Profit with purpose and the triple bottom line, guest post by FutureX CEO and Co-founder Bruce Walker

As the business world adjusts to global tailwinds and the news of some tech layoffs coming from Silicon Valley, business leaders are rightly asking themselves where they should prioritise spend and where to make potential cuts.

When the economy is feeling wobbly, communication is more important than ever - just think of FTX or Twitter in the business world in recent times, or, closer to home in politics, Liz Truss when it comes to communications and planning.

As consumers, we all know we have a deeper connection to businesses that communicate authentically, care about the environment, and have a purpose that resonates with local communities. Which is why during any economic downturn, your USP comes from how you communicate with your customers, the actions you take and the commitment to your purpose during recessionary times, helps to prove your authenticity.

Evidence shows customers reward authentic brands, with Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2020 showing that 64% of today’s customers are “belief-driven buyers”.

Our mission at FutureX is to help founders and high-growth potential companies realise their missions by combining purpose-driven communication with growth strategies that generate a healthy triple bottom line; people, planet, and profit.

For the last 10 years, we have been creating international leadership courses and programmes, working all over the world, from Silicon Valley to India, China, and of course back in Scotland.  Additionally, we advise large corporations and governments on creating their own accelerator and leadership programmes, as well as consulting with high-growth leadership teams to save them time, remove roadblocks, and dream bigger.

The latest programme ‘How to Scale with Purpose’ is an immersive 4-day course, delivered in partnership with experts in their field, including Mark Logan, the Scottish Government’s Chief Entrepreneur and former Skyscanner COO, Graeme Barron, VP Legal at Trustpilot, and Arelette Halavage, Senior Leader at GSK.

The cohort-based programme is supported by Johnston Carmichael and Scottish Enterprise, and is positioned to take founders out of their comfort zone and introduce them to world-class education, advice, and networks. One of the highlights of the course has been the immersive company visits, which included a private tour of the Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) Crop Research Centre outside Dundee and Q&A with IGS CEO David Farquhar. The visit to the vertical farm was a fantastic showcase of technology and innovation being created in Scotland, with IGS building on centuries of crop management and putting Scotland firmly on the environmental tech map.

These programmes not only provide access to world class opportunities and learning, but create powerful new networks for the founders who generate connections and friendships that will last their entire career.

With the famous quote from the World Economic Forum reminding us, “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again”. It’s critical that founders keep learning, up-skilling and growing their network, with Mark Logan telling us this week that you must be “aggressive with your own learning and development” and that “best practice almost always comes from outside your own organisation”.

Together we can shine a light on the innovative ecosystem we have locally and help each other build strong, resilient businesses that serve people, preserve our planet, and generate sustainable profit.

Coulda been a contender, by Nick Freer

Global tech bank GP Bullhound swung into Edinburgh a couple of weeks’ back to present its Titans of Tech report to an audience of founders, investors, and advisers at Skybar on Bread Street, jointly hosted by Scottish law firm Shepherd and Wedderburn.

I was there with Trickle founder and CEO Paul Reid, and the room with a view, possibly one of the best in the city, contained some of the usual suspects from the local tech ecosystem - investment firms like Par Equity, Techstart Ventures, and BGF, and founders including PlayerData’s Roy Hotrabhvanon, and Cally Russell from Unfolded.

The 2022 Titans of Tech report lays out a record year for European tech, with as many unicorns created in one year as in the three previous years combined.  According to GP Bullhound, there are now 283 tech companies valued at over $1 billion in Europe, with 125 companies reaching that status in the last year alone.   

Of course, economic headwinds are now in force, and will likely be even stronger as we move into 2023.  And, the technology sector itself has experienced well-documented malaise, with lower company valuations followed by mass job losses.

With an eye on Europe, GP Bullhound’s managing partner Manish Madhvani frames it like this: “The European tech ecosystem continues to show its strength, demonstrated by the record value creation since last year.  Now as inflation spikes to 40-year highs, Europe’s unicorn party is slowing, and growth companies are likely to be hit hardest as investor focus is shifting from growth to profitability.  However, activity persists, and history shows that founders that react quickly and decisively will be able to seize unique opportunities to reposition for the future landscape and continue building category leaders.”

Back at Skybar, the GP Bullhound guys put up a slide on “The contenders”, startups contending for unicorn status and which the tech bank predicts will reach this milestone in the next two years “through showing the greatest ambition and being best positioned to take advantage of opportunities.”

I’m sorry to say that there were no Scotland-based contenders on the slide.  When put to the floor by GP Bullhound, who asked if anyone in the audience had a Scottish company they would put forward, the crowd was rather muted and only a couple of hands went up.  Perhaps everyone was just feeling shy on the night, and the single company suggested was vertical farming specialist Intelligent Growth Solutions.

Later in the week, I was out with a C-suite executive from a tech company that secured one of Scotland’s largest ever exits in recent times.  He agreed that the “ambition” and “seizing opportunities” points expressed by GP Bullhound are absolutely key.

Realising the importance of the North American market from the early days, this senior executive’s Edinburgh-based CEO spent “about half the year” shuttling between the East and West Coasts of the United States to meet prospective customers and shareholders.  And this determination and time on the road paid dividends, both in terms of big-ticket sales and big name additions to the company’s investor cap table.

No need for this particular CEO to repeat Marlon Brando’s famed lined from 1954 silver screen classic On the Waterfront: “I could’ve been a contender”.

Betting on web3, by Nick Freer

At Solana Breakpoint in Lisbon last weekend it was good fun, and informative, to hang out with the BetDEX Labs team who were presenting at conference. While the cryptocurrency industry moves into an even tougher winter than observers had forecast, event organisers Solana pointed out during the introductory address that some of the most successful tech companies were founded during bear markets. 

Microsoft, airbnb, WhatsApp, Apple, and Uber would be just a handful of present day tech giants who launched during deflated markets and times of financial crisis.  

The Scottish philosopher William MacAskill has a narrative around what he describes as plasticity, that there are moments in time when change is much easier.  MacAskill uses an analogy of history being like molten glass, so when glass is hot it can be folded into different shapes.  But when the glass is harder, it’s much more difficult to change things. 

In the tech sector, with widespread job losses and hiring freezes, over and above the current woes in cryptocurrency, we are definitely in a time of change. 

