The twin-engined Loganair Saab 340 bumps down on the runway at Tiree’s dinky airport. Moments later, I'm greeted by Calum Smeaton, a weather-sculpted Fifer, who leads us out into the blustery, clear blue-sky morning.
We hop into his mud-spattered Ford 4X4, where Daisy and Duke, the friendly collies, are keen to get in on the act, and head off towards Scarinish, the island’s main settlement, and Gott Bay, one of the world’s most fabulous beaches and a mecca for wind-sport aficionados.
Smeaton, and partner Rosie - a corporate lawyer, originally from Glasgow - have spent the last two years, designing and building an eco-home on this treeless and wind-whipped Hebridean island.
Now they have a well insulated concrete-and-glass croft with stunning views of the white strands where Calum and Rosie can decide whether to drop their corporate work for an hour or two and go kite-surfing. Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud would certainly be impressed.
Over the last three years, the couple have spent their time on Tiree in rented accommodation, while Smeaton has also been working between Tiree, Glasgow, Edinburgh and New York, on what is in line as one of Scotland’s deals of the year.
The company, TVSquared - founded by Smeaton - was recently bought by New York-based Innovid in a deal worth $160m (£100m) - while the Edinburgh-based software engineering team will remain a centre of excellence for the New York Stock Exchange-listed tech company.
Now the deal is done, the 53-year-old has stepped back from the company to devote time to flitting into his island home. He is also considering investment closer-to-home.
Around 20 years ago, before the famed dotcom bust, I was invited to sit in with Smeaton and associates at Orbital Technologies, as he pitched his pre-Google analytics software product, Organik, to the tech boffins at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. It was a fabulous insight into a Scottish tech company making inroads into Silicon Valley and Orbital floated in late 2000.
Since then, Smeaton has accumulated a wealth of market wisdom culminating in the mission to build and then sell TVSquared. While this assured Smeaton’s financial security, it also ensured the opportunity to pursue the great outdoor life that he craves.
Smeaton grew up in Dalgety Bay in Fife.
His father, Hugh, was an entrepreneur who built an early Scottish tech company called Fortronics, which employed more than 400 people in the region.
He and his father learned to sail on boats at the local boat club on the Firth of Forth. Smeaton attended Inverkeithing High School, then Dundee College of Technology, which became Abertay University halfway through his electronics and software engineering degree. He undertook a postgraduate course in software engineering and went back to work in Dalgety Bay at Marconi on the Donibristle Industrial Estate.
“I went straight into the Marconi simulations department working on nuclear power control systems and flight simulators for the air force - I was living in Edinburgh at the time, so I did two years in industry.”
Marconi built its own bespoke hardware and software, using its own programming language, allowing computing teams to undertake a variety of development projects, but it was limited in terms of using open-source software.
“It was a good place to go, but not necessarily a good place to stay, because the rest of the world was using other coding systems - such as C - I was conscious of not being exposed to that.”
In 1993, he moved to a joint European-funded research project between Cambridge, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde universities, which changed his direction and his fortunes. It involved using simulations for computer-based learning working with research colleague Alan Slater on Heriot-Watt’s Riccarton campus.
“We were very lucky because we were tasked with finding a hyper-text technology to use for this three-year project and we came across the World Wide Web - this was very early, most people only started to hear about the web in late 1994.”
He remembers downloading X-Mosaic on his Sun Microsystems workstation from a guy called Marc Andreessen, now a legendary Silicon Valley figure who co-founded Netscape, which was sold to AOL for $4.2bn.
“We clicked on it and suddenly you were downloading information from halfway around the world, and we looked at each other and said: ‘This is going to change our lives.’”
Smeaton and Slater recommended the web to Heriot-Watt, but also convinced Cambridge University to use it. This resulted in the duo attending the first worldwide web conference in the US, and subsequent gatherings, picking up information about the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), early HTML standards and evolution of the web.
“We ended up being early adopters of Java, Alan wrote a paper on the ability to have programs that could run within a web browser, which was what Java was all about.
“We became involved with Oak, which became Java, so we probably had the first copies of Java in Europe.”
For Smeaton and Slater, the realisation was that Sun Microsystems’ Java coding was about to revolutionise the digital landscape, and they decided to leave the project and set up their own firm.
However, the university’s principal, Alistair MacFarlane, contracted the company to finish its work and they moved to Dunfermline. At this time, they contacted Ian Ritchie, an honorary Heriot-Watt professor, who had a successful exit with the sale of his firm, Owl Systems, to ask for help in raising finance to grow the business; now called Orbital Technologies.
In January 1995, Smeaton was joined by Kevin Dorren, a Napier University graduate working in hospitality, who would become a seminal figure in Scotland’s digital story.
“We read everything we could about Silicon Valley, entrepreneurial books, newspapers articles, magazines - we learned about all the top venture capitalists in America, and spent our time going out to conferences - we spoke to Ian Ritchie, and he backed us with £20,000, we spoke to Andy Davis, who was at Spider Systems, and he matched Ian’s investment.”
However, this was not nearly enough and the young tech team was advised to raise £1m; an incredible amount for two 26-year-old academic software engineers in 1994. They received advice from Oliver Vellacott, who had just raised funding for tech firm IndigoVision, and ended up building Indigo’s first website. “This gave us confidence because they were just ahead of us.”
Stuart Paterson, then at Scottish Enterprise’s private equity division, and Hazel Cameron, of 3i, were initial supporters in raising the funds for Orbital.
“It’s easy to look back now and say it was obvious how the world wide web was going to change, but it wasn’t that clear.
“Many companies and investors thought it was a passing fad, whereas Kevin was a fully-fledged believer along with ourselves and that this was going to change the world.”
