Enough about programmes, lets build companies, guest blog by CodeBase COO Richard Lennox

I recently attended the Dublin Tech Summit, chairing a panel on a question that has occupied my thinking and driven my most recent actions: whether the ecosystem we have built around founders is serving them, or serving itself. Founders and operators across Europe are asking the same question, yet are the customers of that same ecosystem?

Scottish Enterprise's 2025-26 Ecosystem Guide lists over 100 organisations providing entrepreneurial support across the country. The guide opens, with complete sincerity, by declaring that Scotland is "the best place in the world to start and scale your business." We all have a right to ask: when will that support produce outcomes?

Having met Irish founders, VCs and ecosystem operators in Dublin, I saw that Ireland's answer is delivered in producing durable and sustainable companies. Ireland has built a culture that backs ambition loudly and early, treats a founder's failure as evidence of serious intent rather than personal embarrassment, and measures its success by the number of globally significant businesses it produces rather than the volume of interventions it funds. The contrast with Scotland is not subtle.

I took on my current role at CodeBase, including leading Techscaler’s delivery, specifically to attempt to address this. Every founder, regardless of what stage they are at, ultimately needs three things: access to customers, access to capital, and support from people who have actually built and scaled businesses before. 

What they do not need are generic playbooks nor advice from those who have never built anything. The hard question for every programme operating in Scotland, including Techscaler, is whether it is organised around meeting those needs or something else entirely.

Scotland has too many rooms where founders are talked at by people whose careers and reputation depend on the existence of the room, and too few where operators who have actually scaled a business sit with founders to work through their problems. Techscaler needs to be the latter, and that's what you should expect going forward. 

It must serve the needs of the businesses it supports first, before serving any broader narrative about Scottish entrepreneurship. A programme that cannot demonstrate it has helped move a company forward is not worth funding.

We have invested seriously in our entrepreneurial economy, an investment that will likely take a decade or more to fully realise the value it creates. The long-term measure is how many companies Scotland built that are still growing in ten years. 

Scotland now has a clearer sense of what public support actually means. It needs the policy environment to match. One that gives real agency to the operators best able to deliver the promise; that funds business outcomes not programmes, and backs the businesses that emerge with the same confidence Ireland brings. 

That is how the ecosystem reaches the tipping point of self-sustainability. The companies we build become the capital, the customers, and the operators for the companies that follow, and the system pays for itself.