Executive Summary
The recently commissioned Logan Report makes a number of important recommendations about how Scotland can support development of the new digital economy. The tech scene in Edinburgh has been a major international success story over the last decade. Logan outlines how, in broad terms, we can build on that success across the whole of Scotland. In this report I will look specifically at Glasgow.
The Edinburgh tech start-up scene today exhibits the following desirable attributes to a reasonably evolved extent while the Glasgow start-up scene largely does not:
- a strong sense of identity and confidence
- a well-known place where ecosystem participants can meet
- a place where investors can access multiple businesses easily
Logan talks about how the Edinburgh and Glasgow tech scenes are different. In this report I focus on why they developed differently and try to summarise some of the hard learnt lessons of Edinburgh with a view to informing the implementation of Logan in Glasgow.
This report first enumerates the eight learnable lessons of Edinburgh. Then it looks at the landscapes first of opportunity, then threat. It ends with six fundable, implementable and credible recommendations.
Eight Lessons From Edinburgh
Before implementing Logan in Glasgow it is worth internalising some of the hard-won lessons and insights from the slow, painful Edinburgh experience.
The Edinburgh institutions listed by Logan did not emerge like Pallas Athena, fully armoured from the forehead of Zeus, but grew, part organically, part experimentally and part consciously.
And critically they grew out of each other.
Edinburgh flourished and Glasgow didn’t. The purpose of this report is try and explain why, to identify the missing nutrients and irrigation that the emerging Edinburgh scene got and Glasgow did.
1. The Harlem Globetrotters Problem
Edinburgh had to address the Harlem Globetrotters question. Everyone wants to be Silicon Valley, everyone is studying their playbook. But they are better at being themselves than you can ever be.
In Edinburgh we consciously chose another way. The only way to beat the Harlem Globetrotters is: don’t play basketball.
Edinburgh Tech is not organised like Silicon Valley Tech. Inspired by, yes and aspiring to, yes, but organised like? No. Our institutions, companies and their relationships are indigenous, organic and quite, quite different.
Early on — when there were only about 10 startups, Scottish Enterprise took a group of founders out to Silicon Valley. (It remains the single most transformative thing you can do.) During the trip Google poached one of the founders with a good salary and place on their Product Manager’s training programme.
This seemed an insurmountable problem — the tech scene should simply evaporate. You could double your money in London, and treble it in California, so why wouldn’t you? With that came two revelations:
- big Silicon Valley firms saw strong academic computer science Universities as recruitment sources — we should focus on our success not theirs.
- people leave for money and opportunity; it’s simple. Our focus should be on the complex and nuanced issue of retention.
Running our companies like San Francisco startups was a recipe for disaster. In Silicon Valley it is trivial to pick up a team of experienced individuals and in Scotland it is not. American firms typically focus on internal training.
In a skills-poor environment training is critical — and the core mantra of in-company training in Edinburgh is: don’t do it. The model of networking, of meetups, of product tank, or the Turing Festival is extra-company training. Don’t keep training and learning to yourself, organise a meetup to do it on a community wide basis.
Edinburgh’s mantra was that there are no competitors on this side of the Atlantic and when somebody is presenting, everybody in the room works for their company. Scotland cannot afford to wait for your company either to go bankrupt or be successful enough to slough off senior staff to learn from your successes and mistakes. Nor can your company afford to hire in the skills and learning you need, and if they could you could not find them. Everybody needs to learn from everybody else’s experience at the same time.
2. Externalised Excellence
It is not an accident that the Turing Festival is Festival and not a conference. It is not a coincidence that it takes place immediately before the Edinburgh Festival.
It is not a mistake that the first class tech speaker, Steve Wozniak — the co- founder of Apple with Steve Jobs — spoke at the distinctly 5th rate Turing Festival. He came for the Edinburgh Festival.
3. Heartbeat Meetups
The density depth and interconnectedness of the Edinburgh tech community is driven by the structure of its meetups. At the core is a heartbeat meetup with a core mailing list, the sun, the source of light and life, and orbiting around it are transactional meetups. The organisers, key members and local speakers at the moons are overwhelmingly members of the core heartbeat community itself.
