retorted.
A few years ago he started falling out of love with Mile End, cluttered as it was with mixed emotions and memories. He has never gone back to the park bench he slept on at 15, apart from when he filmed a documentary about his life with Barclays.
Then he started missing it again: ‘It’s my home, I don’t feel grounded anywhere else.’
‘My favourite landmark is Canary Wharf: it’s a symbol of progress. They use commerciality to drive growth in the area.’
Denying it is sterile, he loves Canary Wharf’s evolution, and capital investment underpinning its value. For him, it is a symbol of progress. ‘It is also the only place in the world where the best-fried chicken and burgers are right next to each other. Black Bear burgers beat NYC any day.’
What would he say to aspiring teenage Tower Hamlets entrepreneurs?
‘You don’t know shit. I don’t, you don’t. There are no easy answers, the greatest life skill is listening. Life is difficult, there are no easy answers. I do business in the grey area.
Daniels’ earnest swagger is tempered by the nuance and depth of his thinking out a kaleidoscope of topics. When challenged he thinks. This can seem inconsistent, professing a love for democracy and a deep cynicism about its viability. Yet, like a homing pigeon, he always seems to return to the East End.
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