A somewhat more renowned philosopher, Plato, wrote in his Socratic masterpiece Republic that “our need will be the real creator”, a saying that has morphed into a more commonly used proverb, “necessity is the mother of invention”.  

What is certain is that MacAskill’s analogical glassblowing will continue in the technology sector, in software and hardware, and across both the Web 2.0 and web3 manifestations of the internet. 

In BetDEX’s address to conference, co-founders Nigel Eccles and Varun Sudhakar explained their plan to disrupt sports betting, a sector valued globally at around 2 trillion dollars, with a web3 offering positioned to address the constraints of Web 2.0 equivalents - namely, a fragmented market, high fees, locked up funds, counter party risk, and an aversion to winning bettors.    

Being in situ at Breakpoint, it would not be an understatement to say that BetDEX was one of the best received storylines at the 4-day event over a balmy few days in Lisbon.  And no real surprise from the guys who built the astronomical sports betting company FanDuel from a base in Scotland.  

Tech conferences play an important role in technology ecosystems, a point highlighted in Mark Logan’s 2020 STER report.  While our domestic tech conferences - Turing Fest, EIE, ScotSoft, DataFest, or DIGITExpo, which took place this week at the EICC, to name a few - are important fixtures on Scotland’s tech scene, the trip to Lisbon reminded me how important it can be to jump on a plane to get your finger on the pulse of other International ecosystems, and build meaningful connections.  

Today, Startup Grind Scotland jets out to Helsinki with cohort of startup founders and ecosystem stakeholders like CodeBase to attend Slush, a major fixture on the international tech conference calendar, along with site visits to Nokia, Startup Sauna, and Aalto University.  

The Startup Grind team has promised me a wrap piece on the Finland swing, so look forward to reading a postcard from Helsinki in this column in the weeks ahead.

Overall, I guess the hope is that we can take the learnings and connections made at conferences like Slush in Helsinki, and Breakpoint in Lisbon back to Scotland to help power our own tech ecosystem forward. 

web3 and into the metaverse, by Nick Freer

At last year’s Solana Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, the Solana blockchain and its cryptocurrency token were riding high, with one the world’s largest banks suggesting that Solana could become “the Visa of the digital asset ecosystem”.

Since then, the value of Solana’s cryptocurrency, SOL, has retreated from around $250 to $31 (at time of writing earlier this week).  Against a macro-economic backdrop characterised by inflationary pressures, interest rate hikes, and general malaise, Solana’s fortunes have taken a similar dent to the rest of the crypto industry in what is now widely termed “crypto winter”.

On the upside, commentators are forecasting an easing of cryptocurrency bear markets in the months ahead.  More certain, is that cryptocurrency, blockchain, and the more all-encompassing web3, are here to stay.

In the context of Solana, co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko explained on a recent podcast that despite the lower price of SOL, startups continue to develop and build on the network, startups who are also raising funds at “still pretty high valuations.”

Last November, sports betting company BetDEX Labs, co-founded by former FanDuel founders and early employees, raised the largest ever seed round by a UK-headquartered startup.  Arguably more impressive than the quantum of the raise, the $21 million investment secured by Edinburgh HQ-ed BetDEX numbered some of the most important players in the fast-developing web3 ecosystem.

This week, alongside the company’s New York PR agency,  we announced a major milestone as BetDEX became the first fully-licensed sports betting exchange on blockchain.  As we converge on Lisbon for Breakpoint, I’m sure a toast or two will be raised to an incredible year of progress for one of Scotland’s most promising technology firms.

An appetite for software

In 2011, entrepreneur turned investor Marc Andreessen penned his famous “Why Software is Eating the World” opinion piece, with the premise that every business needs to become a software company.

Sticking on eating analogies, when I met Estonian Ambassador Viljar Lubi last week he said nations must think about how they plan to “feed their people” in the future economy and how technology plays a central role.  Ambassador Lubi believes technologists and policymakers should be thinking five years down the line, around developing tech trends and how to stay ahead of the curve.

From New Zealand with Love

We teamed up with PR agencies in Auckland and Los Angeles this week to support New Zealand tech firm StretchSense, as the company announced the launch of an AI and spatial computing centre of excellence in Edinburgh alongside its latest investment, a £7 million round led by Par Equity and supported by Scottish Enterprise.

Ben O’Brien-led StretchSense is planning on international expansion from Scotland.  In O’Brien’s words, “With this investment we are expanding into the metaverse, focused on the key partnerships, new technology, and investments in scale needed to build the future of how people will create, learn, work, and play”.

As I said to StretchSense’s chief marketing officer, Charles Pludthura, I just hope the All Blacks don’t play too hard against Scotland when the all-conquering Kiwis visit Murrayfield later this month.

Tech, Estonian style, by Nick Freer

I got the opportunity to meet Estonia’s Ambassador to the UK, Viljar Lubi, this week as he undertook a whistle stop tour of Scotland and shared his views around how the Baltic nation has risen to be global leader when it comes to tech startups.

While the tech success of the Nordics is well documented, many consider Estonia to be the region’s most alluring startup nation.  With a population of just over one million people, Estonia has produced, per capita, more tech unicorns (companies valued at over $1 billion) than any other country worldwide, ten of the rarefied tech firms to be exact.

So, how did Estonia reach this lofty position, what foundational pieces did it put in place, and do they put something in the water supply in Tallinn that helps breed alpha entrepreneurs?

I put these questions to Ambassador Lubi, who earlier in the week at the Digital Scotland conference had pinpointed the importance of Estonia’s Tiger Leap, a public-private initiative credited with bringing about seismic change as the country strived to build a world-class digital economy.

Tiger Leap launched in 1996 focused on the IT competency of students and teachers, which Lubi says ensured the supply of tech-savvy Estonians who could help develop innovative e-services.  “We could not create a modern e-governance system,” says Lubi, “without people knowing how to use it.”

“Today”, continued Ambassador Lubi, “the majority of our unicorn founders consider themselves a Tiger Leap generation.”

Ambassador Lubi told me a story about a new coding school in East Estonia, which he says illustrates how founders and companies give back and invest in the ecosystem, almost as a rule.  Cross-border payments startup Wise’s (Wise became the largest tech company on the London Stock Exchange, with a market capitalisation of $11 billion when it completed its IPO last year) co-founder Taavet Hinrikus helped launch kood/Jõhvi to help address one of the biggest challenges faced by Estonia,  a shortage of talent and skills.

