Innovation buzz, guest post by Anna Brow, Head of Comms and PR, Startup Grind Scotland

If you sit down in any coffee shop in San Francisco, I guarantee you will overhear at least one entrepreneur interviewing potential co-founders or pitching investors their latest big idea.

From across the world, visionaries flock to Silicon Valley to pitch the next Uber or Netflix. It is the new American dream - a world built on selling ideas to the highest bidder. It’s easy to see why. There is an electric pull to this slice of the Californian coast: the sunshine, welcoming people, and the buzz of innovation that draws you in. 

I found myself earlier this month alongside twenty of Scotland’s most exciting tech entrepreneurs and the rest of the Startup Grind Scotland team, Dec McLaughlin, Caroline Melendez and Nick Murray. We spent a week immersed in the tech mecca, meeting fellow founders, visiting leading tech companies, and attending Startup Grind’s Global Conference - culminating in a private pitch party with over fifty US-based investors.

From the outset, we envisioned bringing together a diverse group of founders from various backgrounds, walks of life, and ways of thinking. As Tzaritsa Asante, founder of web3 fashion disrupter Tzar!, said, “In such diversity, you are permitted to grow.” This year’s cohort was a true representation of Scotland’s entrepreneurial sector: a shining example of what we have to offer the world. 

In his 2020 report, Mark Logan presented his vision of a world-leading Scottish technology ecosystem. Our programme funding was based on his recommendations, and we are tremendously grateful to the Scottish Government for levelling the playing field and enabling founders from across the country to travel to Silicon Valley. 

As forerunners in innovation, it is clear why we look towards the Valley’s tech leaders to incorporate their way of thinking at home. Nvidia blew us away with the company’s deep capabilities in AI, walking a line between science fiction, reality and ethics. Startup Grind’s Global Conference presented creative web3 applications, from decentralised communities to how the blockchain can ensure inclusion in a historically white and male space. 

But we must not only look outwards: Scotland’s tech leaders have much to offer the world. At UserTesting HQ, CEO Andy McMillan said, "Scotland has a unique tech industry," with more untapped tech talent available than he's seen worldwide. Our next challenge is to ensure that Scottish talent is highlighted on the global map. We're excited to work alongside Scottish Development International to help make this a reality. 

A highlight since our return has been hearing Kate Forbes MSP champion the programme's success to Holyrood. There is more to learn about how the broader impact of this experience will ripple across tech businesses in Scotland. Given the reception that this trip has already had, it's easy to imagine what could be possible with more funding, more founders and more excursions.

Scottish businesses are competing on the global stage. Our entrepreneurs are as driven, unforgiving and innovative as those in Silicon Valley, but their magic lies in their empathy and understanding of their businesses' impact. We may have a lot to learn from the Valley, but we have a wealth to share, too. If this cohort represents the next generation of tech leaders in Scotland, we're in safe hands. 

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 30th April 2022

Scottish tech puts best foot forward in London, by Nick Freer

EIE London rolled into the London Stock Exchange this week following a hiatus of a few years due to…..you guessed it. 

The Scottish technology companies that featured at EIE London were agritech star Intelligent Growth Solutions, ultrasound sensor specialist Novosound, facial animation scale-up Speech Graphics, and online brand protection business SnapDragon.  

SnapDragon CEO Rachel Jones recounted how a car seat for kids her previous company developed was faked, an episode which led to Jones founding SnapDragon to “fight fakes online”.  Half a trillion dollars is lost to illicit trade very year, and fakes lurk in both B2C and B2B said Jones.  The software developed by SnapDragon can help to remove an illicit product or seller from Amazon in less than five minutes, and the company has already saved organisations over £100 million, including the Scottish Government in relation to PPE during the early days of the pandemic.  

Speech Graphics shot to international fame working on music videos with Kayne West and video games like Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, with its facial animation technology now seeing uptake from various industries outside the entertainment sector, particularly around the advent of the metaverse, web3, and avatars.  As CEO and co-founder Gregor Hofer put it, “avatars are a great way to interact with your audience, and increase your chances of concluding an e-commerce transaction”.  With a sales force in San Francisco, a developer unit in Budapest, in addition to the core team in Edinburgh, Speech Graphics is in classic scale-up mode. 

Novosound was the youngest company to present at EIE London, only founded in 2018 as the University of the West of Scotland’s first ever spin-out.  CEO and co-founder Dave Hughes described himself as a “recovering academic”, although in 2022 Novosound has a commercial nous that would many much more established startups would envy.  Customers include GE Aviation, the world’s largest manufacturer of jet engines, and the company has grown headcount to 30, while more than quadrupling year-on-year revenue.

David Farquhar, the CEO of Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) who announced a £42.2 million Series B funding round at COP26 in Glasgow last November, explained how the company’s 42 square metre vertical farms produce the equivalent of 4 hectares, and are one thousand times more efficient than a standard field.  By way of a different explanation, Farquhar says an ISG farm can grow broccoli in 11-12 days, rather than 11-12 weeks.  The company hit £100 million of sales last month, is hiring three people every week, and its technology was recently positioned as one of the 15 technologies that can change the world by The Economist. 

On my way to pre-dinner drinks on my first night in London, I spotted friend and adviser George Mackintosh with two of his young children at a cafe in Covent Garden, a miraculous spot all things considered.  I didn’t know George was going to be in London, a city of however many million people.  On the other side of the street, and in a rush to avoid being late, I didn’t stop to say hello, but somewhat spookily George texted me about a press announcement we’re working on together only a few minutes later.  As they say, what are the chances?

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 23rd April 2022

Wining, dining, and low-rate philosophising, by Nick Freer

Following two years of the pandemic, it’s noticeable from Zoom calls alone that growing numbers of people are back in the office.  I’ve had a few meetings back in client’s offices, although relatively few and far between, and still outnumbered by coffees, lunches and the occasional dinner in the city centre.  

I think there can be a notion that PR people are always out wining and dining and, while this can be true to an extent, I’m always happiest at my desk, getting through the actual work.  Next week, we are handling four, possibly five, client announcements, and there is a lot of groundwork that goes into each.  I love a long lunch as much as the next guy or gal, and there is definitely a place for them, but I prefer to be in control of the ongoing drafts and email chains from in front of my computer screen.   

Pre-pandemic, I can remember days of coffees, lunches, oftentimes a dinner or event the same evening.  On reflection, it was too much.  I would end up way behind the curve, working into the evening, and on the weekends.  Post-pandemic, I know I need to introduce more balance. 

Of course, there can be a downside to spending too much time holed up at home if remote working becomes your thing.  Working from my office at home last week, I realised I had not left the house for a couple of days.  Nor was it the first time, and I’m pretty sure that isn’t recommended or, more importantly, healthy.    

