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.

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To a select community of Twitter dwellers who have cartoon animal profile pictures, Web3 is going to be the next huge evolutionary step in how we use the internet. And to be honest, they’re probably not wrong.

Web3 is at the stage where it asks more questions than it answers - how do we define the value of digital goods? How do we share that value among the people who created them, rather than hoarding the value on a handful of large platforms? What does it mean to be part of a digital community? When did “right clicker” become an insult?

Warning: Hegelian concepts of ownership discussed at length. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

“Would you dare to hug a robot?” is a question we might all need to be asking ourselves soon, and in this episode Matt and Steven are joined by Zaki Hussein from Touchlab to talk about this exact topic. Zaki works on producing electronic skin - something that lets our robot friends feel and sense as we do. As we all know, being wrapped in very sensitive sensors is useful in a whole bunch of scenarios.

The discussion goes from e-skin to robotics more broadly and down some very philosophical rabbit holes (as is Steven’s wont) - but also the more pragmatic side of building a deep tech company, like getting funding and hiring.

Remember when you first saw an Ooni? It may have popped up on your Instagram, or perhaps an episode of Binging with Babish. Suddenly a couple of your friends have one, and they’re telling you all about their 72 hour pizza dough and the San Marzano tomatoes they get specially imported. This pizza obsession didn’t come from nowhere - Darina and her cofounder Kristian understood there was a community driving this quest for perfect pizza, and what this community was lacking was a way to mimic a traditional scorchingly hot pizza oven. They kicked off with a modest crowdfunder and a shonky prototype, and have grown to become THE pizza oven brand, globally. In this episode Darina, Matt and Steven explore Ooni’s success, and talk about creating new product categories, iteration of hardware, and enabling communities to do cool stuff.

AgriTech is one of the oldest of the X-Techs - 13,000 years old in fact. There has been a heck of a lot of innovation along the way. The earth’s growing population needs fed, and new, clever ways to create food and reduce waste will become ever more important. This episode Matt and Steven are delight to be joined by David Farquhar from Intelligent Growth Solutions - a vertical farm specialist. They discuss farming-as-a-service, how AI is getting better at plant care, and how global innovation can support locally grown food.

Matt and Steven have talked about a few different X-Techs before, and this week they’re tackling EnergyTech. More specifically, they’re stepping out of their area of expertise to hear from Bill Nuttall, Professor of Energy at the Open University, about what the future of low carbon synthetic fuels looks like. They discuss how hydrogen can power the world, how big energy companies need to reposition themselves, what the UK’s legacy will be, and how VC thinking maps to energy.

Bill Nuttall is Professor of Energy having joined the Open University in October 2012. Much of his work has focussed on technology and policy issues of energy. He has had a leading role in studies devoted to particular energy-related materials including plutonium, helium, uranium, thorium and hydrogen and much of that work is on-going.

He has long-standing experience of matters relating to civil nuclear energy and more recent experience associated with hydrogen energy systems.

This week Matt and Steven, like every podcast host, are talking about NFTs. For those of you who have successfully managed to avoid the NFT discourse of the last few weeks, Non Fungible Tokens are a way to assign value to digital creations. The most famous example from the last few weeks was Beeple’s work Everydays - The First 5000 Days which sold for an eye watering sum of $69 million.

The strange thing is, we can just go on to the web, screenshot Beeple’s work, and paste it into MSPaint for our own free masterpiece. So why is the original worth so much money? And while we’re at it, why is the original Mona Lisa worth so much money? Turns out there are some very clever people in the art world who are more than capable of telling a story and making a bit of cash while they’re at it. It’s just a shame that the environmental impact of crypto art is so egregious.

For this episode Matt and Steven are joined by Michael Macleod, who has had an amazing career taking him from the Wee County News in Alloa to Instagram, Conde Naste, and finally his startup life in Beams. He shares his experience of what it’s like having the keys to the Instagram account on Instagram (with 380 million followers), how worried the world of publishing is in these times of digital disruption, and what new communities look like.

As people are questioning their loyalties to the big social networks, many are finding new tribes elsewhere. Clubhouse is the Zeitgeist example - although not an overnight success, it certainly felt like one as this year everyone rushed to grab their OG username in the last couple of months. But it feels like there’s even more opportunity for new ways of finding your community online - via voice, images, video, text chat. Is the medium the message? And how do you curate these things? Would Michael have Trump on Beams? All this is discussed and more.

For our 30th episode and first of 2021, Matt and Steven are chatting with Zara Zaman, who founded edventure, the UK's first student-led venture builder and accelerator. She paints a picture of what entrepreneurship looks like for Gen Z - how purpose leads much of what student entrepreneurs want to do, and how attitudes around topics like failure and mental health are changing the way we work.

University really is the ideal time for people to found a startup - the mix of people, access to resources, and energy creates the perfect melting pot. So what can we do to inspire and encourage more student startup activity? Have a listen to find out.

For the last episode of 2020, Matt and Steven are joined by Daisy Ford-Downes to explore alternative finance in a world dominated by venture capital. Daisy’s experience running the Scottish chapter of Zebra’s Unite is leant on to discuss how an ecosystem can support businesses that don’t fit into a traditional investment paradigm, and what the future of investment looks like. They touch on how banks will adapt to a new world of investment, how you can maintain positivity in a movement, and expanding an ecosystem’s local maxima.

This week Matt and Steven are chatting with Gabi Matic, who runs the ATI Boeing Accelerator. They talk about startup principles in aerospace, and whether or not software playbooks can translate to the real world and building jet engines. As is their wont, they touch on ecosystems, education, and corporate/startup relationships. Gabi’s insight into both worlds is eye opening - her experience speaks for itself - check out her impressive CV below:

Brad Feld literally wrote the book on Startup Communities, and his work has been hugely influential in helping startups work together all over the globe. He also founded Techstars, so it’s safe to say he knows what he’s talking about.

