The great and the good (of Scottish tech), by Nick Freer

Due to the quality of guest contributors of late - including former Financial Times reporter Jeremy Grant writing on renewable energy infrastructure, Pathways Forward’s Ana Stewart considering women in entrepreneurship, and Stellar Omada CEO Colin Frame sharing his thoughts on digital education - it’s a while since I’ve penned this column and I feel a little out of practice.

So, like Bridgerton’s Lady Whistledown after a Netflix mid-season series break, perhaps a notable society event is a good place to restart putting ink on the page - in which case, Contini’s recent 20th anniversary celebration deserves a special mention.

Italian and Scottish inspired restaurant Contini’s is surely an Edinburgh institution as much as it is an eaterie, where the city’s great and the good, including from the business world, meet up for coffee and treats, or to eat great food and drink fine wine in the former banking hall immaculately styled on a Florentine palazzo.

Over a decade ago, when we launched our agency, Contini’s was our office before we had an office.  More than that, when contacts, clients or friends from out of town came to Edinburgh, Centotre at 103 George Street was always my first port of call.  A decade later, in spite of the addition of so many shiny new restaurants around town, Victor and Carina’s place remains my number one.

A week or so ago, my latest meetup was with Glasgow-born GlobalScot Ross Hamilton, a New York-based businessman who is on a mission to bring international investors to Scotland to experience what he describes as “the country’s dynamic sectors” firsthand, helping to take our entrepreneurial ecosystem to the next level.  Watch this space, as I hope Ross will write for this column in the near future.

On the subject of moving the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the right direction, it was encouraging to see the Scottish Government’s commitment earlier this week to extra funding for some of the main initiatives in place to support our most promising startups, through organisations like Scottish EDGE and Pathways Forward.

As a longtime adviser to Scottish tech brands like Skyscanner and CodeBase, and many startups and tech ecosystem players along the way, I have written extensively on the trajectory of the nation’s technology sector down the years, and it feels like the retooled Scottish cabinet has a better understanding of all things tech.

While former Skyscanner COO Mark Logan has been front and centre of the so-called ecosystem building process since he published the Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review in 2020, another Skyscanner chief has engaged himself in the tech narrative and debate in more recent times.  Shane Corstorphine, the online travel site’s former CFO, has published a series of LinkedIn posts around what he describes as “Building a world-class scale-up ecosystem” which have caught the eye of the tech scene.

Referencing a piece on Forbes, Shane agrees that scale-ups must have achieved a high degree of product-market fit, while demonstrating sustainable annual growth of more than 20 per cent over three years.  However, to be defined as truly world-class, startups must jump a higher bar.  Having walked the talk, small wonder that guys like Mark and Shane are now among the leading voices in Scottish tech.