The school receives support across the board, from startups, more established corporates, and government.  And we’re not talking about small cheques here, with the Estonian way of giving back illustrated by IT company Pilvio, who are providing kood/Jõhvi’s new school building rent-free.

Getting back to my chat with Estonia’s man in London, Lubi says a successful tech ecosystem needs three things, namely skills and talent, funding, and markets.

Not content with his coding school in East Estonia, Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus launched €250 million venture fund Plural earlier this year to give tech firms exposure to seasoned founders-turned-investors. Plural says only 8 per cent of investors in Europe are former operators, in contrast to more than half of tech investors in the US.

“We’re the investors we would have liked to have when we were building our own companies”, said Hinrikus at launch.  “Founding a company is a craft, and the best way to learn that craft is to work alongside those who have done it before.”

Wise words, with a lesson or two for our tech ecosystem here in Scotland.  More on this next week.   

Happy Anniversary, by Nick Freer

Anniversaries can be a big deal.  I had a notable one myself earlier this year, although in truth I was pleased to get it out of the way and into the rear view mirror.  As something of an introvert, with very occasional extrovert tendencies, I’ve never been a fan of being the centre of attention.  At the same time, I do think it’s important to acknowledge milestones in our personal and business lives.  

Two of our clients had anniversaries of their own this month, with CodeClan CEO Melinda Matthews-Clarkson stepping down after five years leading Scotland’s digital skill academy, and the Smart Things Accelerator Centre (STAC), Scotland’s first Internet of Things (IoT) accelerator, marking its first year of operations. 

Leadership is taxing, and this was particularly the case for many leaders during pandemic times, and Melinda deserves credit for guiding CodeClan through a challenging couple of years to come out stronger on the other side.  As she sets out on a sabbatical that will include a spell back in her native United States, the word on the tech scene is very positive about Matthews-Clarkson’s replacement in the top seat, tech entrepreneur Loral Quinn. 

CEO and co-founder Paul Wilson has had his foot down, in the best possible way, at the Glasgow-based STAC IoT accelerator since day one.  The overall aim of STAC is for the industry and government-supported organisation to produce Scottish IoT companies capable of scaling and competing on a global level.  

Backed by top-tier homegrown and international corporates, STAC has already built a 24-company cohort, and last week announced a further round of impressive appointments to its executive and advisory teams.  With former Scottish Enterprise chief Linda Hanna now in place as STAC’s head of partnerships, and with Meta VP for Supply Chain Sean Murphy joining a STAC advisory board that includes recently appointed Volvo Cars CEO Jim Rowan, the IoT accelerator has a powerhouse team to help guide STAC’s bold strategy to supercharge Scotland’s IoT sector. 

One of the not-for-profits we advise, Digital Xtra Fund, was in the news this week around the 35 grants it has awarded to drive digital skills for young people across Scotland.  We know from research that we need to get kids interested in all things digital at an early age, so it was no surprise to see a weighting towards primary schools in this year’s grant awards.

As with CodeClan and STAC, industry partnerships are key to Digital Xtra Fund making a real and lasting impact on a national level, and the Kraig Brown-led charity has some high profile corporate supporters - including Baillie Gifford, CGI, Chroma Ventures, J.P. Morgan, Accenture, and Skyscanner.  What would be great, would be having even more companies step up to back Digital Xtra Fund.  While the small team already makes an outsized impact, think how much more it could do with even more backing.

You would think it would be nothing less than a no-brainer for Scotland plc to invest in digital skills initiative, as this will help to create a virtuous circle that will benefit us all in Scotland’s future economy. 

The question of leadership, guest post by Opto Advisory co-founder Chris Wilson

In the recent flood of coverage about the late Queen, I was particularly struck by the strength of her leadership that came through in so much of the commentary.   One exchange in particular caught my eye, especially in light of recent events at number 10.

Former Prime Minister James Callaghan was recalling an interaction with the Queen.  He was dealing with a particularly troublesome issue and was struggling.  At one of his weekly audiences with the queen, he took it upon himself to enquire as to what he might do.  Quick as a flash came the reply… “that’s why you are paid the big bucks”.

It’s not, I suspect, that the queen did not have an answer.  I’m certain she will have.    However, giving her view would narrow his perspective – he needed to explore all options without bias and with all the context and facts.  Once decided, of course she can have an opinion on plans, share wisdom and indeed challenge if she sees fit.  But not tell him what to do.   

I’ve been lucky enough to lead in great organisations and experience lots of different leadership styles.   This exchange hit home with me as it was very aligned with a recent (and am sure you may think very obvious) realisation of mine on leadership.  No, on great leadership.    

Great leadership is not about the ability to use your wisdom and experience to give great answers. Vanity sometimes causes us to fall into that trap.   Great leadership is about using those same attributes to ask great questions.   

So not, “You should” or “I would …”. Instead, “why might that be happening” or simply, “what do you think?”  A small change but a big difference.  

And I know it works because I’ve experienced it… 

“Why might that have happened?” asked the pro, as I once again hit a wild slice with my 6 iron at a golf lesson.   Initially, this was a source of great frustration for me.   I booked the lesson for the pro to tell me why it was happening.   We both persevered… “maybe my swing was a bit wonky?” I offered pathetically.  “OK, why might that be the case?”  The professional gradually coaxed my amateur golf brain to work out what was going wrong.   Then, as we narrowed the issues down to the most significant (of many) issues with my game,  next came, “What could you do about that?”  And then, “OK, try that then.”  

And so the process continued – trial and error, to rectify the issues in my game.   Miraculously (and for him I expect painfully), the shots started to straighten out, the flight path improved, and I actually started to hit what looked like a golf shot.    Then he said it:

“I’ll not be on the golf course with you when you start to hit bad shots – you need to work out what’s going on and how to sort it yourself”.

So, whether it’s a recurring slice or a global crisis, great leadership is not about telling. Like the Queen,  it is about taking the time to ask great questions so that, in the moment, we help people get the best from themselves when it matters. 

Normalising entrepreneurship, by Nick Freer

At EIE22 week, tech luminaries delivered keynotes addresses to delegates alongside 40 startup founders pitching to investors from across the UK and beyond. 

