Cracking the code of global-scale businesses, by Nick Freer

Glasgow Tech Week took place this week in the metropolis once known as the Second City of the Empire.  At the stunning Barclays campus with incredible views over the Clyde, the river that runs through the story of Glasgow’s industrial revolution, today’s business leaders gathered to discuss taking Scotland’s tech and entrepreneurial scene to the next level.

The ‘Scaling in Sync - C-suite strategies for Unified Growth’ event featured scaleup leaders from Deliveroo, ENOUGH, Firstbase, and Malted AI, and thanks to the Innovation Banking team at Barclays, Cooper Parry, and Burness Paull for inviting me along to chair the panel on the night.

Andy Robinson was the commercial director at software development firm Cultivate when Deliveroo made the company its first ever UK acquisition in 2019, with Robinson joining a tech juggernaut which was hiring up to one hundred people every week - which sounded like scaling on steroids.

As chief financial officer at ENOUGH, chief financial officer Elaine Ferguson has overseen funding rounds totalling over 100 million Euros from global investors as the food tech company innovates towards its mission around sustainable food transition.  Headquartered in Glasgow, ENOUGH recently opened the world’s largest non-animal protein facility, based in the Netherlands.

After leaving the oil and gas industry in Aberdeen, Chris Herd built IT asset management platform Firstbase that was acquired by San Francisco-headquartered AppDirect last year.  So the maxim, “If you build it, they will come”, from the Eighties movie Field of Dreams rings true - you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to scale amazing tech startups.

Having said that, in spite of a catalogue of individual company success stories like Cultivate, ENOUGH, and Firstbase, as a nation we are still seeing relatively few scaleups going on to achieve truly global success.   

In this column only a few weeks ago, prominent tech C-suite Richard Lennox put it like this: “We haven’t yet cracked the code of creating global-scale businesses” in an op-ed headlined, “How Can We Fix Scotland’s Big Scaleup Problem?”.

Artificial intelligence is enabling some tech startups to gain traction much quicker than ever before, so for example a small AI-enabled tech team can be ten times more productive.  So, it was interesting to hear from Laura Bernal Vergara, chief of staff at Edinburgh-based Malted AI, about the work they are doing around small language models (SLMs).

We covered so much at Barclays the other night that it would be hard to faithfully digest that here, but I hope that each of the panelists will take the opportunity to write for this column in the weeks and months ahead.

What is clear is that we need more of the kind of interaction that took place at Glasgow Tech Week, and very probably on a more regular basis, so that founders can continually learn from other peers, and share playbooks on how we can succeed together - faster and stronger.

Lastly, a shout out to Alisdair Gunn, the director of the Glasgow City Innovation District and the chief architect of Glasgow Tech Week.  Bravo!