Matt and Steven recorded live at Turing Fest 2022. The big topic of conversation was the announcement of the Scottish Government’s Tech Scaler contract to Codebase (disclosure: Steven works for Codebase). Hear questions from Matt and the audience about this and get the inside skinny from Steven on what it is, and what it might mean for the Scottish tech eco-system.

Timestamps: 2:30 The three types of people into web3 6:00 web1 vs web2 vs web3 11:00 What actually is decentralisation? What tech has enabled it? 22:30 To what extent is web3 replicating web2? 27:30 The value of digital ownership 39:00 Wait, what is ownership? 45:00 Thinking beyond greed 57:00 Community first: geodesic vs geodetic

Timestamps: 2:00 Touchlab - making skin for robots 6:00 Uses in manufacturing and logistics 10:00 The state of manufacturing 13:00 Is Touchlab building deep tech or a product? 22:00 Reverse engineering nature 26:00 Robots: To be feared? 30:00 How do Deep Tech companies get funded? 37:00 Finding amazing people in Deep Tech

Timestamps: 2:15 A bit about Ooni and where the idea came from 6:45 The true value of a £7.5k crowdfunding campaign 12:30 Enabling communities to do cool stuff 16:30 Creating a new product category and iterating on hardware 24:00 Staying innovative and understanding customers  28:30 The difficulty of productising the Tartine and working with influencers 41:15 Impact led entrepreneurship - what drives it?

Timestamps: 3:00 Big trends in AgriTech from the last 13,000 years 8:00 What are vertical farms?  12:00 The economic benefits 19:00 Emerging business models - farms-as-a-service  21:30 Investment in vertical farms and areas of innovation 26:00 Local food supported by global innovation 29:00 The market - just how big are farms? 35:00 The software behind AgriTech - how do farmers feel about FaaS? 41:00 AgriTech adoption - where we are on the S curve 44:30 Cybersecurity in AgriTech 50:00 What does the competition look like?

Timestamps: 2:00 Bill’s intro, and his interest in scientific policy 3:30 The future of hydrogen, both green and blue 11:00 Is blue hydrogen really environmentally friendly? 21:00 Building innovation into EnergyTech 31:00 What opportunities are there?  35:00 The macro optimism of VC mapped to energy and why energy companies need to innovate 45:00 Renewables and/or carbon capture 52:00 Can we become the decarbonisation capital of the world? 57:00 Where should people look to learn more / train in this new world?

Timestamps: 2:00 What are NFTs? 6:00 Creating scarcity in digital   11:15 How this affects real life scarcity 15:30 Why bother adding scarcity to digital?  22:00 Conspicuous consumption 25:00 The fungibility of art 29:00 Why do we care so much about how art is made? 35:00 Who’s driving this change? 42:00 The fractional participation hellscape 46:00 Whataboutism 53:00 Other collective fictions

Timestamps: 1:00 Michael - from local news to nationals to codeclan to instagram to conde nast to beams 7:00 Beams - building communities on social media 11:00 How do you build a community product in 2021? 20:30 Clubhouse as a platform for VCs and German hip hop 30:00 Old media vs Substack 38:00 Curation 45:00 Building in values to a product

Timestamps: 3:30 Introducing Zara and EdVenture  7:30 What’s involved on the EdVenture programme 12:00 The role of business schools, knowledge transfer partnerships, etc.  20:00 How student debt is holding back the entrepreneurial ecosystem 24:30 Risk in entrepreneurship at University 28:00 What EdVenture is looking at - VC and Impact 31:00 Gen Z and the future of startups 37:00 Building things that should exist 42:00 How VCs are learning about the world 46:30 Gender in student ventures 55:00 Finding your entrepreneurial energy

Timestamps: 1:00 A bit about Daisy. 3:55 Zebras and Unicorns  10:00 Do current playbooks solve the right problems? 14:00 Where innovation in finance will come from 17:00 Bankification 20:30 The role of PE in the future 28:00 Where is money getting pumped from in the future? 34:00 Expanding local maxima 40:00 Infusing positivity into a movement that criticizes the old way 48:00 The opportunity to be ahead of the game in Scotland 50:45 Are Zebras also just following SV playbooks? 52:00 Memesis 54:15 Is VC changing? 55:30 What does success look like for a Scottish entrepreneur?  1:00:00 Being communitarian

Timestamps: 2:00 The current Boeing accelerator programme 5:30 Innovation in aerospace, and lack of playbooks for sustainability 10:00 What drives innovation in aerospace? 11:30 What makes an industry specific accelerator successful? 15:15 CVC in aerospace 17:00 VCification 21:00 How should an incumbent support startups? 26:00 Education in corporates 29:30 Where is industry 4.0 heading? 35:00 Contrasting failure in startups vs incumbents 41:00 Do companies need to move at the pace startups do? 47:00 Industrial ecosystems reinventing themselves 53:00 Missing institutions 57:00 Iterating around hardware