Scotland’s Chief Entrepreneur Mark Logan revealed that the startups invited into Scotland’s Tech Scaler network will have access to grant funding when they start joining one of the seven hubs across the country later this year.  In terms of other benefits, Logan believes it will be easier for investors to connect with the nation’s startup talent because of Tech Scaler’s inherent one-stop shop proposition.  

On the subject of entrepreneurship, Logan said entrepreneurial potential is latent in all of us, but we need to normalise entrepreneurship on a societal level and throughout the education system. Scotland’s universities are world-class at teaching and research, Logan continued, but they need to be better at entrepreneurship to “complete the triangle”. 

In response to a question on securing more international investment for startups based here, Scotland’s Chief Entrepreneur said this challenge was being addressed at government level, a point reiterated by recently appointed CEO of Scottish Enterprise, Adrian Gillespie, who spoke after Logan.  Gillespie went on to pick out EIE alumni companies that have helped to move the dial when it comes to innovation - including thermal storage specialist Sunamp, and space technology rising star Krucial, a company the new Scottish Enterprise CEO visited last week. 

When it comes to an entrepreneurial journey, incoming president of techUK Sheila Lavell CBE’s story was an eye-opener.  Starting her career as a police officer in Glasgow, Flavell recounted to conference, she went onto become an air stewardess in the Middle East before the Gulf War clipped her wings and she returned to the UK, where she started a business that is now valued at over £1 billion as a constituent of the FTSE 250 on the London Stock Exchange. Supporting women in tech has been one of Flavell’s main crusades, and it was illuminating to hear from entrepreneur and investor Ana Stewart, chair of the Scottish Government-commissioned Women in Enterprise Review, or Stewart Review, co-authored with Mark Logan, reiterating her belief that Scotland can bring about transformative change when it comes to moving the dial on gender imbalance.  

A year on from COP26 in Glasgow, CEO of The Earthshot Prize, Hannah Jones expanded on how Earthshot searches the world for the most innovative solutions to the climate emergency, and how the spark for the foundation is based on President John F Kennedy’s famous moonshot speech at Rice University in 1962. 

One of the climate tech companies pitching at EIE22 that caught my eye was Robotics Cats, with CEO and founder Andre Cheung outlining how his team are aiming to reduce wildfires via AI-enabled detection software.  Another was Ocean Biofuels, a startup seeking £4 million of investment to develop a fleet of autonomous vessels powered by green hydrogen and solar to harvest sea kelp for a variety of applications with sustainability at their core.  

Healthcare startups were also prominent at EIE22, and I got a kick out of seeing my youngest brother, Matthew Freer, a consultant anaesthetist, present his company Infix Support, a venture he set up three years ago to improve operating theatre efficiencies in the NHS. 

The Silicon Valley CEO's CEO, by Nick Freer

Early stage investment firm Race Capital’s general partner Alfred Chuang was in the media this week talking about right-sizing valuations during the tech downturn, and the opportunity that exists for startup founders in spite of economic woes. 

When Alfred Chuang speaks, people listen, to the extent that venture capital heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz refers to him as “Silicon Valley CEO’s CEO”.   BEA Systems, the enterprise software group co-founded and led by Chuang, was sold to Oracle for $8.5 billion in 2008, after which he entered venture investing, going on to help transform an array of startups into some of the Valley’s most iconic technology companies. 

In the arena of all things crypto, blockchain, and web 3.0, companies like FTX, Solana, and Databricks are among Race’s portfolio, and Chuang is bullish about Web 3.0, viewed by commentators as the next seismic shift in the evolution of the internet, via decentralisation where ownership is by users rather than behemoth corporates.

Chuang uses the example of Amazon Web Services (AWS) controlling over one-third of the western world’s internet infrastructure. Crucially, Silicon Valley CEO’s CEO says, the decentralisation of the internet addresses the concentration of power wielded by dominating tech groups. 

While the growth and late stage venture market has been dampened by the recent market crash, the rate and quantum of early state investment deals remain strong and, according to Chuang, this is down to three factors.  

Firstly, seed funding is not tied to revenue, and market slowdowns have a limited impact on early stage founders.  VC firms like Race look for what they describe as “founder-market fit”, providing startups with investment for 18-24 months of runway to penetrate target markets. 

Secondly, exits don’t have to be initial public offerings (IPO), which dry up when tech valuations go south.  The vast majority of exits are by way of acquisitions.  Just think of Scotland’s biggest tech exits of recent times - TVSquared, Current Health, Skyscanner, FanDuel etc. 

Thirdly, venture capitalist investors are sitting on top of USD162 billion of cash for new investments.

So, how is this relevant in the Scottish context?  Tech trends Stateside tend to migrate - there is that old adage about America sneezing, and the rest of the world catching a cold.  

The findings of the 6th annual Scottish Startup Survey were announced this week, a survey of startup founders run by the EIE investor readiness programme at the University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre in tandem with my own agency.  

While 93 percent of respondents said Scotland is a good place to launch a startup, 88 percent of startups are targeting investors outside Scotland.  

London and Rest of the UK (46 percent), followed by North America (30 percent), and Europe (21 percent) are the most targeted investor regions. 

If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.  Along these lines, and after its successful Silicon Valley trip earlier this year, Startup Grind Scotland will be taking 10 Scottish tech founders to the Slush tech conference in Helsinki next month.  For the lucky guys and gals that are picked, the Finland swing will afford a fantastic opportunity to meet some of Europe’s top venture capital firms.  

The power of positive listening, by Vanessa Collingridge, Associate, Freer Consultancy

In this time of widespread economic misery, it’s a natural response to draw in your horns and retrench.  But with hardship looming for so many this winter, how do we strengthen and grow our businesses and personal networks – all without adding to costs?

One of the most interesting shifts in business culture that I’m seeing among my clients is the growing realisation that we need to transform how we engage with each other; put simply, we need to rediscover the art of effective communication. 

To illustrate, let me share a real life story from a leadership development course I ran recently. This was for a group of chief executives and managing directors from the logistics industry - mainly male with twenty-plus years in positions of power.

Part of my work was helping them boost their business performance, improving the way they communicate by seeing customers and colleagues as human beings with unmet needs. As the theory goes, recognising and meeting those needs forges stronger, deeper relationships, and better quality outcomes for both parties. So how is that achieved?

