Nick Freer is sold on the wisdom imparted by an impressive line-up of remarkable success stories
While out to get an airing earlier this week, I made it along to a Shepherd + Wedderburn ‘fireside chat’ themed as “Transatlantic M&A: Sold in the USA!”, supported by RBC Brewin Dolphin and Turing Fest. Led by the legal firm’s Stephen Trombola, a highly-rated corporate partner on the Scottish tech scene, the line-up of founders was impressive.
Calum Smeaton’s TVSquared was acquired by advertising platform Innovid for approximately $160 million in 2022, Chris Wright’s DeltaDNA was bought by San Francisco-based gaming giant Unity for an undisclosed sum in 2019, and Varun Nair’s Two Big Ears was snapped up by a certain Facebook back in 2016.
The founding stories of each company were fascinating, not least Varun’s Bollywood to Silicon Valley journey, starting his career in post-production in Mumbai, relocating to Scotland where he completed a masters at Edinburgh College of Art, before developing immersive audio technology that became coveted by tech giants like Google and the company’s eventual acquirer.
If there were commonalities around each founder’s thoughts on the night, then product development and pivots, investment and investors, the makeup of the co-founding team, US and international strategy, and that most important factor, a good helping of luck and good fortune, were to the fore.
For Two Big Ears, Icelandic songstress Björk utilised the startup’s tech for an immersive virtual reality video in 2015, using a headset that turned a smartphone into a virtual reality device. The publicity around this helped get Varun and his co-founder Abesh Thakur globally recognised, and it wasn’t long after that US tech giants started circling. Drop me a DM if you’ve got a founder’s story any better than this one!
At FutureScot’s “DigitalGlasgow” conference at University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre on Thursday, talks, panel sessions, and chats around the drink stations centred on subjects ranging from startups to scaleups, and healthcare to space tech, with many of Scotland’s main players in these areas in situ.
Loud clapping accompanied Mark Logan to the stage during his final stretch as chief entrepreneurial adviser to the Scottish Government, proving that while some quarters of the media took potshots at his role, Logan has near unanimous support from the individuals out on the coalface that is Scotland’s technology ecosystem.
At the heart of Logan’s approach to Scotland’s technology ecosystem is what he describes as the “widening of the funnel”, equating to the creation of more tech startups and scaleups, some who will go on to achieve unicorn status like one of his former employers, Skyscanner.
So it was fitting that one such Scottish scaleup, a University of Strathclyde spinout no less, joined Logan for a Q&A panel session. Producing vast quantities of healthy and sustainable protein is one of the world’s most urgent priorities, and ENOUGH’s CFO Elaine Ferguson shared the company’s bold vision is to help address this.
In the face of a climate emergency, the world needs 100 million tonnes of sustainable, non-animal protein, and ENOUGH has built a plant in the Netherlands to help achieve this target. Ferguson’s advice for ambitious startups in the room? Be bold, culture is key, live by your values, and establish and follow processes as you grow.
Nick Freer is the founding director of corporate PR agency the Freer Consultancy
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