This week, I got to catch up in person with my main contacts at fast growth tech group Stellar Omada.  A mid-morning coffee in the zen-like surrounds of the Roku Gin Japanese garden at Tigerlily on George Street was a nice working break from the laptop, and we agreed that meeting up in person trumped the many video calls we’ve done over the last couple of years.  Caffeined up, I was ready to rip into the ‘to do’ list that afternoon.  

The one dinner I did have this week, at Hawksmoor on St Andrew Square, was a chance to catch up with a client CEO over from New York and the managing director of a media publishing group.  Cancelled flights and damned Covid had scuppered a couple of our previous dinner dates, and shooting the breeze over a glass of wine was the kind of human capital you just can’t replicate when talking through the screen of a device.

Another thing I’ve noticed the last few weeks, was how much I’ve missed seeing clients in person.  Meeting up with the head of PR at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre the week before last, you remember how well you’ve got to know people, how much time you’ve spent with them over the years, the genuine interest you have in how they’ve been getting on with everything going on in the world.

A bit like my blog this week, it’s not always about the ‘business chat’.  While I won’t be giving up my day job to become a low-rate philosopher, surely business will always revolve around people, the human being, and empathy.  Or, something like that.

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 16th April 2022

Startups lagging on ESG, by Nick Freer

Environmental, social, and governance - ESG for short - factors have become an important yardstick in the corporate world over the last couple of years.  On the startup scene, founders need to prioritise ESG because investors, customers, and people talent are all likely to quiz companies about what measures they have in place.  

A study last month by a collective of leading European venture capital firms (VCs) found that while startups are doing okay on the S and the G components of ESG, they are way behind the curve when it comes to the E component, environmental. 

Only 11 per cent of companies surveyed currently measure their carbon footprint, while an even lower percentage, 7 per cent, have a policy and programme in place to achieve net zero carbon.  By way of comparison, the average performance of early-stage startups on environmental metrics is almost 50 per lower than social and governance metrics. 

On the upside, the research found that venture-backed businesses adopt better ESG practices as they scale, with notable progress as they move through various funding rounds.  In no small part, this is because environmental, social, and governance factors have become a key part of investment strategy for VCs. 

As Andrew Noble, a partner with Edinburgh investment manager Par Equity, puts it: “We’ve always sought to help management teams build better companies, and ESG has become an increasingly important lever to achieve this.  Our portfolio companies recognise this too and, over the last two years, they’ve been more engaged on ESG than ever before and at a much earlier stage.  Having a robust approach to ESG is very much part of their value creation strategy.” 

Noble adds: “Not only do we use it for an annual assessment of the portfolio, but it’s now part of our pre-investment diligence, setting a baseline ESG score and helping management teams drive the ESG agenda from day one.”

Karen McCormick, chair of ESG_VC, who carried out the survey, says: “Early-stage companies can feel overwhelmed by a plethora of frameworks, acronyms, platforms, and other solutions.  Companies are, therefore, struggling to feel incentivised to invest the substantial time and resources in getting to grips with this complex topic - particularly when a startup’s environmental footprint may feel less impactful than say a global conglomerate.” 

Catching up this week with Laura Westring, senior communications manager with highly-rated Scottish startup Amiqus, Westring said: “The market for carbon removal is still in its infancy and, for early stage businesses, calculating emissions can take several months, with most to be found within supply chains.”  

“I don’t believe these businesses are ignoring the global call for carbon renewal”, Westring continues, “rather many are asking themselves what can feasibly be implemented for real impact, because it’s not as simple as planting a few trees.  One thing is certain though, it’s easier to ask the hard questions about your supply chain while you scale than it is to re-strategise after.”   

According to the poll, companies do much better when it comes to equality, diversity, and inclusion, and mental health.  31 per cent of companies surveyed already provide equality, diversity, and inclusion training staff, with 58 per cent of companies having a policy in place to provide support around mental health and wellbeing.

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 9th April 2022

All roads lead to Ro... London, by Nick Freer

In last year’s annual Scottish Startup Survey, which we ran in partnership with the University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre, 72 per cent of startup founders said they expected their company to come out of the pandemic in a stronger position.  This year, it will be interesting to find out how things have panned out for our most innovative, fast growing companies. 

Most high-growth companies require funding to fuel their rocket ships and, on the investment side, 92 per cent of startups polled in the survey said they were targeting investors outside Scotland.  Along these lines, the EIE investor readiness programme run by a team based at the Bayes Centre, is set to announce its first EIE London event since before pandemic times.

London is a global tech capital, and startups headquartered there raised around $25.5 billion in venture capital (VC) investment last year, a mammoth amount that only trails the San Francisco Bay Area ($98.5bn), New York ($46.3bn) and Greater Boston ($28.3bn).  

London’s total investment figure comes from VC firms across the globe, and the scores of firms who are based in the UK’s capital.  Because of this, London provides a gateway to global finance for Scottish startups and it’s vital that we strengthen links between our ecosystems. 

As Scotland continues to build its own successful tech ecosystem, albeit at a vastly smaller scale than the world’s leading tech hubs, many bemoan what is seen as an investment bias towards London that takes investment away from other regions in the UK.  

The hope around EIE London is that we can fire up the narrative, and design an action plan that moves the dial to the advantage of our most exciting tech ventures here.

Women in business

The gender gap in business has become a common narrative in the media over recent years. 

In my own experience, for every female founder I’ve met that has encountered male bias in the business world, there is another female entrepreneur who has excelled without experiencing prejudice to any great extent.  But no one should be content with the status quo.   

Along these lines, it’s encouraging to hear that Ana Stewart will chair the Scottish Government-commissioned Women in Enterprise review - a report that should get to the heart of the matter in the Scottish context by producing key findings and recommendations around barriers facing women in business. 

Ana previously founded and floated IT specialist i-design Group, subsequently acquired by US-based ATM group Cardtronics Inc in 2013, is a partner with investment firm Eos Advisory, a Non-executive Director with the Scottish Football Association, and also sits on the board of startup Bella & Duke and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Scotland (ICAS). 

Stewart is already close to completing the discovery phase of the review, with findings likely to be published by late September, and will focus on a number o areas including education, access to finance and funding, advice, mentoring, and support.

Another key aspect of the report is around what Stewart describes as “robust and resilient” data.  That’s going to be important, according to Stewart, so that we can benchmark and measure progress in the years ahead.

This blog ran in The Scotsman on Saturday 2nd April 2022

On the tech beat across the pond, by Nick Freer

Last week, Startup Grind Scotland held an evening event at CodeBase in Edinburgh to welcome the 20 entrepreneurs who have been selected to join the Silicon Valley trip next month made possible by the Scottish Government’s Technology Ecosystem Fund. 

