Scale Up – What light through yonder window breaks? Oh look its John O’Connell
Possibly the most significant news from this week’s London Tech Week is news last night that the UK gets its own Silicon Valley styled VC fund as a group of highly-successful IT entrepreneurs get together and help to turn young start-up to fast-growing mid-range businesses. This ties into the current fascination of addressing ‘scale-up gap’. The head honcho is John O’Connell, known to plc investors as the founder of Staffware.
In addition to Mr O’Connell there is the Board of Advisers which includes Dr Mike Lynch, Autonomy & Invoke capital, Dr Steve Garnett, President of Salesforce.com EMEA, formerly Siebel and Oracle, Michael Tobin OBE, Telecity. The stats tell is that fast growth companies need advice as much as capital and that is the USP of the Scale up – that said getting them all around a table will need all of Mr O’Connells deft touch, possibly outside help, and possibly a big stick. Says Mr O Connell: “ScaleUp will provide a combination of services; experience and well-established relationships in the areas of management mentoring; talent finding; financial management; international expansion and related matters, as well as capital for growth. To this end, we have created a team of ‘Active Supporters’ consisting of founders and executives with expertise in these areas, including Aidan Cooney-Founder of Opta Sports Data, Duane Jackson- Founder of Kashflow; Stuart Clark-Founder of Impendium; Paul Excell, Chair of BCS entrepreneurs and former global executive at BT; Neil Kipling, Founder of IDBS and Rob Wirszycz, serial mentor and investor.”
Investors will recall that spiritual guidance was provided by the Sale up report by Sherry Coutu, who we see announced yesterday the Scale-up Institute, an industry-led NFP providing a platform to ensure that the UK increases the proportion of companies that scale globally over the next 10 years. Ms Coutu said: “I am delighted that John O’Connell’s initiative, which I very much applaud, offers a range of support addressing all of the causes of the UK’s scale-up gap”. Operationally the ScaleUp team also includes CEO Charles Winward, ex- director of IP Group and CIO Nick Kingsbury. Mr Kingsbury also well known to plc investors being ex-chairman of Accumuli plc (sold to NCC), and was for years global sector head for software at 3i, and from memory didn’t he have a proper job once? ScaleUp expects to announce its first engagements Autumn 2015. What a superb idea – we wish them the very best.”
George O’Connor
Analyst
Panmure Gordon