This group was well practised with the sales patter; in fact, they were close to pitch perfect. But inexplicably to them, they still weren’t connecting with their customers. I put the group into pairs and did a listening skills exercise with them. Person A talked for a minute with Person B ignoring them completely. They then swapped and repeated the exercise before reflecting on how it felt to be ignored. Some of the team felt dehumanised; others felt a surge of red-hot anger. We then repeated the exercise with Person A talking, and Person B listening with strong, affirming eye contact and body language – but no talking or even sounds. Everyone reported that this felt better but was still unsatisfying. Finally, we repeated the exercise where the listener listened, paused, then ‘reflected back’ what they’d heard the speaker say, using the speaker’s words as far as possible. This time, the participants reported that they felt acknowledged, appreciated and validated, with their words not only heard but respected and understood. 

So far, so good. But when everyone else was clearing their chairs away, one very senior executive – let’s call him Dave – stayed stock-still in the middle of the room, as if transfixed by some giant discovery.  Gently, I asked him if he was ok and with his eyes still focussed in the middle distance he replied, “I’ve been leading teams for over thirty years but I think that’s the first time I’ve ever truly listened to anyone!”.

Dave’s discovery was the power of active listening – not just to what was being said but conveyed in the silences and body language, as these often divulge a very different truth. 

Active listening is a whole body experience that takes humility, empathy and patience to achieve. It flips the ‘download’ culture on its head, adding value by recognising and hearing those unmet (and even unspoken) needs of customers and colleagues – and then responding to them. By ‘listening to understand, not to reply’, we can help to build strong and successful teams, heal fractured relationships, and deliver what the customer really needs, not what we think they need.

Craftwork, by Nick Freer

Working for top-rated financial and corporate communications agency Maitland in London for a decade from the mid-Nineties, at one stage we were advising around a quarter of the FTSE 100.  Unsurprisingly for an agency that was having so much success, there was regular speculation about several global media groups wanting to snap up the Angus Maitland-founded firm.  

Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP was never too far removed from the mounting speculation, but ultimately it was French advertising giant Havas that secured a controlling stake.  Fast forward twenty years, and Maitland is now a central piece of Havas’s global financial PR network, AMO, a network that covers every continent and advises on hundreds of M&A deals valued at hundreds of billions of dollars on an annual basis.  

It was a hard decision to leave the agency, particularly when global expansion was afoot, but I was determined to relocate back to Scotland.  From my own perspective, I think the PR scene here is much stronger today than when I landed back north of the border, and I’d like to think I’ve played a small part in that evolution.    

Domestic agencies like Charlotte Street Partners have really helped to move the dial, in a mould not too dissimilar to the agency environments I remember from London.  Charlotte Street’s founding partners Andrew Wilson and Malcolm Robertson have set the standard in the Scottish context, not unconnected to the fact that both guys have gravitas in spades.

As a CEO, founder, or director, the public or media-facing profile of your company is a big deal.  How that corporate reputation plays out is going to be significantly determined by how you handle press relations, and how that translates to resulting coverage in column inches or on the airwaves.  

With this in mind, next week we are going to announce the appointment of an associate partner to run dedicated media training for our client base.  We think we’ve found a great person to take on the role, a former BBC broadcaster who has spent years advising the financial services, professional services, and technology sectors - a strong overlap with the sectors we already work in - on connecting better with various audiences when it comes to external communications.

So, that could be preparing for a milestone press announcement, dealing with crisis comms, carrying out a broadcast interview, pitching to investors, or delivering a keynote address at an industry conference.  While we already cover these disciplines to an extent, the rationale for the appointment is to supercharge our existing offering.

If PR can be considered a craft, then I think it’s natural to want to continually improve that craft.  Not to rest on your laurels, and all that.  I have a friend from Jeddah, the Saudi Arabian port city on the Red Sea, who talks passionately on the subject of craft.  As an institutional and private investor, he strongly believes you must continually work at your craft no matter what you do for a living, and I hope he will share his insight in this column in the not too distant future.

If craft is important in life, it’s equally important to graft.  Talking of which, it’s time I got back to the grindstone. 

Deciphering a tech ecosystem, guest post by Robert Gelb, startup founder and adviser

I attended the TechScaler launch event in Glasgow last month and wasn’t really sure what to expect. The announcement on CodeBase securing the £42 million contract to run the government’s TechScaler initiative, as with the appointment of the Chief Entrepreneur, have certainly generated headlines.

But for founders like me, our focus is on our businesses, and often (with good reason based on experience) we’re used to ignoring the latest initiative announcement, usually assuming it to be a showcase of buzzword mastery popular with politicians and professional services firms.

Cynical, I know! But Scotland’s tech ecosystem has long suffered from tribalism, with a sometimes uncomfortable rivalry between groups who all purport to be aligned on helping entrepreneurs succeed, but without much in the way of collaboration, openness to feedback, and public self-reflection. Often, more barriers are built than removed.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad there's movement. I'm glad the government has tasked an ecosystem leader to solve an ecosystem problem. It builds on the very positive introduction and expansion of the Scottish Growth Scheme that helps empower venture capital (VC) firms like Techstart Ventures to actively invest in pre-seed and seed stage companies. A game-changer for startups needing early institutional capital.

I’m hopeful that Tech Scalers might have similar impact addressing unmet needs that previously were unmet responsibilities of public institutions. But as founders, we don’t really focus on initiatives until we think they directly affect us. It’s easy for us to sit back atop our perch and moan about the latest initiative, judging and whining about the lack of founder inclusion.

So how do we get more founders off that perch and involved with the process? We think it’s by giving them an opportunity to express their perspective. So, that’s why a group of us came up with The Founders Survey and Awards, precisely to give founders in Scotland that voice.

We want to highlight what’s working, what isn’t, and provide direct and actionable feedback so that Scotland’s startup ecosystem becomes world-class.

Our first questionnaire (which is live now) covers the Scottish investment landscape for early stage startups. Who are the most helpful angel investors? What funds offer founder-friendly terms? What syndicates are respectful of a founders’ time even if they decide not to invest? With this data, we’ll announce a series of awards recognising the best angels, funds, and syndicates in Scotland based on founders’ views, along with a report on the state of the landscape. 

Each quarter we hope to run more awards including around evaluating the best local professional services providers, ecosystem partners, and unsung heroes helping startups.

