I pursued something similar. I created the Tree Notation Lab in Oahu (https://lab.treenotation.org/ https://lab.treenotation.org/), secured a physical home for

I pursued something similar. I created the Tree Notation Lab in Oahu (https://lab.treenotation.org/ https://lab.treenotation.org/), secured a physical home for it at a university, got funding commitments, started recruiting, and came close to pulling the trigger, but slowed down at the last moment circa January 2020. The reason I hit the brakes were some specific incidents that made me realize how much I was underestimating how difficult recruiting, retaining, and enabling the level of talent I hoped for. I was probably underestimating those challenges by 2 orders of magnitude. The majority of folks you'd want to recruit probably have great careers already and probably families, and are likely world class, so in today's market you'd need probably on the order of a $100M - $1B+ war-chest to be able to efficiently compete for them and not have recruitment and retainment as an urgent problem that would keep you up every night. I instead pivoted and decided to make it a remote first, part time thing. I have a number of advisors and collaborators. New people pitch me ideas and I fund them or not. I sometimes put a few weeks in, sometimes just a day a month. I can scale it organically and pause it when I want. I can be an active part of other remote research groups as well. I made this decision pre-COVID, when it was more of a tossup, but now I'd say it's a no brainer. If you're just looking to house a group of like minded people perhaps something like https://www.together.casa/ https://www.together.casa/ or https://www.pandopooling.com/ https://www.pandopooling.com/ might be interesting to check out. Happy to chat more too if that would be helpful. I definitely encourage you to go for it, as I think we need more of these, but at least for me the better bet was to start remote.