Now Alan, Kevin and Calum, with Ritchie as chair, and Davis as a non-executive director, wanted to build Orbital’s commercial knowledge platform. Kevin already had a database of bed and breakfasts, and hotels across Scotland and, as a demo to show what the web could do, they set up the Virtual Inn, where you could book a hotel online.
“Our first online reservation was from Italy and we booked it for the Scandic Crown Hotel in Edinburgh.
“We ran it as a side-project and then did our first press release for the Virtual Inn, which cost us £400, and the story made the front page of USA Today in 1995 - that was the best money I’ve ever spent on PR!”
The hotel internet business was sold off, and Orbital began developing Organik, a Java-based information storage and retrieval platform for corporate organisations.
“We realised we needed to get to Silicon Valley.
“Kevin, myself and Jamie McKinlay, the commercial director, all headed to America - we got two apartments in Palo Alto and set up shop.”
But before Smeaton and Dorren headed off to Silicon Valley, they were introduced to Crawford Beveridge, a former director at Sun Microsystems, who went on to become the head of Scottish Enterprise.
Beveridge had worked with Eric Schmidt, then chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, later chief executive of Novell, then the second largest software company in the world, with $10bn in cash. Beveridge was excited by Orbital’s proposition and urged Smeaton and Dorren to phone Schmidt and say: “Crawford Beveridge says ‘hi’.”
After a few weeks in the US, the young Scots phoned Novell, briefly speechless at getting through to Schmidt’s office, before blurting out: “Crawford Beveridge says hello!”
With the ice broken, Schmidt told them he was speaking at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto, and would meet them.
“The Churchill Club was a networking event on steroids, there were 400 people with venture capitalists from the major Silicon Valley investors.
“We watched Eric speak and then approached, but [it] was four-deep at the stage, and we were at the back, so we shouted across and he heard the Scottish accents, parted the crowd, shook our hands and took us for a beer in the hotel next door.”
In Schmidt’s mind, the Scots had come all the way to Silicon Valley to see him. He told the Orbital team he was not interested in buying the company, but Novell had a corporate venture fund and would take a $2m stake. Dorren returned to Edinburgh with his partner and young daughter, while Smeaton, as chief technology officer, remained networking and meeting potential customers.
“Eric was great, it was one of the entrepreneurial learnings about going to the Valley: you get access to people that you can’t get in the UK, you can’t get the same speed of access.
“Being a 30-person company that could get the ear of the CEO was incredible.”
Smeaton says the power of networking remains “super-important, if you do it right”.
“We met all the senior executives at Sun and Novell, we got into places that you just can’t believe just by turning up; Kevin was at a dinner with Bill Gates, for example.”
The expanding company, now with 30 people, moved its Scottish development team to a former Co-op supermarket in Davidson’s Mains, and Schmidt, later boss of Google, flew into Edinburgh on his private jet.
Smeaton says that once your firm receives Valley investment, you must deliver. “If you have great ideas, they will listen and give you time, but if you don’t deliver, they can be ruthless; they are very precious with their time.”
Doors opened, as did meetings with Silicon Valley investors, who pressed with brutal elevator pitch questions such as “what’s your value add?” and “how much are you selling it for?”
It all helped sharpened Smeaton’s responses, as the company floated on the stock exchange.
“All the books make it sound easy, but it is really, really hard to do. Silicon Valley’s ability, in the late 1990s and 2000s, to attract talent and customers for early-stage companies was completely different to anywhere in the world - it has changed since, but it has taken 30 years.”
Without investment and funding from well-known venture capital firms, it was often hard to get a foothold, but there was always a doubt that people might miss the next hot-ticket start-up and Orbital, was briefly in this groove, with Nokia and NASA as customers.
“Everyone wants to be associated with the next big thing, so it gives you an edge with your first employees and with your early customers - this has a snowball effect.”
This was something he managed to replicate with the development and growth of TVSquared. Orbital shareholders agreed to a £13m acquisition by Sopheon in November 2001.
“It has been an incredible and challenging time, to go from starting above a garage in Dunfermline, to offices in New York, Boston and San Francisco.
“We did it all within the space of five years, it was a real-world MBA in every aspect of the business.”
Smeaton, a seasoned day sailor since his teens, and still only 32, decided he would take time out to fulfil an ambition to sail the Atlantic in a yacht. This turned into a three-month sailing adventure across the Pacific and the South Sea Islands.
When he returned to Scotland, he undertook tech consultancy work, and agreed to join David Sibbald, the Glasgow-born entrepreneur. Sibbald had sold Atlantech to Cisco in March 2000 and was keen to repeat his success.
He created Sumerian Networks, one of Scotland’s first Big Data analytics companies, working with major financial institutions, including Lloyds Banking Group, and Smeaton became chief technology officer, then chief executive.
“It was pretty depressed at the time, in terms of the Scottish market - even when I visited Silicon Valley, it was in the doldrums after the wild times between 1998 and 2000.”
Smeaton spent nine years at Sumerian, stepping back in 2011 to take time off with Rosie.
Sumerian was sold to ITRS in 2018. He helped with fund-raising and the recruitment of Jo Kinsella as chief executive, for Verdande FS, a Norwegian predictive tech company, which was in the oil and gas sector. It was using Big Data to predict when drill-bits might need replaced.
In parallel, Smeaton was asked, in a part-time capacity, to help solve another problem which would become TVSquared.
He devoted himself to TVSquared full-time in 2013, and during breaks in building this Scottish tech company, Calum and Rosie escaped to the beaches of Tiree, an island where they decided to build their dream home.
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