Start-Up Scotland How we became a nation of entrepreneurs

YOUNG PEOPLE ACROSS THE COUNTRY ARE SEIZING OPPORTUNITY WITH BOTH HANDS AND CREATING THEIR OWN COMPANIES AT A RATE NEVER SEEN BEFORE. VICKY ALLAN INVESTIGATES THE LATEST BUSINESS BOOM

INa large airy hall in the former Fairfield shipyard offices in Govan is RookieOven, a “c o - work i ng ” space that provides rentable desks for freelancers and people setting up their own businesses. It describes itself as “a home for the tech community”.

As well as desks and a raised mezzanine with comfy chairs and tables, there’s a muchused pool table. Steven Calder, founder of digital company Streamba, which provides a logistics service for the oil and gas industry, happens to be visiting the office to drop off a monitor and jokes it is a sign of the tech community: a pool table, or maybe a ping pong table. “There’s stuff going on here,” said Calder, “and you can smell it. You walk in and you think there’s something going on here.”

Scotland is buzzing when it comes to start-up companies. New figures show that Glasgow has the second-largest growth of start-ups in the UK, after Birmingham. In 2016, the number of start-ups increased by 16 per cent from the previous year. On average ,22 new companies start up each day in Glasgow alone. On the other side of the country Edinburgh is a tech mecca. Think of Skyscanner, the travel fare aggregator, or FanDuel, the web-based fantasy sports game – two companies valued at over $1 billion.

Nationally, business survival rates are better, and a significant and increasing proportion of start-ups are tech or digital companies. Last week, Tech City published its Tech Nation 2017 report, which showed an increase in the GVA, or gross value added, to the economy by the digital industry from £480 million to £591m in one year.

RookieOven’s founder Michael Hayes is widely regarded as an innovator and networker at the heart of Glasgow’s tech community. Creating such a community is something Hayes has been working at for many years, long before he took over the office space in 2015. Partly it was driven by his own experience.

Hayes recalls that back in 2010, he set up his first business, a safe social networking platform for children. It failed, he says, “spectacularly”. One of the problems, he realised, was the lack of “community” for start-ups – fellow entrepreneurs to bounce ideas off, and work alongside. “It didn’t work out, partly because I was an idiot,” he said. “But also the environment didn’t exist for that business to thrive. Part of the environment is having that community and people who will give you the advice for free. That environment didn’t exist.”

Hayes considered moving away from Glasgow because of the lack of opportunity he felt existed in the city. In 2011, he went down to London to visit a friend who worked in the tech industry. His friend said: “Glasgow has got a lot to offer for someone like you. You just don’t know what it is. You need to find it.” So he headed back home and sent out a tweet, saying: “Who wants to meet for some beers and pizza and talk about start-ups?” RookieOven was born.

By 2014, he was starting his own business, Add Jam, and needed an office. He was also noticing that many other cities had co-working spaces at the heart of their tech start-up communities. He wrote a blog post, saying: “If I take up on office space, who would like to join me?”

Hayes believes there is a great deal of potential in Glasgow. “Being in Glasgow is a major plus. You’ve got that pool of talent there, there are students and people coming out of university, a draw of international talent you can tap into, a low cost of living.”

Co-working spaces are on the rise in the UK and have been for the last decade, inspired by experiments with the style of working in the United States. Among those working in RookieOven is Mark McEwan, a former architect turned designer who co-founded Skunk Works, a company currently working on a “connected vehicles” system – a kind of smart monitoring of cars which links up to the garages which service them. The team has created hardware which attaches to the onboard computer of the car and feeds back information to the person’s mobile and the garage they use, triggering notifications about when they need maintenance.

McEwan believes the co-working space has been hugely valuable. “Since I moved in here, productivity has increased but what’s more than that is meeting people who are in the same boat as you.”

The last few years have brought a growth in spaces like this in Glasgow. Another is the

There’s stuff going on here and you can smell it. You walk in and you think there’s something going on here