Nick Murray, Carolina Melendez, Dec McLaughlin, Anna Brow, Emma Loedel, and the rest of the Startup Grind Scotland team have organised an amazing programme, matched by the quality of startup founders picked for the week-long visit to the world’s most successful tech scene.  

As an agency, we’ve had the pleasure of working with many of the startups heading for California through the years - companies like Administrate, PlayerData, Robotical, Coastr, and R3-IoT, who will undoubtedly put their best foot forward and be shining examples of our own tech community here in Scotland. 

I would have loved to join the Scottish cohort jetting out to San Francisco, but a special family birthday back at home - I guess every birthday is a special one when it’s one of your children - ruled that out.  All the same, I can’t wait to keep up with regular posts when the guys and gals are away, and to hear a few good stories when they return. 

The architect of Scotland’s tech ecosystem fund, Mark Logan, was one of the speakers at CodeBase on the night.  Logan recounted his many trips to the Valley, including at the time of the dotcom bubble, its subsequent burst, and  for the purpose of learning from other companies during his time at Skyscanner. 

When on the ground in Silicon Valley, Logan says you soon learn about the “enormous sense of belief”, a mindset to “take on much larger companies”, a “strong sense of competition”, and “how to scale an enterprise”.  He says there is a palpable reverence for best practice, and these learnings can be brought back to Scotland and propagated.

“Great companies come from great ecosystems”, said Logan, “and great ecosystems come from great companies.”  

Commenting on the make-up of the company cohort, the University of Strathclyde’s Head of Investments, Poonam Malik, also a Scottish Enterprise board member, praised the “diversity of age groups, sectors, stages of development, not just the diversity in terms of gender and ethnicity”. 

Victoria Ross from Scottish Development International’s capital investment team, who are hosting a ‘pitch party’ with local investors and GlobalScots on the last night of the Silicon Valley trip, placed importance on “researching the local market”, “using their terminology”, “making relationships”, and having a short and longer pitch deck available.   

In a reverse of the famous Ottoman saying, “if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain”, tech news this week shows that early stage European startups don’t always have to go to Silicon Valley to engage with the Valley’s top venture capital firms. 

US venture capital giant Sequoia has just launched an accelerator programme in Europeoia-launches-accelerator-programme/ for seed-stage companies, with 15 companies being selected for an eight-week programme that comes with a $1 million investment from Sequoia. 

Applications close in early April, with the programme kicking off in late May.  It would be great to see Scottish representation in Sequoia’s first European cohort. 

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 26th March 2022

Normalising change, by Nick Freer

I was in a taxi last week on the way home from an event at RBS Gogarburn with a business contact who works at Scottish Enterprise, and was interested to hear that he was going back into the enterprise agency's Edinburgh office for the first time in two years.   What a crazy couple of years we said, living and working through pandemic times.

Chatting to a client at a dinner hosted by the Lord Provost of Edinburgh the previous week at Prestonfield House, we agreed that while there can be a good deal of excitement about getting back to the workplace, you can also have an equal measure of anxiety when it comes to getting back into the old routine.  I guess if there was a spectrum with excitement at one end and anxiety at the other, we all place somewhere on this particular yardstick.  

While some people have flourished during Covid, others have floundered, and employers now need to fully commit to the mental health and wellbeing of their employees.  Pre-pandemic, workplace initiatives around mental health could be filed under ‘nice to have’, whereas now it’s a ‘must have’.  

It was something I spoke to Nicki Denholm about when I met the founder of search and recruitment specialist Denholm Associates earlier this month.  As Nicki puts it: “Mental health and wellbeing has more importance today than at any point before.  The nuances around this area, and other workplace factors that have moved up the agenda since the pandemic, are constantly changing and employers need to be on the ball if they want to attract and retain talent.”

Lisa Thomson, the founder and CEO of PurposeHR, acquired by accountancy firm Anderson Anderson & Brown in 2021, says that “from an employer point of view, it’s vitally important to treat employees as individuals, talk to them, seek their feedback and avoid making assumptions or generalisations.” 

“By ensuring their voices are heard”, says Thomson, “people will feel involved in decisions and planning, which will in turn benefit engagement, wellbeing and retention.”

Paul Reid, CEO and co-founder of Trickle, a venture-backed startup that has developed digital tools to increase employee engagement and wellbeing, supporting organisations like the NHS during Covid, says: “The working world has changed beyond recognition in the last two years – being able to normalise change and make it part of everyday work is now essential for organisations to be successful.  Truly understanding what matters most to your employees day by day, is more important than ever before."

While there are new unwritten rules of engagement around looking after your workforce in the wake of the pandemic, widespread research also indicates that most returning workers don’t want to go back to the kind of traditional office they worked in before Covid hit.

Jordan McCaffery, a partner at surveying and design consultancy HK, who count Skyscanner, Incremental Group, Leith, and Whitespace as clients, agrees that companies need to put a lot of thought into what a workplace looks like following two years of remote working: “There is definitely a consideration around softening the transition from people working at home to being back in the office and, two years on, technology is even more integral to how people work in 2022.” 

'Keys for Kyiv', by Nick Freer

This week, we supported non-fungible token (NFT) specialist VAULT around an announcement on how the startup has partnered with three Ukrainian media companies - Ukrainska Pravda, Noyove Vremya, and Hromadske - to help raise funds to support the reporting of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  

The ten thousand NFT keys made available can be used to unlock a digital vault of content curated from the publications’ English-language coverage.  The fundraiser - ‘Keys for Kyiv’ - was the brainchild of VAULT’s CEO and co-founder, Nigel Eccles, who previously co-founded and led fantasy sports platform FanDuel, and his team who are based in various locations across Scotland and North America.  

As a nation, Ukraine is more switched on than many when it comes to cryptocurrency and blockchain, with other Web3-led initiatives by the country’s crypto-friendly government including a donation scheme whereby tens of millions of dollars in digital currency will acquire military supplies for the fight against Russia.

Out for a coffee with investment firm Eos Advisory partners Mark Beaumont and Ana Stewart on Wednesday, Mark told me how one of his fellow adventurer pals, David Fox-Pitt was en route to the Poland-Ukraine border with a convoy of trucks, where Fox-Pitt and his crew plan to provide one thousand meals a day to refugees.

With a strapline, ‘Make Pizza, Not War’, the project is being organised via social enterprise Siobhan’s Trust, set up by Fox-Pitt in 2020 and named after the late Countess of Dundee.  

