Chris van der Kuyl has made a plea to the Scottish Government to help solve the growing skills shortage faced by businesses.
Speaking exclusively to Insider, the Chroma Ventures principal and 4J Studios chair - among many other things - said that almost every business he's involved with is concerned about how to find and retain the right people.
Industries as far apart as financial technology and truck driving have taken to increasing wages and enhancing flexibility, but Van der Kuyl believes companies shouldn't just throw money at the problem or lose long-fostered work cultures.
"It’s a short term challenge, and one we don’t solve by making rash decisions.
"If most of your team is working from home or freelancers, you just don’t build cohesive teams over time - those that find their own culture and can foster new talent; they’re the ones that succeed."
He bemoaned the fact that as governments typically think in election cycles, the long-term issues at the heart of current labour shortages and skills gaps are not being properly addressed.
"We have to create a workforce that knows how to innovate, is creative and technically skilled against a global high bar - but we’re just not doing that, we're not even at the races in terms of funding higher education in this country.
"We’re living on a fantastic legacy or great educational institutions, and the goodwill of people in those institutions who don’t want to leave, but compared to departments in the US or Asia, it's laughable how much more money they get.
"I understand the concept of funding struggling parts of the system, but it misses the point that if you don’t fund the successful parts to be even better, we won’t have anything left," Van Der Kuyl added.
Starting at the grass roots, he called school education "completely broken" and in dire need of a "reset and reinvest" strategy to help come up with a different working relationship between teachers and government, otherwise Scotland will continue to just "shuffle the deckchairs around" on a sinking ship.
"It's not my job to do that, but I think we need to put power in the hands of educational leaders that have an output goal to get our talent level up in terms of volume and quality - it will take 20 years, but let's make the decisions now."
Van der Kuyl was involved in the formulation of Finance Secretary Kate Forbes' recently-published 10-year economic strategy, to which he made the play that if education is properly sorted out, everything else should eventually fall into place, "and we’ll have a tsunami of companies wanting to be here".
He praised her "relentless focus" on entrepreneurial culture and pushed back against criticisms from trade union representatives.
"I’d be delighted if we had entrepreneurial trade unions, all I hear is 'we’re here to fight for the worker', when you’re actually there to be the voice of staff and partner with other groups to improve things collaboratively."
In terms of the temptation of outsourcing to solve problems, Van der Kuyl argued that most Scottish business believe in creating a fairer environment to work in, rather than moving jobs overseas to "places with lesser values".
He continued: "I’d love to hear a rational conversation about this, as we need to support Scotland’s ambitions - the downstream stuff is paid for by the entrepreneurs driving things forwards."
Van der Kuyl is less concerned about owning all elements of the supply chain, however, giving the example of ready meal business Parsley Box - which he chairs - running its distribution and marketing from Edinburgh, but outsourcing all the manufacturing elsewhere.
"We can get tied up in knots in terms of Scottish jobs, as opposed to productivity, adding the most valuable to the economy, picking industries and skills that are transferrable.
"People are slightly fantasising that renewables are going to take up all the oil and gas jobs for instance," he added.
Similarly, Van der Kuyl is not too precious about holding onto Scottish companies as they scale-up, noting New York-based Innovid buying Edinburgh's TVSquared in February.
"TVSquared could have been built further here, but there was huge complementarity with the Innovid deal, so we're happy to support the combined team for the next stage of the journey; I’d hope that they can generate a lot more future value than we have today."
He admits that the team at 4J Studio's investment arm Chroma Ventures are no better than anyone else at picking start-up winners, but it's about "sticking with your guns and backing people to make mistakes and get better".
Using the example of portfolio company Broker Insights, he says people are the most important part of growth.
"What we’ve learned is that people get way to obsessed with the product - marketing and financing it - when what they need to do it over invest in people, because when things really blow up, the problem is always having the right people and maintaining the culture."
Van der Kuyl concludes that Scotland must rid itself of the small nation mindset in order to really fulfil its potential.
"We lack ambition, we feel bounded by geography and population.
"One thing the last couple of years has taught us, is that things can be based anywhere - take Klarna as an example - if you can grow a tech unicorn in Sweden, you can definitely do it here."
Don't miss the latest headlines with our twice-daily newsletter - sign up here for free.