The current Founders Survey is available at www.founderssurvey.com. It’s open to any founder that’s taken or applied for funding from Scottish-based angel investors, VCs, family offices, and syndicates. The survey closes at the end of September.

Scotland’s ecosystem is only as strong as the intent, humility, and self-reflection that everyone involved brings to the table. Our hope is that the Founders Survey and Awards elevate and celebrate progress, while identifying opportunities to improve the ecosystem in a productive way.

Generation R, by Nick Freer

WeWork founder Adam Neumann was in the business news last week, with lofty venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz backing his latest venture, Flow, to the tune of $350 million - equating to the VC firm’s largest ever investment, and turning Neumann’s fledgling residential property play into an instant unicorn with a $1 billion valuation.  

Renowned for being an extrovert party animal (just Google to find out more) and equally persistent businessman, Neumann founded WeWork in 2010, with the co-working behemoth going on to be valued at almost $50 billion ten years later in 2020.  Today, its value sits at around $4 billion.  In spite of a shocking decline in valuation, WeWork has played a central role in an area commonly described as the future of work. 

Neumann’s new startup Flow aims to rethink the future of living by addressing the housing crisis in the States, and the fact that many cities are pricing out talent.  Sound familiar?  Flow already owns apartment blocks across the US, is expected to offer concierge type services to its tenants via an app, management services to third party landlords, and has plans to launch a digital wallet that can store cryptocurrency. 

So, very much a bricks-and-mortar business, underpinned by technology, and playing to a well documented saying of Neumann’s: “As the world becomes a more digital place, we cannot forget about the human connection”.  

Neumann’s big name backer, Andreessen Horowitz principal Marc Andreessen famously penned an essay in 2011, “Why software is eating the world”, although in 2020 he had revised his thinking somewhat, saying it was “time to build”, with particular reference to schools, hospitals, and homes.  

In the Scottish context, on the Edinburgh scene, we have an entrepreneur who has been building companies in a not dissimilar vein to Neumann, although with a character makeup that is much more agreeable.

Alex Watts is the CEO of Kingsford Group and Let Tech, with Kingsford running business and co-working space around the city, and Let Tech an emerging property technology startup that is digitising the whole letting journey. 

Catching up with Alex this week, he reminded me that Kingsford was one of the very first Scottish operators of Build to Rent, a category of housing provision that is much more prevalent in the US and Europe.  The 75 designer apartments Kingsford Residence operates at the former Broughton High School building on McDonald Road in Edinburgh, deliver a new way of living for professionals who demand an altogether higher level of service.  It’s a demographic that Neumann describes as Generation R, with the ‘R’ being for rental.  

As Alex puts it, “the fragmented rental market requires seismic change, the archaic status quo is ripe for rebooting and upgrade, and it’s such an important area when you consider that residential real estate is the single largest asset class there is.” 

If you don’t know Alex Watts, in addition to his entrepreneurial acumen he also throws a great party.  One of those happened this week, with an evening of bands playing live music at his Kingsford Business Club.  Sadly, yours truly was on babysitting duty and had to miss what I gather was a good old fashioned knees-up.  

In the thick of it, by Nick Freer

In July 2019, our agency supported San Francisco-based tech group UserTesting around the launch of its European headquarters in Edinburgh, and then the follow-on Scottish Enterprise grant to support the development of the company’s R&D function here.  Our strategic media relations support was a nice feather in the cap, in terms of getting to work with the CEO and in-house PR team on what was the first Silicon Valley tech company to set up shop here. 

While I remember the large amount of prep we carried out got somewhat in the way of our summer vacation that year, it was the kind of press announcement that doesn’t come along every day of the week so, as a PR adviser, you always want to be in the thick of it.  We advised on similar announcements, with Deliveroo, also in 2019, and then with Trustpilot the following year, and it is something of a sweet spot in terms of our strengths and capabilities as an agency. 

When tech companies from outside Scotland land here, journalists always want to know about the level of ambition around growing a team here.  It’s pretty much the first question reporters ask, after the general opener, “why Scotland”? 

UserTesting made its first hire in Scotland in April 2019.  Fast forward three years, and Andy MacMillan-led UserTesting now has around 150 people in its European division.  That makes it the company’s largest office outside its Atlanta base, and even bigger than its San Francisco HQ.  

If you ever get the opportunity, a visit to UserTesting’s Exchange Plaza office in Edinburgh is an eye-opener.  Scrawled above the bar area is a blue neon sign, “UserTasting”, with free-flowing beer taps serving ethical lagers and ales by Brewgooder, rows of ergonomically arranged desks, and breakout office rooms named after Scottish islands.  Very Silicon Valley, with a Scottish touch. 

Putting the bells and whistles to one side, what could be most impactful for Scotland is the precedent that UserTesting has set.  CEO MacMillan recalls how when he made a case to his US venture capital firm backers for launching in Scotland, it didn’t take long to convince them of the rationale, including access to talent, living standards, and proximity to the company’s customer base. 

While MacMillan says he was already espousing the strengths of having operations in Scotland to VCs stateside, his appointment as a trade envoy for the Scottish Government earlier this year has added a bit more formality to Andy banging the drum for our tech ecosystem.  

Effectively, UserTesting provides a case study for VC-backed tech companies setting up here.  Particularly, when the allure of being based in Silicon Valley is on the wane.  While we talk about building unicorns like Skyscanner and FanDuel from scratch here, unicorns from the US growing operational bases here can only help to take our ecosystem to the next level.  That, you would think, should also help to take our tech ecosystem to the tipping point outlined in the Logan Report.   

Separately, we are working on another interesting tech inward investment story which is currently in the wings, so watch this space. 

Graphic equalizers and turning up the ecosystem dials, by Nick Freer

At Turing Fest last week, one of the most anticipated speakers was CodeBase’s chief strategy officer Steven Drost, a couple of weeks on from the tech campus being awarded the £42 million Tech Scaler contract to establish seven startup hubs across Scotland.  

In his talk - ‘The Tech Ecosystem Graphic Equalizer and What is a “Tech Scaler”?’ - Drost reminded the audience that while the term “startup” was first coined in the 1930s by British botanists Arthur Roy Clapham and Sir Arthur George Tansley, it wasn’t until the early Nineties that the term mapped over to the business world.