Last week, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky tweeted that over 61,000 nights had been booked by users of the platform in Ukraine within 48 hours, at a total gross booking value of almost $2 million, as a novel way to send donations.  

As U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris put it at a press conference with the Polish premier in Warsaw on Thursday, “we have seen extraordinary acts of generosity and kindness” since conflict broke out.

Return to the workplace

As people start returning to the workplace after two years in Covid limbo, a Gallup poll in the U.S. this week revealed that while only 6 per cent of white-collar workers worked from home pre-pandemic, that figure had risen to 65 per cent by May 2020.  

While on one hand this percentage seems relatively low, it does illustrate the paradigm shift that took place over a matter of weeks during the first half of 2020.  

Commenting on the findings of the survey, the director of the Centre for WorkLife Law at the University of California said: “The only thing holding back flexible work arrangements (before the pandemic) was a failure of imagination.  That failure was remedied in three weeks’ time in March 2020.” 

Fast forward two years, and LinkedIn is vastly populated this week with posts about people returning to work.  It’s a joyous occasion for many, for others there is anxiety around settling back into the old routine.  Some have weathered the last two years relatively well, others less so.    

It’s a subject I have been speaking to business contacts about this week, and plan to share some of the feedback next weekend. 

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 12th March 2022

Back on the business beat, by Nick Freer

I was going to write a piece for this weekend on how a Scottish tech founder and one of his latest ventures is set to help fund journalism in Ukraine, but as the initiative is still in the finalisation phase it will be a matter of watching this space. 

Writing this week, it seems hard not to reference horrific events in Ukraine and, for the Ukrainian refugees who land in this country, I hope our nation will welcome them all with open arms.

One of our client executives recently married a Ukrainian national, and God only knows what kind of stress they must be under at the moment worrying about family and friends, while another client, fast-growth fintech startup Stellar Omada, works closely with a development partner in Ukraine.  Collectively, we have so many close links with this country and its people.

Business diary

Even as friends and contacts continue to go down with Covid, there is a definite feeling of things opening up again on the business scene.  Tomorrow evening, I am attending the Lord Provost of Edinburgh’s delayed Burn’s Supper at Prestonfield House.  I can’t actually remember the last time I donned a black tie and dinner jacket, so to say my outfit will need a dusting down is an understatement.  

Next week, the companies selected for this year’s EIE22 investor conference gather at RBS Gogarburn, while the following week Startup Grind Scotland, and Equity Gap are each holding events of interest. 

Funded by the Scottish Technology Ecosystem Fund, Startup Grind Scotland is taking twenty entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley in April for what will be a fantastic opportunity to connect with fellow founders, investors and tech groups based in the Valley and San Francisco.  The architect of the ecosystem fund, Mark Logan, will address the lucky guys and gals who have been picked for the trip to California at a closed-door event at CodeBase.  

Equity Gap’s ‘Leaders’ Club’ get together at The Royal Society of Edinburgh is open to founders or CEOs of high-growth, technology-led, early stage companies.  The word on the street says that co-founders from both Skyscanner and FanDuel will feature on the day.  

On the last weekend in March, the organisers of tech conference Turing Fest are running a careers event at the Biscuit Factory in Edinburgh, billed as an opportunity to network with some the UK’s most exciting startups who are looking to hire.  Open to tech professionals of all levels, companies featuring on the day include Trustpilot, FreeAgent, and Machines With Vision.

Day job

Back at the coalface, this week we handled press announcements for Scottish legal firm Anderson Strathern, who appointed former Deloitte partner Mike McGregor as its new Non-executive Director while posting strong annual results, and Glasgow-based Smart Things Accelerator Centre (STAC), Scotland’s first Internet of Things (IoT) accelerator.

Next week, look out for announcements by Scotland’s largest creative agency, a fast-growing online pharmacy business that is in expansion mode in the UK and Europe, and a former private banker from Edinburgh who has co-founded a fashion tech startup in London.  

An edited version of this blog ran in The Scotsman on Saturday 5th March 2022

Moving past the narrative of the tech groups that earned us our spurs, by Nick Freer

2021 saw a record level of investment into Scotland’s technology startup and scale-up companies, with the total amount estimated to be in the region of £650 million.  The upward curve is indicative of global trends, with investors stepping up their investments into innovative tech during pandemic times. 

While the country’s earlier stage startups still rely heavily on the Scottish bedrock of angel syndicates, private investors, and Scottish Enterprise support to fuel their rocket ships, increasingly we are seeing investors outside Scotland invest in our most promising fast-growth companies.  

As we develop a reputation for being a bona fide startup nation, arguably with Edinburgh at its epicentre, it is also important that we move past the narrative of the tech groups that earned us our spurs - Skyscanner and FanDuel.  

While both remain integral to our technology ecosystem, years on from each company achieving an exit - Skyscanner was acquired by Ctrip in 2016, and FanDuel merged with Paddy Power Betfair in 2018 - some wonder when Scotland will start to produce more tech companies valued in the hundreds of millions of pounds. 

Encouragingly, there are signs that our ability to build tech businesses at this kind of scale will be more than a flash in the pan.  Last October, digital health startup Current Health was acquired by US consumer electronics retailer Best Buy for $400 million.   Edinburgh-based investment firm Par Equity led the original seed investment into Current Health, initially branded Snap40, a press announcement we handled for the Chris McCann-led healthcare startup in 2016.

With an eye on the potential for Scotland’s burgeoning healthtech sector, Par Equity plans to invest around 20 per cent of its overall funding of approximately £25 million this year into digital health technologies, evidence of the potential for Scotland’s life sciences and health tech sectors. 

One investment announcement we handled this week was for Clare Wareing-founded Cumulus Oncology, Europe’s first oncology biotech accelerator, which secured a £5.6 million raise led by St Andrews-based investment firm Eos Advisory. Now chaired by GlobalScot and GlaxoSmithKline veteran Dr Russell Grieg, Cumulus definitely sits in the ‘one to watch’ category. 

Research group Beauhurst recently ranked Edinburgh as the UK’s top innovation city, albeit some way behind number one ranked London.  The University of Edinburgh’s informatics school was referenced as one of the central building blocks of of the city’s tech ecosystem, with world-leading expertise in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and data.  

One of the locally based companies featuring at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week is Net AI, a University of Edinburgh spin-out developing artificial intelligence to improve efficiencies for 5G network providers. 

Hopefully, Net AI’s CEO and founder Paul Patras and team can create a bit of buzz in Barcelona and get onto the radar of some of the right people in the right places.   

Net AI was one the companies selected for last year’s EIE21 investor readiness programme, run out of the Bayes Centre at Edinburgh University, and with the new EIE22 cohort of startups soon to be announced, it will be interesting to see the next wave of bright young startup stars emerge from the Scottish firmament.  

