Despite typically stellar reviews from participants, Techscaler’s foreign trips for budding entrepreneurs to places with tech industries in full bloom have come under scrutiny in a recent piece in The Sunday Post. 

Based on a series of interviews from mostly unnamed individuals, the trips were described by the Post as ‘holidays’ sponsored by the Scottish Government, providing entrepreneurs with free transportation and hotels to exotic destinations complete with ‘wild parties’ and a lack of structure. 

While these are the more outlandish claims in the article, it did raise appropriate questions about the selection process of these trips, and the reason for them. 

Are these Techscaler trips essential parts of growing Scotland’s tech ecosystem, providing startup founders with critical access to successful regions and investors? Or are they government-backed revelry under a thinly-veiled guise of freeform networking? 

The Scottish government contract to deliver Techscaler was awarded to CodeBase back in July 2022, backed by £42 million in state funding. The programme largely delivers engagement and networking opportunities and training courses for Scotland’s tech startups, but also offers fully paid trips for founders to some of the world’s leading tech hubs. 

Founders were flown to Silicon Valley, California, Singapore, and Japan, providing them with the opportunity to network with other founders and connect with investors in the vibrant tech ecosystems. 

However, The Sunday Post alleged – based on mainly anonymous sources -that the trips had a questionable selection process and were treated as free holidays by many participants, who took the opportunity to have nights out and ‘wild parties’. 

According to the article, some attendees stayed out in Singapore “drinking all night” and “didn’t turn up” to organised events the next day. 

Others said anonymously that they questioned the selection process for the trips, saying that some were selected to attend the trips without a formal application process. 

One person, quoted anonymously as a “business leader” who was “involved” in the Singapore trip said that the trips were known as “a running joke. Among founders, everyone calls them free holidays.”

The only named person in the article, Daniel Grant, founder of notation.dev, and attendee of the Silicon Valley trip, said that some investors on the trip did not have a “game plan”, and critiques Techscaler’s filtering on startup founders selected for the trip in the article. 

CodeBase, however, is having none of it. 

CodeBase CEO Stephen Coleman expressed his disappointment in the article, telling DIGIT: “The article wholly misrepresented the nature of the international programmes, based on comments from unnamed sources with unknown agendas and uncorroborated information, while actively ignoring the huge volume of positive feedback, case studies and impact created for the businesses involved.”  

A CodeBase spokesperson went into a bit more detail, providing some answers to questions left open by the report concerning the selection process and the reported inclusion of partners on the trip. 

When it comes to the selection process, CodeBase said: “We review various criteria when selecting international programme participants, including revenue, investment raised, plans to expand to US or APAC markets, diversity and regional representation. 

“There is a rigorous selection process in place to pick the companies who we think will benefit most from the programmes. Companies need to be Techscaler members by the time they go on the programme, be a registered business in Scotland, or have a senior executive based in Scotland.”

As far as spouses or partners being bankrolled by the government, CodeBase firmly denies this. 

“Techscaler pays for flights and accommodation for the selected founders and supporting team only,” the CodeBase spokesperson told DIGIT. “No spouses or partners participated in any of the programmes. 

“Some participants extended their stay beyond the programme with their partners, at their own personal expense.”

Even Daniel Grant, who was the only named individual in the article, shared his misgivings about the article’s presentation of the Techscaler trips. 

He said on LinkedIn that he has “never heard anyone call these trips a holiday.”

He clarified his comment about some attendees not bringing a game plan with them “I was one of those people,” he clarified. “Contrary to what the article said, I hadn’t called investors before. I just got on a plane and figured it out when I arrived. We all had a couple of weeks to prepare – we made of it what we could.”

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Another founder who participated in the Singapore trip, Wes Beard of Konversable, shared his thoughts on the article with DIGIT: 

“The fact this has been reported as a ‘free holiday’ is not only factually inaccurate, but an insult to the entrepreneurs who dedicated a substantial amount of time towards not just maximising the opportunities available to grow their companies, but to elevate the profile of Scotland as a tech ‘place to do business’.  “We spent many days at a suite of conferences, pitching events and networking events, helping to promote our own businesses and representing our country on the world stage.”

Beard said that meeting prospective clients in the APAC region would have been impossible without the Techscaler trip, due to his company’s relatively small size. 

Beard said the trip opened his business up to other opportunities in the APAC region, from self-funding a trip extension to a conference in Malaysia, to unlocking other business deals in the region. 

“If any blame should be pointed, it should not be towards CodeBase.  If founders did not maximise the opportunities available to them on the trip, that’s on them, but to blame Techscaler or use this as a reason to talk down the potential of Scottish tech to the world stage is wholly wrong.”

In his LinkedIn post, Grant concurred: “The real villains of this story are not Codebase who provided an opportunity for business and personal development in another country. It’s the entitled founders who took that opportunity, squandered it, and then whined about it.”

The article’s controversy led all the way to the Scottish Parliament, with Scottish Conservative MP Murdo Fraser calling for “urgent enquiries” into the Techscaler trips. 

It remains to be seen if the article will lead to anything after CodeBases’s comments and the clarification of the only named contributor in the piece.