Writing for the Harvard Business Review in 1993, James Moore penned a piece, ‘Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition’, in which he set out a new metaphor for competition drawn from the study of biology and social systems.  Moore suggested that a company be viewed not as a member of a single industry, but as a part of a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of industries.  In a business ecosystem, companies “co-evolve” around a new innovation, working cooperatively and competitively to support new products and satisfy customer needs.  

From Moore’s paper: “Successful businesses are those that evolve rapidly and effectively.  Yet innovative businesses can’t evolve in a vacuum.  They must attract resources of all sorts, drawing in capital, partners, and suppliers.” 

In a blog posted on Medium in 2019, Snap Inc’s Joseph Darko wrote: “Think of any strong and thriving regional tech ecosystem and you will more than likely see all six entities play a major role: a strong developer community, accelerators and tech hubs, tech focused startups, established businesses and companies, engagement and connection, and universities and schools.”

After referencing venture capitalist and entrepreneur Paul Graham’s 2006 essay ‘How to be Silicon Valley’, in which Graham stated, “I think you need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds”, CodeBase’s Drost suggested that in 2022 there are “different focal points” when you talk about ecosystems, including around ethics, diversity, inclusivity, social impact, and sustainability. 

If Drost has a metaphor of his own, it is what he describes as the “graphic equaliser”.  If you think of a graphic equaliser, there are different dials with which you can adjust sound and frequency.  Put in simpler terms, you could turn up the drums, or turn down the bass.  

On the display of Drost’s graphic equaliser, the dials show startups, the state, academia, agencies, big corporations, and investors.  In every ecosystem, these moving parts play lesser or more important roles.  By way of a crude example, in North Korea the dial is turned right up when it comes to state involvement, and turned all the way down on startups and investors.  

In Scotland, the role of government is still important, but not in a dominant way, we have world class universities, but the dials are down fairly low when you look at the number of startups we are producing.

The collective hope is that the tech scaler initiative will help lay the ground for the transformation of Scotland’s tech ecosystem.  You can hear Steven Drost talk more eloquently on the subject, compared to my second hand account, over on his Startupification podcast. 

Ecosytem building... Scottish style, by Nick Freer

Tech conference Turing Fest at the EICC this week seemed to hit all the right notes, and there was a real buzz about the conference centre, in no small part because there were so many international delegates in situ this time around. 

Diversity and inclusivity were among the big themes at Turing, and one of the breakout sessions I found most informative was a roundtable organised by digital skills academy CodeClan and online travel site Skyscanner. 

The ‘Building an Inclusive Team’ conversation covered the importance of unconscious bias training, and on the gender front it was interesting to hear that Skyscanner plans to have women in 40 per cent of its senior management roles by 2025.   

One of the main fixtures at Turing was a Q&A with the Scottish Government’s recently appointed Chief Entrepreneur Mark Logan, with Logan interviewed by global tech news site TechCrunch’s editor-at-large Mike Butcher. 

There was some amusing preamble, including how Mark found one of his first tech jobs in a newspaper ad for a company whose hiring policy seemed to revolve around appointing “odd people, because they thought if you were odd you were intelligent”.  The startup, Atlantech, was acquired by Cisco for $180 million in 2000. The chat quickly moved on to building successful tech ecosystems, with Logan confirming his well-documented view that Scotland is still pre-tipping point and has yet to achieve a key yardstick for success, namely true network effect.  

In terms of reaching the tipping point, education, infrastructure, and investment are key pillars for Logan, first outlined in his 2020 Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review, but these three descriptors are nuanced.  “If you had to choose an order though”, said Logan, “it would be education first, infrastructure second, then investment”.  

There is also an X factor, agreed Logan and Butcher, which is serendipity.  I have seen this first hand, with a number of startups, including one of our most celebrated tech companies which was only founded here because the CEO followed his girlfriend to Edinburgh and then settled in Scotland’s capital. 

As the Scottish Government and its Ecosystem Fund, born out of the 2020 Logan Review, moves through the gears in its backing of Scottish tech, Logan reminded the audience how Silicon Valley “was always supported by government, and still is”.    

What else does our tech scene need to work on, in order to reach the transformative tipping point phase?  “Belief”, said Logan.  “Don’t accept mediocrity, believe we can be as impactful and successful as any other ecosystem.” 

So, how do we get there?  Logan continued, “Ecosystem builders, mentors, and founders will take us to the tipping point”. 

Earlier this month, the Scottish Government announced its ‘Tech Scaler’ initiative, via a £42 million contract awarded to CodeBase to create tech scaler hubs across Scotland.  

Enter stage right, and next up at Turing was CodeBase’s Chief Strategy Officer Steven Drost, outlining his own definitions around the terms ecosystem and tech scaler, and laying out how CodeBase and its multiple partners are going to drive this unique and pioneering opportunity to add serious rocket fuel to our most promising startups and scale-ups. 

More on that next week…

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.

Startup pixie dust, by Nick Freer

On a family break up in Sutherland this week, we managed to escape the good weather elsewhere in Scotland in exchange for a wind-ravaged landscape and brooding skies.  Assynt and the surrounding region is one of my all-time favourite places come rain or shine, so it was all good.

My ‘getting away from it all’ moment came when riding white horse waves into a deserted beach, surrounded by a cathedral of heather-covered mountains that stooped down into the sea.  I was thankful for every millimetre of thickness in my wetsuit, as a cauldron of freezing cold water erupted and threw me out of the breakers onto the sand.  Mother Nature, Scottish style, at its most majestic, and a short-lived moment of serenity in an otherwise hectic life.     

One event back in the lowlands that I was sorry to miss, was the ‘Tech Scaler’ reveal announcement by the Scottish Government at Barclays’ Glasgow HQ.  Tech campus CodeBase, which originally opened its doors in the heart of Edinburgh back in 2014 and now operates UK-wide, will now lead the development of a network of tech scaler hubs around Scotland - in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Stirling, Inverness, and Dumfries.

In spite of our remote location and associated reception issues, I was able to have a few chats with CodeBase CEO Stephen Coleman as he and the team prepared for the media announcement.  Without pomp and ceremony, as I said to Stephen, CodeBase has quietly gone about its business over the years, becoming the motherlode of Scotland’s startup scene.