This blog ran in The Scotsman on Saturday 26th February 2021

The Big Game in crypto, by Nick Freer

Last weekend’s Super Bowl at the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles has been coined the first ‘crypto bowl’ by commentators, with a number of cryptocurrency-related ads featuring among the more traditional adverts for beer, potato chips, movies, and cars.  

A common theme in the cryptocurrency ads was around crypto being the future, as the industry’s main players try to tempt a more mainstream demographic into becoming users of the digital payment system that is integral to the next generation of the web, widely termed Web3.  

Los Angeles Lakers superstar basketball player LeBron James starred in Crypto.com’s ad, revisiting his younger self in the year 2003, with a young LeBron finding it hard to believe that there will be cordless headphones, that people will be able to “watch movies through their phones” or, as he puts it, that “y’all will be driving electric cars”.  

The crypto ad that got the most laughs was FTX’s one minute long advert, where Larry David of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fame is seen turning down or balking at some of the world’s greatest inventions and advancements at their advent - including the wheel, Thomas Edison’s lightbulb (“Edison, can I be honest with you, it stinks”), the moon landing, and portable music.

The commercial, with a production that included over 100 actors, seven stage sets at a Hollywood studio, and is thought to have cost something in the region of $7 million in airtime alone, ends with David rejecting cryptocurrency exchange FTX, before the ad closes with: “Don’t be like Larry, don’t miss out on the next big thing.” 

As a New York Times columnist wrote this week, “because Larry David doesn’t get crypto, that makes him the perfect pitchman”.  At a time when there are still virtual currency detractors and skeptics aplenty, FTX may have played a masterstroke with one of the most talked about Super Bowl ads in 2022.   

Being in the marketing team at FTX must be full on, but fun.  The virtual currency exchange only launched in 2019, is already valued at over $30 billion and, with an eye on the sporting arena and popular culture, has launched multi-million dollar campaigns in recent months with iconic figures like Tom Brady and uber cool music festival Coachella.  

In January, the Bahamas-based exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried established a venture capital arm, FTX Ventures, with $2 billion to invest in startups working in the social, gaming, fintech, software, and healthcare sectors. 

Closer to home, FTX was one of the lead investors backing Scotland-headquartered BetDEX in November, with the $21 million raise, the largest ever seed investment round secured by a UK startup, backing BetDEX’s mission to create the world’s first decentralised global sports betting protocol.

Commenting on the investment on the occasion of the announcement, Bankman-Fried said: “We are thrilled to be backing a team with deep industry expertise to transform the sports betting experience, and are excited to partner with BetDEX to bring this vision to reality.” 

Currently hiring people from a base in Scotland, BetDEX is set to be a standard-bearer for blockchain and Web3 in the Scottish context. 

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 19th February 2022

Purpose and perspective, by Mark Beaumont, Eos Advisory partner, record-breaking athlete, author, and broadcasater

These days, I often joke about spending half my life in lycra and half in a suit.  Although, like most readers, my suit gets less outings than it used to.  Whatever the attire, I have always maintained that there are far easier ways to make a living.  For sure, profit matters, but purpose is important.  Everyone strives to balance those two P’s. 

Here is another P – perspective.  Last week I was in Spain, training with the Novo Nordisk pro cycling team.  They chewed my legs off in the beautiful Alicante province, taking on legendary climbs like Col du Rates, as if gravity did not apply to them.  Like all athletes, they strive for personal bests, and on some days that is enough to win.  But this team is unique, they are all type 1 diabetic.  They race to educate and to inspire a global fan base that you can still take on your dreams with such a life-changing condition.  I was completely inspired.  

Whilst Team Novo Nordisk knows its audience and has a purpose that is greater than winning. I saw a powerful metaphor for barriers that we all perceive.  You don’t need a medical diagnosis to think that you can’t do something, barriers are all around us, real and imaginary.  

Thinking about my own ‘purpose in lycra’, there was a stage in my career when it was all about trying to break records and scrape a living from doing so.  But, as I near my 40’s, I’ve used my profile to continue to push the limits of ultra-endurance, whilst putting a spotlight on important topics.  For example, if you have time to watch Maiden Race on YouTube, the documentary about a 2000km British gravel race, we could have made this all about racing and winning.  Instead, we showcased the importance of sustainability, equality and breaking down barriers for people.  

Thinking about ‘purpose in a suit’, I’ve been a part of Eos Advisory for four years, investing in predominantly Scottish innovation that’s tackling issues including climate change, quality of life, and food and water security.  I have worked in private equity for much longer, which absolutely has its place in business growth.  But it is the entrepreneurs and innovators who so often answer the big questions of our time, and as I’m not a scientist able to found one of these important companies, the next best thing I can do is put a spotlight on them, invest in them and help nurture their growth.  

Clearly, I can’t do this on my own, and neither did I cycle around the world by myself.  But in terms of purpose, it’s exiting work.  I often think that investors might only have ten per cent of their portfolios in early-stage innovation, but these are the businesses that dominate their enthusiasm and their conversations with friends.  That is because we all want to have purpose in our lives.  Making money is vacuous without it.  

I’ve returned from Spain re-energised for the year ahead.  And, for a team living with a diagnosis that could have stopped them in their tracks, they will tell you that whilst they aren’t the biggest or most successful team, that they have something that is the envy of the peloton, purpose beyond winning and massive impact globally.

Something to aspire to.

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 12th February 2022

Tales in crypto, by Nick Freer

Social media giant Meta announced this week that it is on the cusp of having the world’s fastest artificial intelligence supercomputer, called AI Research SuperCluster or RSC for short, at its disposal later this year.

In a blog post, a Meta senior engineer wrote: “RSC will help Meta’s AI researchers build new and better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples; work across hundreds of different languages; seamlessly analyse texts, images, and video together; develop new augmented reality tools.  Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform - the metaverse.” 

Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 science fiction novel “Snow Crash”, in which the author envisioned lifelike avatars who meet in virtual reality environments.  When tech groups like Meta and Microsoft talk about the metaverse, essentially they too are outlining a vision of what the internet could look like in the years ahead.  

All things crypto

Over $30 billion was invested in cryptocurrency-related ventures in 2021. And while Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have taken a pounding at the beginning of 2022, commentators expect the inflow of investment into all things crypto to increase in 2022.   

According to Digital Galaxy Research, 43 per cent of crypto funding in 2021 went into companies in trading, exchange services, investing, and lending of crypto assets, with 17 per cent invested into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), Web 3.0 or Web3 (a decentralised online ecosystem based on the blockchain), and the metaverse.  

