The rise of the Chief Storyteller, by Nick Freer

I remember the first time I met someone who had the title ‘Chief Storyteller’ on their business card. I was a bit cynical and imagined a senior executive sitting around on cushions in the corner of the boardroom reading books to some of the company’s younger employees.

It was a couple of years’ later when I was at a talk by Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s own Chief Storyteller, that I started to get a feel for how the function fitted into the the corporate communications structure and the overall hierarchy of an organisation. 

Building a narrative for your brand is essential. It helps drive sales in the good times when the graphs are heading north and is also there to back up your brand when the chips are down. More so in the States, but increasingly in the UK, Chief Storytellers are on the payroll and are front and centre of developing a company’s story and guiding its dissemination inside and outside of the business.    

Best practice says the CEO should be integral to the development of the company’s narrative, along with the CMO and relevant retained advisers. Arguably, the PR team is the most important cog in the wheel; it is the company’s gatekeeper and the filter for what comes in and what goes out. 

I’ve always thought PR should be something that is done on the front foot, in tandem with having a well-oiled reactive system in place, and that strategy should drive communication. Abraham Lincoln said “character is the tree, reputation is the shadow” and too many companies still spend more time manipulating the shadow than tending to the tree.

Duncan Logan, CEO and founder of RocketSpace in San Francisco, told me on one of his last visits to Scotland that good PR can make the difference between success and failure for a company and that it should be embedded in a startup from the early days. Logan is well qualified on the subject when you consider that Airbnb and Uber are two of the technology companies that went from fledgling to global at RocketSpace. 

We have had the chance to work with an exciting bunch of early stage companies in recent times. Some founders have a strong vision of the company’s brand and how they want the story to be told, others seem to be more in the "make it up as we go along" camp, many more still are somewhere in between. 

PlayerData, a sports wearable tech startup founded by two computer sciences graduates from the University of Edinburgh and backed by an impressive collective of investors including former Tesco chief Sir Terry Leahy and now chaired by Blackcircles.com founder Mike Welch, is a great startup story in the making. CEO Roy Hotrabhvanon is an international archer who has represented Thailand and only narrowly missed out on the Rio Olympics in 2016. Roy mastered the bow and arrow while studying computer sciences at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, developing an early version of wearable tech to monitor and enhance his performance. By targeting (excuse the pun) the global wearables market, the PlayerData team could be on to a winner with the sector expected to grow to over £15 billion by 2021. 

At a Heriots rugby lunch in December hosted by LendingCrowd, Scotland’s only alternative finance provider to SMEs, I had the pleasure of meeting a Scottish tech founder whose company flies somewhat under the radar in terms of media profile while achieving notable success in spite of it. Cortex CEO and founder Peter Proud has just completed a buy-out from advertising giant WPP and, when it comes to good stories, Peter and Cortex’s back catalogue is something of an embarrassment of riches. 

Peter worked for Microsoft for over a decade and there is a story about Bill Gates putting Peter on his private jet so he would not miss one of his children’s birthdays. Another good one saw Cortex being brought in to stop the Seattle Seahawks' website crashing due to an unprecedented amount of visitors to the site around the 2014 Super Bowl.  I get the feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more about Peter and Cortex’s story in 2018. 

A very good year for Scottish tech, by Nick Freer

2017? As the Frank Sinatra song goes, ‘it was a very good year’, in this case for Scotland’s entrepreneurial world. Sure, we didn’t have barnstorming exits a la Skyscanner in 2016 but enough good things took place to suggest our fast-growing corporate scene moved up a gear. 

On the subject of Skyscanner, it was noteworthy to see the travel search site’s former CTO, Alistair Hann, pop up at a new travel tech startup. TravelNest, founded by 23-year old Doug Stephenson and positioned to maximise holiday rental income, grabbed some headlines around the largest ever seed round raise by a Scottish startup. More impressive still was the quality of the venture capitalists who came in on the round - Luxembourg headquartered Mangrove, London-based Frontline and Pentech. 

Former advertising supremo John Denholm, a co-founder at The Leith Agency and currently chairman of eponymously named headhunter Denholm Associates, called me up around this time last year to say he wanted to put me in touch with a startup who could be, as John put it, “Scotland’s next Skyscanner.” 

After I coughed up a few cornflakes in response to a fairly bold prediction, John explained that he was going to his niece’s wedding that weekend and that Andrew McGinley was the founder, and groom to be, in question. A week or so later I met Andrew, Care Sourcer’sCEO and co-founder, and came away from the meeting thinking that maybe John was not too wide of the mark. 

John’s hunch was confirmed earlier this year when two high calibre UK venture capitalists - BGF Ventures and ADV - each made Care Sourcer their first ever investment in a Scottish startup. When former ‘FanDuel-er’ Dr Graham Jones joined the team as COO - Jones is the guy who, during his time at Kotikan, built the team that helped build both Skyscanner and FanDuel’s wildly successful apps - and when the team won a major contract with a NHS Trust, more of the right type of writing appeared on the wall.  

The fact that more VCs, including from outside the UK, are investing in our startup talent is a big move in the right direction for our tech scene. More exciting still, we are very likely to see our most promising tech startups benefit from even larger funding rounds in 2018. 

The shining light of our own venture capital community in Scotland, Scottish Equity Partners, announced the first investments from its recently launched SEP V fund in 2017, a £260 million fund that invests in technology companies across the UK and SEP is now a powerhouse not only on our own tech patch in Scotland but also in European terms.   

Fresh from a partnership with global accountancy giant PwC, Edinburgh-headquartered CodeBase announced an alliance with Barclays last month that puts the UK’s largest incubator in an even stronger position heading into 2018 and beyond. Still to reach its 3rd birthday, take a look at CodeBase’s website if you need a refresher on the incredible amount of software stars in the building. 

One of these companies, Cultivate HQ, is helping to power the web development of one of Europe’s fastest growing technology companies, Deliveroo. Another, Aquilia Insight, was acquired by US marketing agency Merkle in the summer. GP Bullhound advised on the deal and next March the global investment advisory firm brings the Northern Tech Awards to Scotland for the first time along with the CEOs of one hundred of the UK’s fastest growing tech companies. I’m pretty sure they will be impressed with what they see.   

The University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre opens its doors in 2018 and its very creation will, in itself, cement Edinburgh’s position as a global leader in the field of data science and analytics. Some of the industry and international partnerships in the pipeline for Bayes will take the reputation of the university’s School of Informatics even further up the world order. 

Along with Informatics Ventures and the University of Edinburgh Business School, we launched the inaugural Scottish Startup Survey this year. Confidence is important in every sector of industry and the hope is that our startups, in the most fledgling of sectors, remain cautiously optimistic about what 2018 holds.