Skyscanner founder Gareth Williams put me in touch with Stephen’s elder brother, Jamie Coleman, almost a decade ago, as Jamie was looking for PR support ahead of CodeBase launching at Argyle House, and in light of the incumbent PR agency, as Jamie put it, “going around our tenant companies, knocking on doors to offer their services.”  To put it mildly, he wasn’t pleased, and the PR firm was shown a door of its own.

Over the years, as an agency, we have advised multiple startups headquartered at CodeBase.  But I always remembered Jamie’s words, only engaging with startup founders when I was recommended.  I think, in part, that was because I recalled Jamie’s former glory as a successful amateur boxer.   

On my first meeting with Jamie, as he sat amongst crates of Dewar’s whisky bottles (another story in its own right) at the precursor to CodeBase, he explained his vision to create a “factory in the cloud".  “In Scotland, we are used to doing the hard lifting, think of our engineering heritage”, he said, “only now we are building world-class software.”

That vision has been carried forward by Stephen Coleman and his team - CodeBase is all about the education piece, shared learning and insight, mentoring, having a critical mass of startups that grow stronger in no small part because of their proximity and connectivity to each other.    

If you’ve ever been in a CodeBase campus, you may even have noticed the pixie dust in the air, an intangible characteristic that is perhaps closer to spirit or soul.  It is great news for Scotland that so many of our startups will now get the chance to be coated in this special dusting.   

An eureka moment for Scotland's IoT scene, by Nick Freer

I first met Professor Harald Haas in 2013, when Professor Haas was chair of mobile communications at the University of Edinburgh and co-founder and chief science officer at one of the university’s spin-out companies - PureVLC, which was soon after rebranded as PureLiFi. 

Haas has been credited with being the so-called “father of LiFi”, an emerging technology at the time which essentially turns standard light fittings into wireless data transmitters as an alternative to traditional WiFi.  

I was brought in to advise the company by its lead investor as it went through a senior management reshuffle, while laying the ground for a transition from a R&D-focused venture to a commercially-minded business.

I had heard of the term the ‘Internet of Things’ at the time, but it was Haas that explained it to me in a way where I could really understand the translation of the technology to industrial and domestic applications.  

We were preparing for an interview with a global business publication, and by chance, in our preparation for the interview, I teased out an interesting story from Harald.  While Alexander Graham Bell is famed for inventing the telephone, at one point the Scottish scientist believed his ‘photophone’, with a signal sent by a beam of sunlight as opposed to a wire, was going to be his greatest achievement.  Alas, it turned out that Scotland’s meteorology was always going to be a hindrance for a technology relying on sunshine.  

While our Internet of Things (IoT) scene was very much in its nascent phase in 2013, fast forward a decade and, while PureLiFi is now venture capital-backed and winning commercial contracts worldwide, there have been interesting developments in the space which point to IoT being an important cog in the wheel of Scotland’s future economy. 

In June last year, an old school friend who is a director at accountancy firm Anderson Anderson Brown (AAB) put me in touch with Paul Wilson, who was set to launch Scotland’s first IoT accelerator programme.  The Smart Things Accelerator Centre, STAC for short, opened its doors at Skypark in Glasgow last August and in under a year has made incredible strides.  More than that, it’s the ambition of Wilson and the programme that deserves most attention. 

While local firms like AAB and law firm Burness Paull, who both boast strong tech credentials, in place as sponsors and supporters of STAC, the global perspective engendered by Paul Wilson and his team is best illustrated with international corporate giants like Intel and Twilio also backing the IoT accelerator. 

This week, Scottish Enterprise committed to the long-term support of STAC, with a focus on funding and resourcing the growing number of early stage companies being supported by STAC - now up above 20. 

Why is this initiative so important?  The answer probably comes best from STAC CEO Paul Wilson’s own words on the occasion of the Scottish Enterprise strategic partnership announcement we handled this week: 

“Through STAC supported companies we will retain Scottish product development talent, who today almost exclusively study here, but then leave Scotland to take jobs elsewhere either in the UK or internationally.”

The only way is up for Scotland's startup nation, by Nick Freer

The Scottish Startup Survey launched this week, a survey of Scotland’s fastest-growing early to later stage technology companies.  Run by the EIE investor readiness programme team that is now based at the University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre, as an agency we have been involved in the survey since its genesis in 2017. 

Scottish startup and scale-up founders and CEOs are being quizzed about investor engagement, valuation, growth strategy, commercialisation, internationalisation, economic outlook, Scottish ecosystem support, hiring plans, returning to the office, new ways of working, the wellbeing of their people and, overall, how they are navigating their way out of pandemic times.

The strength of the survey relies on how much engagement we are able to drive, and having a deep, quality sample of startup respondents across the country.  As Novosound CEO Dave Hughes put it in our press release: “The results of the startup survey are a great barometer of the Scottish tech ecosystem.  It has helped me to navigate our next stage of growth and, as a founder, realise that other founders share many of the same aspirations and concerns.”

It's always good to hear that our annual findings can be used as something of a peer-to-peer learning tool. There’s no point in doing a survey for the sake of doing a survey, we want people from across the tech ecosystem to have valuable takeaways. 

We were lucky to get the input of Michael Moore, Director General of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA), who says: “This is an exciting time to be investing in tech, especially in Scotland. Shared insight is vital to growth companies and their investors across the country - this survey gets right to the heart of the key issues and its findings will be invaluable to all of us.”

Michael Moore puts his finger on it, “shared insight”.  Nobody can build a successful startup in a vacuum.  From many of the founders I respect most, it’s a common theme that the shared insight gained when on accelerator programmes, or when visiting other tech hubs, can be game-changing.  

When writing for this column last November, Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, co-founder and CEO of Infracost, described it perfectly: “In the startup world, your network will not only help you in times of stress, but if done right it will act as a catalyst to your company’s success.”

One of the first Scottish companies to secure investment from world-renowned Y-Combinator, Hassan continued: “Our success is tied to the support of the network, and if we had more strong networks like this in Scotland, we would have more successful startups.” 

Elsewhere on the tech scene this week, there is a lot of excitement in the air after the ecosystem’s jungle drums sounded out that the Scottish Government is on the cusp of announcing details of the five so-called ‘tech scaler hubs’ around Scotland - hubs aimed at helping hundreds of new startups get off the ground.

The collective hope for Scotland’s startup scene, as per the Jazz and the Plastic Population pop anthem in the Eighties, is that the only way is up!