Foreword by Nigel Eccles
founder of the Scottish Unicorn FanDuel
In the summer of 2007 I met Tom Griffiths in Doctors pub in Edinburgh. Tom had just dropped out of a PhD program at Edinburgh university to found a tech start-up called Groopit. A few months later Tom, myself and three other founders, Chris Stafford, Lesley Eccles and Rob Jones, would found the company that would become FanDuel. That company today is the leader in the US sports betting market and was recently valued at over $11 billion. It employs over 1,000 people including over 500 people in their Edinburgh and Glasgow offices.
As I reflect on the success of FanDuel and on where the government made a real difference to us as a Scottish based startup, there are three main areas that mattered: inspiration, environment and funding.
I met Tom in the pub that fateful night after an event called the Silicon Valley Speaker Series. Funded and organised by Edinburgh’s Informatic Ventures, this series of talks was delivered by tech entrepreneurs who had been invited over from Silicon Valley to Edinburgh to inspire local students and entrepreneurs. After each talk, the speakers would typically go for a quick beer with the audience and while the speeches were inspiring, actually meeting tech entrepreneurs in the flesh definitely gave rise to a “well if he can do it, then maybe we can do it as well” kind of feeling. Without this window into the art of the possible, FanDuel may never have been started.
The second area where the government influenced our success was environment. San Francisco and the Bay Area are famous for being a place where being a tech entrepreneur is a way of life. In the local Starbucks it is common to hear people talk about term sheets and operating systems. While you might now hear a little of that in some of the cafes around Codebase in Edinburgh today, you certainly didn’t at all in 2006. Informatic Ventures and Codebase both helped bring together the little pocket of tech we had in Edinburgh. In addition, events like Tech Meetup also brought together like minded engineers and entrepreneurs.
The third area of positive impact was funding. Earlier today a Bay Area entrepreneur sent me a list of US based early stage VC firms with a focus on consumer tech and over $50 million to invest. There were over 500 firms on the list and it was not even close to complete. When we started out in Edinburgh there were two such early stage VC firms in Scotland: SEP and Pentech. Fortunately, one of those, Pentech, would invest in FanDuel. Additionally, there were other sources of funding that provided us with enough money to get us off the ground. Entrepreneurs turned angel investors, Kevin Dorren and Ian Ritchie, took a risk on us when we were 5 people with an idea on the back of a napkin. Twelve months later, when Pentech invested in us, their investment was matched by the Scottish Co-investment Fund run by Scottish Enterprise. Without those matching funds from the government, it is highly unlikely we would have been successful.
Today, Scotland is in a dramatically stronger position than it was 15 years ago. In Edinburgh alone there are exciting new tech startups like Travelnest, Current Health, Relish, Flick, StarStock etc (and those are just the ones I know because they have former FanDuel team members working for them!). Additionally, 2020 has seen a dramatic change in attitude towards remote work which has resulted in a huge increase in people in Scotland working for London, European and American startups, without leaving Scotland.
Some entrepreneurs will say that entrepreneurship does not need government support. My own experience is that this is most certainly not the case — early stage entrepreneurship is incredibly tough and the right type of support can make or break the startup. I am thankful that the Logan report lays out exactly how the Scottish government can support start-ups in an effective and efficient way that will help maximize not just the number of early stage startups but also encourage them to thrive and grow into a rich tech eco-system.