0:45 The origin of the word accelerator, and the origin of the Edinburgh tech ecosystem 3:00 The early days of VC blogging 9:30 The Boulder Thesis and creating startup ecosystems 16:00 Complexity in communities 25:00 Playbooks vs Complex Systems 30:00 Topophilia and the love of place 38:00 Is there a need for a new institution within ecosystems to help understand complexity? 40:30 Inclusivity in ecosystems

How technology is changing the world around us

2:00 Where the term bundling comes from. 5:00 Telecoms: Triple play and quad play 6:05 Being bundle blind 11:00 Is bundling just an enforced cross sell? 15:00 Homogeneous vs heterogeneous bundling 20:00 Is it up to startups to unbundle? 24:00 Apple One 30:00 Cultures created via bundles 33:00 Unbundling and D2C 37:00 .. and back to culture. 42:00 Not everyone is the same - the benefit of not bundling 48:00 Rome with no coffee 51:00 What does bundle thinking do to help you for PMF, exiting, etc.

Timestamps: 3:00 The state of LawTech 6:30 Where does innovation in LawTech come from 12:30 Does the partnership model being so immovable make innovation impossible? 15:00 Internal and external empathy 19:30 Rejigging law firms to encourage innovation 24:30 Building products internally 29:00 Solving productivity gaps, curation of new products, and law eating software 31:00 Has “legal tech” underdelivered so far? 37:00 Will there be a new persona for the lawyer enabled by tech? 42:00 How much the law drives change

Timestamps: 13:00 Introducing Gary 4:30 Intrapreneurship vs entrepreneurship 6:30 Corporate vs startup playbooks 9:00 Working with startups 11:00 The role of corporate support for startups 17:00 Do startup business models gel with corporate sales? 21:00 The importance of having a Systems Integrator 27:00 Does the SI route work in the UK? 29:30 Case study: Dropbox and Box 33:00 The long sales cycle of corporates 41:00 Incubators and accelerators role in educating startups on all this 43:00 Understanding what a corporate needs from a startup

Timestamps: 1:55 Mark’s CV, startups, Cisco, Skyscanner and beyond 3:15 Unicorns, ecosystems, and education 4:40 The Logan Report 5:15 Unicorns 8:15 The startup/scaleup funnel and education 12:30 Playbooks, frameworks, and models 16:30 Heuristics and creativity 24:00 The place of Silicon Valley in playbooks 28:00 Solving the cold start problem of an ecosystem 34:00 The value of iteration in an ecosystem 42:00 Tipping points 47:30 The top of the education funnel - making computer science exciting for kids 55:45 Antifragility

Timestamps: 6:00 Genevieve’s CV 8:00 Introducing the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Institute (3Ai) 10:00 What it’s like running a startup in a University 16:00 What is the vision behind 3Ai 20:00 Technical fetishism 26:00 The importance of history and place in how things get built 31:00 Avoiding getting bogged down in mimicry - of other places, or the past. 36:00 What is the ontology/building blocks of 3Ai? 38:00 Getting out of normative notions with feminist/queer theory - how do you encourage playfullness in a system? 40:00 Is credentialism changing?

Timestamps: 1.45 What is GPT-3? The ultimate autocomplete tool. 2.45 A bit about the creators of GPT-3, OpenAI 7:50 How does GPT-3 work? 12:15 What are they spending all that money on? 16:30 What’s the driving force behind it? 21:00 A few examples of what GPT-3 can create 26:15 GPT-3 and the Turing Test 35:00 Understanding analogies 36:45 The consequences for society (and developers) 42:00 GPT-3 and NoCode 47:30 The future of work for data scientists 49:30 GPT-3 in the Stack 53:00 Ethical concerns

Timestamps: 1:45 The big Twitter hack 6:45 How did it happen? Was it an inside job? 7:50 Types of hacks 14:00 Potted history of cybersecurity and the current metaphors 22:00 Cybersecurity in the time of the cloud 28:00 The kill chain and why people are the route of entry 31:30 The evolution of the cyber criminal 33:30 Is there more talk of cybersecurity these days? 34:00 Why it’s easier for cybersecurity companies to get product-market fit 37:00 Retrofitting cyber security with Darktrace 44:00 Staying agile to beat the bad guys 46:00 Are innovation and cybersecurity pulling in different directions? 51:45 Having a risk framework - NHS Digital vs DeepMind 55:30 How do we build security into the startup stack?