Education can be transformational on the startup journey, guest blog by Shona Marsh, Head of Education Programmes, CodeBase

The more I’ve worked with startups, the clearer it’s become that there are key inflection points on the journey where intervention in the form of education can be transformational.  Today, education is front and centre of the Techscaler programme run by CodeBase, which is designed to cover all the bases, from ideation through to early stage, growth, and scaling.

While our First Steps initiative was launched at Barclays Eagle Labs in May, Next Steps is our course to guide founders towards product-market-fit (and applications are open now).  In his Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review (STER) in 2020, Mark Logan makes clear reference to the challenge Scottish startups find in scaling, and that the two main reasons are that the product or service doesn’t fit the intended market, or there is product-market fit but the organisation isn’t capable of capitalising on this and driving subsequent growth.

Our scaleup partnership with Silicon Valley-based Reforge follows on from Next Steps and is an opportunity to bring that knowledge to Scotland, and show that we can build these companies in situ and see the knock-on benefits, namely economic impact, talent recycling, and innovation loops.  Along these lines, Reforge is more focused on helping specialised staff capitalise on growth opportunities.

Skyscanner and FanDuel are Scottish examples of unicorns (a startup achieving $1 billion valuation within ten years of creation), with both companies achieving this status back in 2015/2016.  However, Mark Logan makes reference to there being no room for historical complacency, with Scotland needing to grow with influence outside of our local best practice, and that we can’t rely on the legacies of Skyscanner, where Logan was COO, and FanDuel to translate to future startup success.

Reforge brings this external perspective, from the most renowned startup ecosystem in the world, Silicon Valley. This perpetual cycle of success and growth has led to the recycling of talent into the ecosystem to both accelerate the growth of existing startups, and lead to the creation of a large volume of new startups that are built and grown quicker.

As Logan quotes in STER: “It’s generally not well understood within the Scottish ecosystem (and many others) how a startup should go about the process of iterating its product or service to the point where it fits the needs of its market… it is very common to see startups declare that product-market fit has been achieved, and start to attempt scaling when, in fact, the market isn’t interested in the product.  This situation always ends unhappily.  Silicon Valley has a well established playbook for how to go about this process and how to measure progress to the product-fit goal.  It’s vital that this playbook is widely understood within our ecosystem.”

In my own career, working at the University of Oxford’s Entrepreneurship Centre and with scaleups like Airbnb, I have seen the way in which domain expertise can be expanded through the development of new skills and knowledge.  It is an ethos I have brought to my role with CodeBase.

While you can encourage, if not teach, an entrepreneurial mindset, you can teach the skills to build your startup, through leadership, product management, understanding customer needs, and simply resilience - an essential skill when building a business.