What 15 years in Scotland's tech scene taught me, guest blog by former journalist and scaleup operator Lisa Venter

I arrived in Scotland in 2011. Exactly the wrong time for journalism and exactly the right time for digital.

I’d trained as a journalist in South Africa during the recession, as newspapers continued moving online. Twitter was so new that I was teaching university students how to use it responsibly because lecturers didn't “get it”. My degree was rooted in newspapers and storytelling. “Digital” was blogging and basic websites awkwardly bolted onto the side.

Working across agencies, propertytech, fintech, traveltech and ecommerce in Scotland taught me a series of lessons through 15 years of technological change that has only made sense in hindsight. First, attention online could be engineered. Second, even beloved products lose to changing customer behaviour. Third, companies can be right too early, building behaviours and infrastructure that don't yet exist. And finally, the businesses that grow fastest are those that learn fastest.

I saw that most clearly at Skyscanner, where a Scottish company became global because it understood something simple: intent matters. If someone searched "Scotland World Cup Boston", they were already telling you exactly what they wanted.

Later, at Snappy Shopper, I watched Covid accelerate digital adoption overnight and then partially reverse as customers returned to stores. The lesson wasn't that online would replace offline. It was that customer behaviour rarely moves in a straight line.

So now… AI.

Some of the AI conversation feels familiar because I've lived through several waves of technological change already. Technology changes. The challenge of helping people adapt rarely does.

What gives me confidence isn’t the technology. It’s the people adapting around it. Take Ross McNairn, a fellow graduate of the “Skyscanner mafia”. Like many of us who learned to scale companies there, he is now leading Wordsmith AI and applying those lessons to the next technological shift.

Over the last fifteen years, Scotland has developed a generation increasingly comfortable operating through technological change. Not because they can predict what comes next, but because they have learned how to test, adapt and keep moving when customer behaviour, business models and assumptions begin to shift.

Capability matters now. AI will change products, roles and operating models, but the companies that benefit most won’t necessarily be those that adopt the most tools. They’ll be the ones that help people understand what’s changing, experiment and translate new technology into better decisions and ways of working.

That doesn’t mean Scotland has solved the startup equation. There’s still scepticism around funding, opportunity and whether enough companies can successfully scale.

But fifteen years ago people were still trying to prove that Scotland could build globally relevant technology companies at all. That argument feels mostly settled now.

I’ve lived through the decline of print, the birth of search, the rise of social platforms, the acceleration of Covid commerce and now the emergence of AI.

Every time, somebody declared everything was about to change.

Usually they were right.

What they got wrong was thinking the technology was the difficult bit.

The difficult bit has always been helping people change with it.