Introduction
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 and make a number of suggestions are to how we can best implement the Logan Report in Glasgow.
Before we start it is worth quoting the Logan Report on Glasgow at length:
Infrastructure, in the ecosystem context, is often mistakenly thought of as only relating to Co-location; i.e. the (usually) physical offices and associated resources out of which start-ups can work. This is certainly an important component of the category. But the market square category is equally important.
To define and to illustrate the importance of the latter category, consider this example: 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. Start-ups believe that they can be successful in their chosen location and that there’s a peer-support network around them.
A well-known place where ecosystem participants can meet, attend talks, share ideas, be efficiently introduced to prospective companies and future employees and feel part of a thriving community.
A place where investors can access multiple businesses easily. As we’ll discuss further later, this is particularly important for venture firms outside Scotland. Relative to working with companies in London, where each prospective portfolio start-up is a short tube-ride away, there’s considerable time involved for a VC in visiting Scottish start-ups. Having a single meeting point where investors can assess several interesting candidates in one visit is helpful.
What accounts for the difference between the cities? In the large part, organisations such as Codebase, Turing Fest and EIE/Informatics Ventures, all based in Edinburgh and which, along with several others, instantiate the above environment there to a much greater extent than is to be found in Glasgow.
Logan talks about how the Edinburgh and Glasgow tech scenes are different, in this report I focus on why they developed differently and try and summarise some of the hard learnt lessons of Edinburgh with a view to informing the implementation of Logan in Glasgow.
Logan only compares Glasgow and Edinburgh but there is a third city that needs to be taken into consideration. Edinburgh has a pair of relatively modest breakout internet companies with valuations of over a billion dollars. Modest by Silicon Valley standards that is. But Edinburgh has a functioning pipeline and huge potential for many more.
By contrast Stoke-On-Trent has to itself an internet behemoth, bet365, with its $84bn turnover and its global reach. Internal to itself, bet365 is a United Nations with workers from all over the world living in company owned housing across the 5 towns.
But surrounding bet365 is no tech scene, no startup scene, no spin-offs that could build on experience of scaling such a company.
A keynote breakout company, like bet365 or Skyscanner or FanDuel, can kickstart, feed and develop an ecosystem of innovation and expansion 10, 20 or 30 times as big as itself. But it doesn’t happen automatically.
From that perspective the institutional, political and state failure to recognise and respond to, to engage with and support the phenomenon that is bet365 can be regarded as an economic catastrophe for the English Midlands and North on a scale with Brexit — a quiet, unremarked trillion dollar failure.
bet365 is not a closed company, it has a strong small-n Stokie nationalism but its engagement with the town is focused on the English premier league.
The Glaswegian technical and startup readers of this report should look to Edinburgh, but the political and institutional readers should turn their eye to Stoke-On-Trent.
Unicorns (tech companies with valuation of $1bn before their floatation on public markets) will only come from a city economy strategically aligned with that goal.
Scope
This is an implementation level document for elements of the Logan funnel:
The recommendations focus on the early stage parts of the funnel, up to small scale start up only.
Within that range the recommendations are again limited:
Pouring petrol on a fire is a destructive political metaphor. Government funding is more akin to kerosene — which will douse a small fire as well as fuel a large one.
The Glasgow Tech-at-scale scene is too embryonic to absorb much money (with some partial exceptions) — excessive funding would be ill-advised and counter productive at this stage. This report makes no recommendations on company funding in Glasgow.
This report first enumerates the 8 learnable lessons of Edinburgh. Then it looks at the landscapes first of opportunity, then threat. It ends with 18 fundable, implementable and credible recommendations.
Building On The Logan Report
This report makes detailed recommendations in these Focal Areas section of the Logan report:
- Foundational Talent Pipeline
- Tech Scalar Backbone
- International Market Square
- Integrated Ecosystems Grant Fund
In relation to the latter is makes recommendations with respect to:
- Foundational Talent Fund
- Ecosystems Builder Fund
- International Market Square Fund