Getting your head around blockchain can be testing, but I heard a good explanation recently by John Wu, president of smart contracts platform Ava Labs: “When you think about crypto and blockchain, it’s kind of like they are all different cities with their specific characteristics, based on the technology and the community that’s there.” 

Wu continues: “For Web3 to really flourish, you are going to have to get from one blockchain to another really easily.  You are not going to get the best of crypto 3.0 unless all these blockchains are able to connect to each other in a multi-chain world.” 

Looking ahead to the next twelve months, analysts expect decentralised finance (or DeFi) to be one of the next big things in blockchain, becoming more mainstream as banks and financial services groups move increasingly into the space.   

The tortoise and the hare

Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare could be applied to news last week that Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, seen as a bellwether for value investment, narrowed the gap between its two-year investment performance and that of highly-rated growth investor Ark’s flagship Innovation Fund as tech stocks continue to tumble.

An improving economic outlook, combined with a record spike in inflationary trends is seen to be at the foundation of this reversal of fortunes for two of the US’s best known investors.

An end to the great supply chain crisis? 

Latest Baltic Dry Index statistics, which measure the price of shipping bulk materials and rose steeply during the pandemic, hit a downward curve at the end of last year.  In good news for world trade, economists say this reflects a return to stable and efficient worldwide supply chains.

An edited version of this blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 31st January 2022

Tech trends, Tesla and tweeting from the toilet, by Nick Freer

Having helped a few publications out recently by connecting them with clients who are well placed to comment on tech trends for 2022, I thought I would sum up some of my own observations, albeit in a fairly scatter fire manner.

Healthcare is prominent in any narrative on tech trends as we approach two years of living with the pandemic.  While tech companies have leaned in to support the fight against Covid, healthcare companies have increasingly turned to technology to deliver products and services.  Accordingly, significant levels of investment have followed.  

In October, Edinburgh-headquartered Current Health secured the second largest European digital healthcare exit to date.  Because of this success story, expect more international investors to train their eyes on Scottish health tech startups in 2022.   

Overall, in 2021, more investment was made into our fast-growth companies than ever before, more than £700 million by some estimates.  Crucially, we are also seeing more International investors back companies here.  

A few months on from COP26 in Glasgow and with greenhouse gas emissions spiking around the world as Covid restrictions are eased, PwC estimates that climate tech is coming off a year in which the sector’s startups received around seven times the investment that went into artificial intelligence (AI) startups.  

Good news you would think, until you factor in that only 25 per cent of that total investment is going into companies who are developing 80 per cent of the technologies viewed as most impactful at addressing the climate emergency - sectors including solar and wind power, green hydrogen production, and food waste technology.  

The lion’s share of investment is being pumped into transportation and mobility, with electric vehicles (EVs) and related technologies garnering most, in addition to hogging the headlines across global media outlets.  

TIME magazine named Elon Musk its Person of the Year for 2021, of whom the publisher says, “few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too.” 

The companies Musk has founded - Tesla, Tesla Energy, SpaceX, Starling, Neuralink, Boring Co., and Starship - are streets ahead of the competition on electric cars, carbon-free electricity, space travel, building the internet in space, human-machine interfaces, underground travel, and achieving the goal of life on Mars. 

Bitcoin became more of a household name when Tesla purchased $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency at the beginning of last year.  Although Bitcoin’s value dropped last week to $40,000 from an historic high of $69,000, analysts expect Tesla to make more from its Bitcoin holding than from selling cars in 2020.  

There are influencers, and then there are influencers, and Musk’s tweeting regularly moves markets.  As described by a Bloomberg reporter recently: “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk.” 

On a more ‘need to know basis’, Musk engaged in a bit of toilet humour in November when informing his 66 million Twitter followers that at least half of his tweets are sent while he is sitting on his “porcelain throne”.

Less about tweeting from the toilet, and more about cryptocurrency, blockchain and Web 3.0 next week.  

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Monday 24th January 2022

Viewpoints on our entrepreneurial ecosystem, by Nick Freer

In last weekend’s blog, I wrote about curating opinion pieces for the business section of The Scotsman, and how I always think there should be some Scotland-specific context to whatever is being written about.  

What I should have added is that, where possible, I think the best columns combine themes around doing business in Scotland with how that fits into the global equation.  So, for example, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist writing about why his or her firm decided to back an Edinburgh-headquartered startup, and their views on our entrepreneurial ecosystem.  

In November, Infracost CEO and co-founder Hassan Kjajeh-Hosseini, penned a piece about the “incredible power of networks for startups”.  Last year, Infracost was selected as one of 350 startups from over 40 countries to be funded by renowned technology startup accelerator Y Combinator in Mountain View, California. 

As Hassan put it: “Our success is tied to the support of our network, and if we had more strong networks like this in Scotland, we would have more successful startups.  A network of founders willing to share stories, learnings and connections.  An example of where this is starting to work is at CodeBase in Edinburgh, and I can’t wait to contribute more.” 

Ahead of COP26 last October, the CEO of digital skills academy CodeClan, Melinda Matthews-Clarkson, wrote that “we know technology can be one of the main drivers of recovery, to leverage creativity, engineering and complex problem-solving to reset our climate course.”  Matthews-Clarkson continued: “In Scotland, we have a number of companies that provide a shining example of climate tech at its best.”

In August, Geneva-based Scot Gib Bulloch wrote about how he believes Scotland is “ideally placed to reinvent the future of work.”  Former Accenture senior executive Bulloch, author of The Intrapreneur: Confessions of a Corporate Insurgent and founder the Craigberoch Business Decelerator on his native Isle of Bute, is an inspirational individual whose thinking has made a big impression on me.  He wrote: “For much of my adult life, the Scottish and British economies have been heavily dependent on North Sea oil.  For the next half century, it needs to be something different.”

Also last summer, Scottish tech entrepreneur George Mackintosh wrote a piece about post-pandemic work dynamics: “Our experiences since March 2020 have changed the way we work and how business is done.  In part that’s good: fewer commuter miles, less emissions, greater productivity, and improved wellbeing.  But what’s being lost?  How do you build team cohesiveness, brainstorm, agree strategy, solve problems and negotiate shared goals?”

In my own opinion pieces, I think I have written in more personal way over the last couple of years than ever before, over and above the more business-focussed articles - including around subjects like mental health and wellbeing, work-life balance, living through pandemic times, and the shock of being struck down by Covid after having dodged the dreaded thing for so long.  

Writing from a very personal point of view can be hard, taking that step outside your comfort zone and really opening up, but if the result resonates with a number of people then I always feel like the exercise is worthwhile.