In this episode, Matt, Steven, and Brad talk about his new book, The Startup Community Way, and everything that went into making it. They discuss the creative process and how Brad’s seminal blog influenced his style of writing, and how easy it is to get stuck talking about your greatest hits.

They then explore the world of startup communities in depth - how to wrap your head around the complexity involved and think in terms of interactions rather than specific nodes. They talk about how playbooks function in complex systems, and how you go from cliques to community. Lastly, they discuss building inclusion into an ecosystem, and the need for new institutions to help connect folks.

This one off special episode is a live recording at the David Hume Institute’s event Talking Tech. Steven sits down to chat with Chris Yiu who is based in Edinburgh and works internationally on technology and public policy for the Institute for Global Change. He has a special interest in tech, education and change. They have a chat about ecosystems, the future of tech, and tech policy.

The more you learn about bundling and unbundling, the more you begin to see it everywhere. Where once a Happy Meal was a simple cardboard box full of greasy food, a sugary drink and a mass produced trinket, suddenly you begin to see how each element serves its purpose within the whole, and how each constituent part has a different job to be done within the complete product.

The quintessential example of unbundling that Matt mentions is the Craigslist image below - each element has been unbundled into many different products. But things have moved on hugely since that image was created in 2012, and the notion of bundling is having a profound impact on culture, tastes, and image. Enjoy!

Matt and Steven first touched on the world of LawTech in Episode 5: X-tech, but it’s such a huge topic it deserves its own examination. And who better to tell us all about the current state of play in LawTech than Tara Waters, head of Ashurst Advance Digital, the technology arm of Ashurst.

Tara takes us through what’s happening in LawTech - the hype, the expectations, the trials and tribulations. To some, it’s efficiency gains in current legal practices, to others it’s the law creating new markets by eating software. The law is fairly immutable, but does that create a solid platform for tech to build on? And where does the innovation come from - startups working in proximity to law firms, or within the law firms themselves? Tara takes us through all this and more through her lens of building a product internally at Ashurst.

Big companies is a topic that comes up regularly on the show, and in fact Matt and Steven dedicated a whole episode to it right here. For many startups, what happens behind the scenes at these companies is a mystery. Procurement, legals, support, innovation, ... it can feel like a completely different language.

Enter Gary from Fujitsu (a company of 100,000 employees and 130 locations globally) to give a peek behind the curtain at how they handle working with startups. It's a tough process, from both sides - the startups can feel lost in bureaucracy, while the big company has a much lower tolerance for risk (as would you, if you had a bank's data to look after).

So, join Matt, Steven, and Gary for a deep dive into the world of innovation at Fujitsu.

This week we welcome our second interview guest, Mark Logan, to the show. Mark recently wrote an independent report for the Scottish Government about our nation’s technology ecosystem. It shines a light on various components of the ecosystem - from growing companies to school education, and offers recommendations on how and when the government might intervene. You can read the whole thing right here.

This episode is mostly a discussion about the report with Mark, although touches on some of Mark’s experience of growing Skyscanner from 100 - 900 people. Mark talks about the value of unicorns (although reveals that the word was actually banned in Skyscanner), how we can think about social infrastructure, and how relevant the Silicon Valley playbook is to Scotland. He also discusses the future post-covid, and what antifragility looks like for both entrepreneurs and their community.

This week we have a very special episode of the show, where we’re delighted to welcome our very first guest! Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell established the 3A Institute in September 2017 with the mission of building a new branch of engineering to effectively and ethically manage the impact of artificial intelligence on humanity through better design and management of technology. She is also Vice President and Senior Fellow at Intel Corporation.

Matt, Steven, and Genevieve discuss a huge swathe of topics, such as the vision for 3Ai, the French Revolution, startup thinking in academic institutions, and breaking free from normative notions. They also bring up both gutta percha and physiocrats, so I’ve linked them here to save you Googling them.

You can follow Genevieve @feraldata and for more information about 3Ai head to https://3ainstitute.org/.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by such Silicon Valley glitterati as Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. They assembled The Avengers of software - some of the leading talent who could create cutting edge AI infrastructure. In June this year, they released their threequel, GPT-3, and got a select group of beta tests to play around with it and see what they could create. And with this great power, these pioneers created buttons for websites that look like watermelons.

GPT-3 is another step in the evolution of AI, and the release reignited many of the questions that have been smouldering for years. What are the limitations of what it can create? What are the consequences for society? Who are the gatekeepers to the creations - and who gatekeeps the gatekeepers? And perhaps mostly importantly, what motivates OpenAI?

In this episode Matt and Steven give an overview of all these considerations. And don’t worry, they also explain just what GPT-3 is.

“This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch […] We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals […] Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity”

Let’s be honest, the film Hackers [1995] probably hasn’t aged well. But it introduced many of us to the notion that our virtual selves weren’t as safe as we thought we might be. As we all spend more of our time in the cloud, cybersecurity has skyrocketed to become as important (or even more so) than physical security.

This episode uses the recent Twitter hack as a jumping off point to explore the murky world of cyber criminals, and the startups doing their best to counter them. There’s a rich seam of metaphors to explore, from fortresses to gendarmerie to pickpockets, and whether it’s better to rob Fort Knox or a small regional bank.

Beyond just discussing cybersecurity in general, in this episode Matt and Steven discuss the tension between building things quickly and securely. When you move fast and break things, well, you break things. How can startups, particularly those using NoCode/lowcode tools, make sure they’re not setting themselves up for a fall? And where do the opportunities exist for new startups creating security tools?