Edinburgh TechMeetup had several major advantages over Glasgow:
- it was located in the incubator floor at Appleton Tower
- it had an institutional sponsor (Informatic Ventures)
- a regular sponsor meant beer and pizza, every time (The importance of regularsupplies of free food and drink cannot be over- emphasised. Early stage startups are underpaid, anti-social and have gruelling working hours. In Edinburgh you could (and still can) get food, drink and some social life 4 or 5 nights, free.)
Without a heartbeat meetup to use to relaunch, each iteration would have been incredibly painful.
4. The Scotch Pivot
At the 2nd Turing Festival we had a long battle over whether there should be a session on “billion dollar babies” — the roadmap to Scottish Unicorns. Simply voicing that ambition was an achievement in itself. Nigel Eccles from FanDuel and Gareth Williams from Skyscanner spoke — both on the road to, but far off, unicorn status then.
Nigel talked about the extraordinary step he had just taken. His team had raised a huge sum, half a million, for HubDub, a news aggregator, launched a product to rave reviews with strong user interest and then closed that down and pivoted to an entirely new sector, and totally different product — FanDuel.
He explained his reasoning by showing the famous “Scotch Pivot”:
A business model which is fundable in the US is not fundable in Scotland, and won’t be for the foreseeable future. The investment cashflow is not strong and steady enough to support high-capital, slow-burn companies, hence the proverb “American CEOs raise money from VCs, Scottish Product Managers raise money from customers”.
It profoundly altered the structure of the Edinburgh Tech Community.
5. The Double Heartbeat
As a consequence of the Scotch Pivot talk the Edinburgh scene underwent a major transformation to a double-heartbeat model. A new heartbeat, business focussed event — first the Scottish Lean Circle and then Product Tank — with its own associated communities and networks was developed.
6. Sequencing and Repetition
A complex event calendar needs to be managed. An infrastructure was built to handle the sequencing and management of multiple events. FanDuel sponsored the development of the Open Tech Calendar, considerable thought was given to sequencing and integration, the programme of heart beat events across Scotland was managed, and critically Turing emerged as part of this infrastructure.
7. Roads to Global
American firms have substantial advantages in the road to global presence. They have a continental scale domestic market and dominating that domestic market is the first priority. It provides the financial and funding firepower to curb, stomp or purchase competitors in other countries.
There are successful EU business models where companies are built-to-be- purchased by the US market leader in a sector — a clone-and-flip model. Wannabe global firms in Europe have to choose their own roadmap to the world.
There is a 3rd road to global which no Scottish company has followed — the Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) model. This model sells support to other tech businesses.
NOTE: This is a core recommendation for Glasgow, later in this paper.
8. The Success And Failure Of The Turing Fringe
The modern Turing Festival is different from its initial design which had two parts like the Edinburgh Festivals:
It was designed with a curated, high end Festival and a give-it-a-go Fringe. Turing as we know it evolved out of the curated end and the Festival Fringe petered out.
The failure of the Fringe was an organisational and not a financial matter.
The Landscape Of Opportunity
There are substantially two motors of opportunity that Glasgow should seek to benefit from:
- Political/regulatory
- Covid
Political/regulatory
For the last 30 years the tech industry has been regarded uncritically as a good thing. That is simply no longer the case. The role that big tech is thought to have played in elections, and the role it plays in surveillance in non-democratic states, means that big tech, and big governments are seen as a clear and present danger.
So, regulation is coming and companies cannot be freed of social and political obligations.
Covid
Covid has also accelerated a change that was already in the works. Companies have been forced to work in a much more distributed way. There have been enough fully remote tech firms for long enough for us to understand how they work, their dynamic and their shape.
There remain skeletal offices; clustered around HQs are jobs such as marketing, legal and corporate. The production of products and services by brain remains dispersed.
The importance of network creation is even greater in a diffuse world. In the physical world large firms create deep and abiding networks of alumni by bringing people into close contact with each other in the office. For many companies this is an unconscious and indeed, invisible, process.
In the remote world that network has to be consciously built.
More remote working gives us opportunities not only to have young talent stay in Glasgow and build our tax base, but also for Glasgow Tech Companies to grow their hinterland. If we can create a tech scene where C-Suite jobs are based in Glasgow and software manufacturing is distributed across a network of European university cities pumping out and retaining their own high skilled workers then the future is very bright.
To be that place Glasgow needs to become an originator of high-growth firms. And to become that it needs to make itself a locus of network generation, of contacts, of ideas, of capabilities.
