Putting the 'E' in CEO, by Nick Freer

Fresh off hosting last week’s Scottish Government tech scaler event at Barclays Tech Campus in Glasgow, the good people over at Startup Grind Scotland have lined up a fireside chat with UserTesting CEO Andy MacMillan in the first week of August.

MacMillan, who has Scottish heritage on his father’s side and was born and raised in the States, led San Francisco-headquartered UserTesting through its initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange in November, a couple of years on from the tech group opening it European HQ in Edinburgh.

MacMillan, who was appointed as a trade envoy by the Scottish Government in April, has credited Scottish tech talent as a key factor powering UserTesting’s growth, helping to scale the company to unicorn status.

I liked a press headline in the San Francisco media recently, where Andy remarked that the ‘E’ in CEO stands for empathy, a clever comment from a chief executive whose team develops software that helps around half of the world’s top brands to better understand their customers.

Next week, Turing Fest, billed as “Europe’s top cross-functional tech conference”, rolls into the EICC and, while I’m going to be there as much for the networking and post-event parties, the two-day conference is primarily positioned to enable attendees to learn and connect, and gain practical insight into the art and science of building, growing, and leading successful startups and high-growth tech businesses.

At what I’m pretty sure was the very first Turing Fest, or certainly its precursor, I got to have an extended chat with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.  What did we talk about?  Ice hockey.  I still can’t remember quite how we got onto the subject, but I am lifelong fan of the Detroit Red Wings, and Wozniak has an obsession with his local ice hockey team in California, the San Jose Sharks.  What I can remember is that we definitely didn’t chat about cross-functional tech.

Because we are running the Scottish Startup Survey again this year in association with the EIE team at the University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre, it will also be useful to get some firsthand views from tech leaders at Turing on how their companies are faring in 2022.

While it’s not the best saying these days as the global pandemic lingers, there is that adage “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold”, and as the valuations of many U.S. tech groups are squeezed, and venture capital investment is down, albeit against a record year in 2021, it will be illuminating to get a sense of sentiment from tech executives on this side of the pond.   

By their very nature, startups have to be a plucky type of beast.  By taking a different tack through disrupting traditional industries, they are always up against it, must have strong belief, and even harder skin.

What is certain is that technology will be the great enabler to address the most pressing societal and environmental challenges faced by the world twenty-two years into the 21st century.  What is exciting is the possibility that we can produce tech companies of scale in this country that become part of this narrative.