Embracing the ‘chaos’. Growing a company is not a linear, straightforward process, according to former Skyscanner exec helping Scotland’s next generation of founders 

I have spent more than twenty years building Scottish technology companies, from the early chaos of finding product market fit through to the very different chaos of scaling fast and exiting.

Those experiences were a series of transitions and inflection points and never a straight line. Some were navigated well, some were harder than they needed to be and all of them formative in ways I only now understand. 

I now want to leverage that experience to ensure that we see Scotland-based founders build 10, 20, even 50 companies as successful as Skyscanner and Current Health. We have the conditions and capability. What we need is the belief and the infrastructure and support to match it.

I believe CodeBase, in executing on the vision of Techscaler, the Scottish Government’s flagship programme to support founders, can be the key component in delivering that.

The infrastructure they have built makes starting an entrepreneurial journey easier than ever and deserves genuine credit. It is by no means perfect and some in the community have legitimate criticisms. Yet CodeBase is a startup with its own scaling journey, and, like all startups, has its own inflection points to navigate. There is no single defined path, all we can do is look to continuously improve to deliver maximum value for businesses.

Scaling today is genuinely harder than it was even four years ago. Competition is global from day one and customers expect reliability and operational maturity far earlier in a company’s life. Local capital markets reward repeatable evidence over ambition and early traction.

The founders who will define Scotland’s economic future are being held back at the inflection points, those critical transitions between stages of growth where the nature of the challenge changes completely and most support structures are not built to keep pace. 

There is something else worth saying, something the best ecosystems in the world understand and that we are only beginning to act on. Entrepreneurial ecosystems are not designed and built. They evolve, organically and over time, out of both the durable and globally consequential companies created within them and those companies that tried and failed. All of whom are celebrated.

The ecosystems we look to, like Silicon Valley, Estonia, Nordics and London were built up over time. The density of experienced operators, recycled capital and hard-won institutional knowledge that makes an ecosystem genuinely strong is a byproduct of companies successfully navigating growth and reaching real scale. Only scaled, sustainable businesses can deliver that.

That is why progression, not participation, has to become the organising principle of what we do at CodeBase. We are building a stage-aligned growth framework that supports founders and leaders through the full arc of their journey, with experienced, operator-led mentorship, integrated access to capital and customer connectivity designed around the specific moments where companies are most likely to succeed or fail. These interventions are built around what founders actually need at each stage and measured against whether they work. 

Startup founders and leaders are not programme participants. The best ones will generate real and outsized economic value, create meaningful jobs, and build the institutions that ensure Scotland is a compelling place to build a company.

We must increase the probability that these founders with real potential make it through the transitions that stop most startups in their tracks. At CodeBase, that means one thing: accelerating the rate at which high potential businesses grow, scale, or fail.

The next phase of economic growth will not be measured by how many founders come through the door. It will be measured by how many of their businesses make it to the other side of the inflection points that matter most and grow into successful, sustainable scaleups. That is a harder standard but one we must strive for. 

Richard Lennox joined Codebase as Interim COO at Codebase at the start of this month and is the former COO of Current Health & Senior Director at Skyscanner.