Curating content and tales from Edinburgh's entrepreneurial scene, by Nick Freer

I first wrote a business column for The Scotsman in 2010 - a piece about corporation reputation in the wake of negative publicity faced by investment bank Goldman Sachs, who had been described as a “great vampire squid” by a journalist at Rolling Stone magazine.  

For the last few years, I have been a more regular columnist, writing or curating a weekly comment piece for the Saturday edition of the paper.  Generally, it is a discipline and routine I greatly enjoy - with the exception of the times at which I’m bashing out some words far too close to deadline. 

If there is a regular theme that runs through my opinion pieces, I guess it would be around entrepreneurship.  Being based in Edinburgh, living and working here, and mixing with a lot of entrepreneurs, that feeds into a lot of what I write.  

It’s the curating bit, as opposed to my own scribblings, that I get the bigger kick out of though - very probably in common with The Scotsman’s readership!  Curated content, in terms of how we assimilate news on the internet, is trending ever upwards, and you can see why given the sheer amount of content on the web. 

Generally, when someone is writing a piece for me, they ask for my view on what they should write about, or how it should be framed.  On the whole, I will recommend that there is at least some Scotland context to the thing - I mean, the article is going to be published in The Scotsman!  Having said that, when it’s a captain of industry type pulling a business comment together, typically they don’t need too much hand holding.  

Looking back at 2021, there were a few standout columns.  

In April, Andy MacMillan, CEO of UserTesting, the first Silicon Valley tech group to set up a European headquarters in Edinburgh, wrote about empathy in business - how it isn’t just about being nice, rather it should be a stone-cold business strategy.  As MacMillan put it: “For businesses, empathy seems to have become not just a value but a paradigm governing nearly every aspect of the operation, from marketing strategy to employee engagement to corporate citizenship.” 

MacMillan recently guided the company through an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange that valued UserTesting at over $2 billion.  As his surname suggests, he has Scottish heritage and completed a MBA in Corporate Strategy and Management at the University of Edinburgh between 2002 and 2003. 

In May, Munich-based energy sector consultant David Scrimgeour MBE, formerly a Scottish Government investment representative in Germany wrote about the shadow formed by Brexit: “For British companies and economic development agencies the world of trade and investment with Continental Europe has changed dramatically since the beginning of 2021.”  

Also back in May, Varun Nair, someone who is always in my top list of Edinburgh-based entrepreneurs, wrote about his journey from co-founding a startup here that was acquired by Facebook in 2013: “Transforming an idea into a successful venture is hard.  It takes tremendous energy, constant iteration from failure, and good timing.”

As I’ve run out of word count, tune back in next Saturday for more entrepreneurial tales - until then, Happy New Year!

An edited version of this blog ran in The Scotsman on Saturday 1st January 2022

Education key to Scotland's digital future, by Nick Freer

CodeClan marked a milestone this week, with the two thousandth graduate from one of the range of software development and data analytics  courses run by the Melinda Matthews-Clarkson-led not-for-profit organisation.  In Matthews-Clarkson’s own words, CodeClan has become “integral to Scotland’s digital future”. 

Scotland’s digital future has been a hotter topic than ever before over the last twelve months, in no small part sparked by the publication of the Scottish technology ecosystem review by Mark Logan last year.  Logan was back in the press this week, with a worrisome view that our nation’s computing science students are lagging behind their European counterparts in Scotland’s higher education system. 

Logan’s gist is that the issue stems from the standard of computing science teaching in Scotland’s secondary schools.  It’s an area that organisations like Digital Xtra Fund are addressing, with a mission for “every young person in Scotland to have access to innovative and digitally creative activities, regardless of their gender, background, or where they live”.  

In many ways, the so-called talent pipeline, which enables companies to access the right kind of qualified people, goes right back to the grassroots, and that’s why the whole holistic educational piece is so important.  

In my own dealings with the Scottish tech scene, my back of a napkin estimate is that for every company that is able to hire the requisite amount of programmers and developers, there is another who finds it extremely difficult to identify key hires from the local talent pool.  On client calls with journalists over the last couple of weeks alone, I’ve heard that divergence of view on more than one occasion.  

Global tech bible Wired magazine approached us earlier this year to source a couple of technology companies who could comment on how their hiring processes were impacted during the pandemic.  We lined up Trustpilot, who have a growing R&D hub in Edinburgh, and Peter Proud-founded Forrit, with both companies subsequently featured in the piece.  

We also put Wired in touch with Edinburgh-based Kelli Buchan, who has helped build teams for the likes of FanDuel and Administrate.  Buchan explained to Wired that while Scottish startups and scale-ups are continuing to attract investment and hire, the real uncertainty is around how long we’re going to be working in a pandemic-impacted fashion.   

In Scotland, in common with the rest of the world, there is an ongoing war for talent.  If you look at one end of the spectrum, Alphabet-owned Google plans to hire 30,000 people next year according to CEO Sundar Pichai.  In an interview with Bloomberg earlier this week, Pichai said that the $2 trillion-valued tech giant is tackling diversity by hiring outside of Silicon Valley in metropolises like Atlanta, Chicago, and New York.  

Talking of digital skills, Pichai didn’t have a computer or access to the internet growing up.  In fact, he didn’t own his own computer until he moved to the United States and attended Stanford University on a scholarship.  Today, he oversees Google’s ever deeper push into artificial intelligence and quantum computing, areas he believes will be the most revolutionary tech trends over the next decade.   

This blog ran as on op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 4th December 20212

Big in Japan, by Nick Freer

The Scotland versus Japan autumn test at Murrayfield last weekend was a great day out, with the kind of atmosphere and buzz in and around the stadium that you would expect for a near capacity crowd at the home of Scottish rugby.  

The Scots and Japanese teams have been evenly matched in recent years, with the latter edging Scotland when the East Asian nation staged the Rugby World Cup in 2019.  Scotland reversed the scoreline on Saturday, although by the final whistle I had already made tracks back into central Edinburgh to avoid the post-match throng.  

I always think of these kinds of international sporting events as being cultural experiences too, more so if you’re travelling to an away game of course, and it was good to see a sprinkling of Japan fans before, during and after the match.

I caught up with a pal earlier in the week who studied Japanese at Kobe University, in the city of Kobe, situated in the Hyōgo Prefecture in the south of Japan.  Murdo Maclean, a client investment manager at investment management firm Walter Scott, explained how culture and sports are intertwined in Japanese culture perhaps as much as anywhere else on the planet.

In Maclean’s view, “As island nations, neither countries are particularly used to dominating world sport. Nonetheless, both have a long and rich history, at points punching well above their weight on the international stage. Perhaps because both draw upon a relatively small domestic pool of talent, in turn they must develop their own particular brand of play.  Both play the role of underdogs well, with a style typified by bags of spirIt and passion that always seems to draw in the neutral.” 

