A message from our CEO Brian Corcoran: Important changes we’re making to Founders Dinners

I want to give the Founders in our community a quick update about some changes we’re making to Founders Dinners, and why I think it will make them even more useful for them.

We kicked off the first-ever Founders Dinner back in February 2018, with legendary VC Fred Destin as our first guest. Since then we have done 22 dinners across Edinburgh and Glasgow, with consistently tremendous guest speakers who have shared inspiring stories of success and failure, fighting the good fight, and making a difference in the world.

We’ve had almost 50 guest speakers, all with great tales and lessons. Here are a handful that I found really memorable:

• Darina Garland (Ooni co-founder & co-CEO); took Ooni from a Kickstarter project to £200m in sales and one of the world’s best loved cooking brands.
• Michael Cockburn (Desana co-founder & CEO); building the world’s best platform for flexible work spaces, with customers like Nike, Microsoft, and Sonos.
• Tom Walkinshaw (co-founder & CEO at Alba Orbital): democratizing access to space by dramatically lowering the cost of satellites.
• Judith Dada (Partner at La Famiglia & General Catalyst); one of Europe’s most highly respected early stage investors, who has the likes of Deel and Personio in her portfolio.
• Varun Nair (co-founder at Two Big Ears); sold his company to Facebook, then led their AR/VR audio software engineering team (and is going again with That Works).
• Keith Bradbury (co-founder at Ember): building the future of public transport – fully electric and tech focused, to deliver a zero-emission and zero-traffic world.
• Jake Jurewicz (co-founder & CEO at Blue Energy): combining Small Modular Reactors and existing manufacturing techniques from offshore oil and wind to revolutionize the cost and speed of deploying nuclear power.

We’re kicking off a new season of Founders Dinners with an exciting change: expansion to London! This will give us – and you – access to a whole new cohort of both founders and investors and help us build a more fluid network between Scotland and London. It will also mean that we concentrate our Scottish network around our Edinburgh dinners; we’re putting Glasgow on hold for now.

So, between now and next year’s Turing Fest we’ll have just four dinners: next week in Edinburgh, and then October 3rd in London, with Edinburgh again in February, and London in March. That means that we’ll only have two dinners in Scotland over the next 10 months – on the premise that what is seldom is wonderful! It also means that tickets will be in higher demand, so book ahead!

EDINBURGH: September 19th (next Thursday!)

• Roan Lavery (co-founder & CEO at FreeAgent)
  FreeAgent is one of Edinburgh’s enduring tech success stories. Starting with an exceptional founding team back in 2006, FreeAgent has had a roller coaster journey entailing pretty much everything that can happen in a startup. On the funding side alone; bootstrapping, crowdfunding, angel, VC, IPO, acquisition – and then the fight to maintain its unique culture – and exceptional engineering – within a massive bank not known for either. Roan is the only person who has been there the whole way, and we’ll be hearing about his journey; the ups, the downs, the satisfactions, the regrets, what he has learned, what he’s thinking of next.

• Mike McQuaid (co-founder & CTO at WorkBrew)
  For a long time, Mike has been one of the most highly respected and sought-after software engineers in Scotland. After 10 very successful years at GitHub – working from home in Edinburgh, but frequently in the Valley – Mike took the plunge to become a co-founder about 18 months ago. Like all founder journeys, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Is he glad he did it? Does he miss the luxuries – and salary! – of a SV engineering giant? Is his startup working? We’ll be exploring all of these questions with one of Scottish tech’s most interesting and opinionated people!

LONDON: October 3rd

• Laura McGinnis (Principal at Balderton Capital)
  Laura McGinnis is a Principal at Balderton Capital, one of Europe’s leading venture capital firms and backer of some of our continent’s most successful startups, including Revolut, Citymapper, GoCardless, The Hut Group, MySQL, and Nutmeg. At Balderton, Laura has focused on sectors like retail, e-commerce, cybersecurity, and climate tech. Her investments span various stages, from seed to Series B, with a particular interest in consumer internet companies and emerging technologies like AI. We’ll be getting her thoughtful views on the current state of play with VC, with AI, with Europe – and lots more!

• Andrey Vinitsky (Co-founder & CEO at Graphy)
  I have known Andrey since the early days of Graphy – which began its life in Edinburgh, where Andrey and his co-founder had been students. Back in 2019 I watched with excitement as he went on a whirlwind fundraising journey from NY to SF to London to Berlin. In the end, I think he raised money from all of those places – from funds like Coatue, La Famiglia, and Northzone, as well as prominent angels like Scott Belsky (co-founder of Behance) and Elad Gil (early angel in Airbnb and Stripe). Armed with that money and a strong sense of mission, he worked like crazy to make Graphy the Next Big Thing. For quite a while, things really did not go to plan: Graphy became bigger than it needed to, and Andrey got pulled into Important Company Things – and away from product and customers. Luckily, he is one of the smartest founders I know – and he realized his mistakes. These days Graphy has found its niche as a data storytelling tool that drives actions – and is on fire! Now that he is an old man (he just turned 30!), we’ll be looking back on the screw ups, the great wins, and the whole glorious mess that is building a startup! In case you can’t tell, I’m really looking forward to this one!

A thank you to RBC Brewin Dolphin, our wealth management partner and Shepherd & Wedderburn, our corporate law partner who help make all of this possible – and who are genuinely playing a key role in supporting UK tech.

I have been hosting these Founders Dinners for 6 years now, and I never get tired of them. It is a genuine privilege to be able to interview the incredible people imagining and building the future, and a delight to do it in the company of so many smart, generous, open-minded entrepreneurs. If you have been to one of our dinners in the past – or indeed are a regular – then thank you, and I’ll see you next time! If you haven’t yet been, I can promise you that you will walk away having learned something – or met someone – of real interest. You’ll also find peers who know what you are going through – the good and the bad – and who will help you if they can. Tbh, that alone makes it a worthwhile way to spend an evening.

Brian Corcoran
CEO
Turing Fest