Let's embrace Ambition

Ambition! It’s a word a lot of us shy away from in Scotland. It’s dirty, a bit self-indulgent and no one likes someone that thinks they’re a bit special. Right?

Forget that, let’s embrace ambition.

Last month I had the good fortune of spending 10 days in TelAviv after winning a competition for startup concepts. I spent the time with 9 other founders from across Europe and met the heads of some of Israelis most exciting startups and corporates. The one thing that I found with all of these amazing people, and especially guys like Eden Shochat the founder of Face.com, was that ambition was something they embraced.

In TelAviv they talk about making $100m companies as if it’s as easy as popping down the shops for some milk.

Too often we feel like we need to snipe at people with ambition in Scotland, hold them down, mock their big dreams and rejoice when they fail. In reality their ambition and the confidence they show to set out to change the world should be something we embrace, support, nurture and strive for. Ambition is a vital ingredient in a startup’s, and an ecosystems, mix and one of the areas that I think might be the most difficult to get right.

There are great things happening in the Scottish tech community from the launch of TechCube in Edinburgh to the work of TechMeetup across the country. We’re lucky to have numerous companies/organisations, love or hate them, all trying to provide support to our ambitious founders. Heck, hopefully even this very blog helps in this regard. It’s due to all of these factors that makes me think, as a nation, we’re starting to show the ambition that is needed to make this a great, thriving, successful community and  ultimately somewhere that we can continually create truly world class companies.

And that’s what we all want right?

A Scotland where multi million exits are the norm, where we make world-changing products and where people from all around the world want to start their companies?

Okay, we might have allowed places like Dublin, TelAviv and London to get a wee bit of a head start but let’s all pull together, show some ambition and put Scotland and all of the amazing companies we have here on the world map.

Who wouldn’t love to see Edinburgh, or Glasgow, break into The Startup Genome top 20 Startup Cities? Maybe it could be a New Years resolution from every founder?

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of ambition!