Murdo also reminded me about Thomas Blake Glover, a Scottish merchant from Fraserburgh, immortalised as the ‘Scottish Samurai’ in the book by Alexander McKay.  Surely, biographies of business figures through the centuries don’t get much better than Glover’s. 

One of the very first westerners to establish a business in Japan, more impressive is the widely held belief of Glover being one of the very founding fathers of modern Japan itself.  

In 1859, at the tender age of twenty-one, he helped establish Jardine, Matheson & Co in Nagasaki, going on to set up his own trading company two years later.  The 1860s were prolific for Glover, trading ships and arms to clans across Japan, introducing the country’s first steam locomotive, the Iron Duke, in 1865, and then commissioning one of the first modern warships to serve in the Imperial Japanese Navy.  

Glover’s list of firsts go on - coal mines and dry docks included, while ingratiating himself with the clans that toppled the incumbent regime in Japan.  All great entrepreneurs fail at some point, the low point for Glover being his bankruptcy in 1870.  

But by God, this is Thomas Blake Glover from Fraserburgh we are talking about, and the determined young man was back with a punch, founding the shipbuilding company that became the Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan, and co-founding what is now the Kirin Brewery Company - if ever a guy deserved a cold beer after a long day in the office…

Presumably though, it was a few glasses of sake that were raised when Glover became the first non-Japanese recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun in 1908. 

An edited version of this blog ran in The Scotsman on Saturday 27th January 2021

'If you build it, they will come', by Nick Freer

It was good to be back at a tech conference earlier this month, when Turing Fest rolled into the EICC following a virtual get together in 2020.     

Two Big Ears co-founder Varun Nair, whose startup was acquired by Facebook in 2016, was in the ‘not to miss’ category.  Back in Edinburgh after leaving his role as head of augmented reality/virtual reality in the audio software team at the social media giant’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Nair, who wrote for this column a few weeks ago (“An overnight success is always years in the making”), is now working on a new venture while advising a number of other startups in the city.  

Having known Varun for years, and being aware of his humble disposition, it didn’t surprise me that he didn’t mention his alma mater, Facebook, or Meta going by its new brand iteration, once during his talk to conference. If the Silicon Valley experience has changed Varun, it’s not apparent when you talk to him.  If anything, he might just be wearing slightly more expensive shirts than when I first met him back in 2014. 

In his keynote address, titled “Move Fast and Ship Things”, the former Facebooker stressed that when you’re developing software, “every moment counts”.   Measurement of success in developing code can be imperfect, said Nair, “metrics can hide the truth, the real metric is the time it takes to ship code and validate it”.  What kills startups?  According to Varun, it comes down to a lack of focus and an inability to ship code and make an impact.

A big crowd, certainly the biggest crowd I’ve been in for I don’t know let’s say the last eighteen months, assembled for the closing session - with Turing CEO Brian Corcoran interviewing Chris McCann, CEO and co-founder of Current Health, the health tech company acquired by US consumer electronics retailer Best Buy in October*.  Corcoran and McCann’s ‘fireside chat’ outlined how the pandemic had highlighted the importance of Current Health’s technology, which allows healthcare operators like hospitals to monitor patients at home.  

McCann recounted how Current Health’s headcount had grown five-fold since 2020, how the Covid crisis “reinvented healthcare overnight”, and how investors “don’t just believe what you are today, they believe in where you are going”.  McCann also stressed the importance of the co-founder relationship.  “It’s not just about the work, it’s about sharing the emotional ups and downs”, he said.  

Later at the bar, I reminded Chris that we had handled his original seed round investment announcement back in 2016, before the company had rebranded to Current Health and was called snap40.  At the time, the £2 million round was the largest ever seed investment into a Scottish startup.

Fast forward five years, and this week we handled the press announcement of the $21 million seed investment round into BetDEX, a soon-to-be-launched decentralised sports betting exchange that runs on blockchain technology where bets and trades are made using cryptocurrency.  

Perhaps more important than it being the largest ever seed round investment into a UK startup, is co-founder Nigel Eccles’ view that Scotland has access to world-class talent and that our ecosystem can make a name for itself in Web 3.0, the next stage of evolution on the internet.  

• On 23rd November ‘21, Best Buy disclosed that its all-cash acquisition of Current Health totalled $400 million, representing Europe’s second-largest digital health exit to date.

An edited version of this blog ran as on op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 27th November 2021

The incredible power of network for startups, by Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, Co-Founder and CEO, Infracost

In the startup world, your network will not only help you in times of stress, but if done right will act as a catalyst to your company's success. This is one of the reasons why Y-Combinator, a venture capital firm who has helped launch the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe and Reddit has become the world’s most successful startup accelerator. A few months ago, I saw how the network works firsthand.

After selling our second startup in 2019, I and my co-founders Ali Khajeh-Hosseini and Alistair Scott took some time off and started traveling. It didn't take too long before we started brainstorming about what to build next. In January 2020 we launched our third company: CircuitOps. It was aimed at helping software companies hire for a specific technical role. In March 2020 as Covid-19 really hit, all budgets were frozen and a lot of people were laid off. Our startup was dead.

We went back to brainstorming. While we did that, Alistair took parts of the code we had written for CircuitOps and opened it up for the world to see and use. It didn't take long before a community of people found the code and started using it, requesting new features and sharing it. The network effect was very powerful.

Our network of users gave us great feedback and insight on the problem space which ultimately encouraged us to apply for Y Combinator (YC). We were accepted into the W21 batch along with 350 other startups from 41 nations. We are one of the first Scottish companies YC has funded. As we would come to learn in the first week, the majority of learnings from YC are public and free, however the network that we would be dropped into is one of the massive value adds that is reserved for YC funded companies.

We were connected with 20 other startups from the W21 batch and could immediately see how helpful the network is. Learning together about how to create a great sustainable business, we would help each other by sharing knowledge about sales, contracts, compensation packages and anything else that was in our path. It is incredibly useful to have a group of companies openly sharing their experiences and insights. For example, imagine the first time you negotiated a raise and knew how everyone else successfully negotiated theirs. A lot of the companies in our batch even became customers of each other's products.

Two months after the batch had finished I read a blog from a publicly listed YC company and thought they could benefit from our product. I emailed the founders. Incredibly, within a few hours they were connecting me to the person responsible for the area of work we are in. This is the power of a strong network.

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.  A network of founders willing to share stories, learnings and connections.  An example of where this is starting to work is in CodeBase in Edinburgh, and I can’t wait to contribute more. 

This blog ran as an op-ed in The Scotsman on Saturday 13th November 2021