This report will make a number of recommendations about developing remote working companies whose executives are based in Glasgow, but whose workforce are spread across the world in general, but within the European Union in particular.
Six Recommendations For Glasgow
These proposals should be considered to be contained within the recommendations of the Logan Report — not as a counter set, or to replace the broad framework that Logan has laid out.
These proposals should also be seen as widening the scope of the Scottish tech sector. Glasgow has its own Harlem Globetrotter problem with Edinburgh — competing with the capital on the capital’s terms is not wise. I propose a third road to global companies — a widening of Scotland’s capabilities.
The implementation of Logan in Glasgow must be built on top of her existing communities, organisations and networks.
1. Culture Kick-Starter
Culture First
In Edinburgh CodeBase achieved its success by decanting a thriving cultural tech and startup scene and dense network of relationships into a couple of quite unsuitable buildings.
The Glasgow Tech-Scalar needs to take active steps to bring the existing Glasgow scene into a structured environment, with these key elements:
- Glasgow TechMeetup — the regular tech meetup
- CodeYourFuture — the code school turning refugees and disadvantaged groups intosoftware engineers
- Rookie Oven — the regular startup meetup where entrepreneurs meet, learn andcollaborate
Timetabled
A timetable of tech events for Glasgow needs to be curated to avoid clashes with each other as much as possible.
Double Heartbeat
The meetup ecosystem should be organised around the principle of heartbeat and orbiting meetings, with two heartbeats, tech and product.
Speaker Fund
The national Tech-Scalar network should establish a pre-funded grant for international speakers travel, with a small number of US speakers, a few more European speakers, a lot of English ones and inter-Scotland as well.
2. The Glasgow Road to Global
The strategic narrative that Glasgow should focus on is the Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) road to global. The goal is to build in Glasgow a technical and startup community and ecosystem around the early stages of the COSS pipeline and from within that community support the creation and growth of high-value COSS companies.
We do this by creating new tech events based on the Turing Festival Fringe — that is to say a festival of tech events dedicated to OSS/COSS and using that to create communities and networks around and within OSS and existing functioning Scottish firms that are dependent on OSS to make COSS startups from them.
This reorganisation of OSS/COSS community development is just a Scotch Pivot — reducing the cost of experimenting with new software communities and then match those communities with existing companies that already have cash flow and primitive commercial acumen (invoicing, profitability, the notion of cash reserves and sustainable work patterns) to launch small scale COSS companies.
A new festival based on COSS should be organised by the Turing team, with a three year initial horizon as follows:
- year 1–80% Scottish
- year 2–10% EU, 50% rUK, 40% Scottish
- year 3–10% US, 20% EU, 40% rUK, 30% Scottish.
3. Build Out A Post-Covid Meetup Infrastructure
As companies switch to more and more remote working, they will more and more start behaving like existing remote working companies.
A characteristic feature of them is regular, yearly or twice yearly all-hands, or departmental meetups where people are brought together to work intensively and build the internal relationships that companies need to thrive.
Lots of companies will be wrestling with this problem. Lots of cities will start producing packs (hotels, attractions, leisure packages) to lure them in.
Glasgow should focus on tech companies, particularly those that use or have open source infrastructure and endeavour to build a long lasting relationship with them, getting them to hold all hands, building bonds and connections that can be converted into sponsorship opportunities, activities within the Festival of Conferences described above.
4. Build Out The Funnel-Widening Infrastructure
There is room for more than one model for widening the funnel. CodeClan — a fully staffed model is one — CodeYourFuture — a volunteer-led organisation is another.
5. Summer Experience For Students
Logan recommends a National, pan-university summer-school. There should be a post established co-located with the National Tech Scalar in Glasgow to identify additional programmes like Google Summer Of Code and Outreachy, these and encourage and manage applications to them.
6. The Regulatory Road
If Scotland wishes to prosper in the future world, then it behooves us to understand and shape the regulatory environment that will have to be established.
The Universities in Glasgow need to seize the opportunity and establish an institute or school dedicated to studying the international tech industries and how the international community might want to regulate them in a fashion that transcends local markets and local powers.
About The Author
Gordon Guthrie is a Vice President of Product Delivery at the American FinTech unicorn BlockFi. He was previously an IT Strategist at the Royal Bank Group, Chief Technical Architect at IF.com. He was a co-founder of the Turing Festival and has been a founder and worked at a range of startups from small to large, including bet365.
