The start-ups hoping to make it big

According to him, this will be the year that CodeBase - the privately funded hub for young and innovative software companies he has created in a giant office block in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle - will spread it wings throughout Scotland. It aims to establish itself in Glasgow and Aberdeen, with an announcement on "its first major partnership with an international corporate" expected within weeks.

Already making big waves in its own industry circles, the rise of CodeBase, and the apparent success of Coleman's head-down-and-charge style of management, will make 2015 a year of momentum. According to Coleman, CodeBase will "triple in size by February, and it's highly likely we'll quadruple this year".

Developed out of Coleman's previous brainchild TechCube, CodeBase already claims to be the UK's largest tech incubator and the fastest-growing incubator in Europe. Its mission is simply "to build, nurture and grow the next generation of tech superstars".

With runaway Scottish success stories like Skyscanner (flight booking) and Craneware (medical software) as inspiration, Coleman sees no reason why Scotland's next £1 billion-turnover company should not be among those of which he rattles off descriptions in a quick tour of the corridors: Kotikan, Make Works, Relaymed, Flexiant, BitWink and many, many more.

Founded in March 2014 and based in the unlovely but jazzed-up 1970s office block Argyle House - with one of the best urban outlooks in the UK - the centre is already home to more than 40 start-ups and 300 people, the mean age of whom is 27. Coleman, born in Glasgow but mainly raised in Argyll, compares himself to being "a good pub landlord - you try and get good beers and the right vibe".

Twelve floors and more than 250,000sqft of available office space is a fine ­example of Coleman's propensity to think big, and his ability to take others along with him, including partners Cern (the European nuclear research centre), Pentech Ventures, Seedcamp and Scottish Equity Partners. Coleman also puts his own money where his (quick-fire) mouth is - so much so, he jokes, that maintenance bills "make me want to shoot myself".

Especially given that the UK tech press is rarely able to see beyond London, Coleman has to be his own salesman as well as administrator, talent-spotter, "bouncer" and all-round trouble-shooter. "When I bring London VCs [venture capitalists] up here, they almost to a man say the same thing: 'Your companies are twice as far ahead [as the capital's equivalents] for half the money.' And that's absolutely true. We feel we are building cockroach companies that can survive the nuclear winter."

He describes what motivates him: "The thing that is interesting to me about ­Scotland is that what we are good at is B2B (business-to-business) and enterprise software. We're good at building the hard stuff.

"Without being derogatory to any other start-up capital, in a funny way the Scots engineering talent that was used for building bridges and so on has moved into ­software. If you look at the kind of talent that is coming out of our universities, it is things like big data [processing], machine learning, natural language processing and sensing. All of these applications are solutions to really big, hard problems."

The kind of businesses that TechCube is nurturing (see panel) are not household names, nor are they likely to become them. But they are perfecting the application of digital ingenuity to universal challenges, like tracking supermarket sales, confirming online identity, or detecting online security breaches.

"Things like applying big data in a hospital environment might be less fashionable than building a Twitter or a Facebook, but the value in these applications is extreme. It turns out that we, in Scotland, are very good at building these. So rather than trying to say 'we're just as good as London or Berlin or wherever', which is pointless, what's different about what we are doing here is that we are better at that difficult stuff, from smart cities and smart grids, to software around security and software around medicine.

"Our purpose here is to build those companies. I want to build the next billion-pound company out of Edinburgh, and that's actually entirely achievable."

Although fluent in the jargon of start-up culture - "domain expertise", "company engineering" etc - Coleman exudes a refreshing impatience with the ­extraneous "nonsense" of the entrepreneurial support that he implies is a speciality of Scottish officialdom. His analysis of what stands between Scotland and commercial success carries conviction.

"There's a whole load of moving parts of a tech industry infrastructure, but they haven't quite gelled together properly. And there are a whole raft of issues that we need to sort out. The point of me building an incubator was mainly for me to stop whingeing about what was going wrong in this part of the world.

"There are a number of different streams there we're trying to address, and the first is the importance of place somewhere to build a home for the best young technology start-ups, and bringing people will domain expertise to actually build, grow and scale ­companies online.

"I didn't realise when I started that 50% of my job would be being a bouncer, stopping the wrong sort of people coming in, many of whom are simply parasites on start-ups.

"We are an open door to ­everyone. We've had people from Silicon Glen to Tel Aviv moving in and its a tremendous community. But sometimes it's been like a zombie movie, with every dodgy consultant known to the country battering at the gates.

"In a way, that's not ­surprising when you have this amount of companies doing this well and making this much money, of course they all want in. We need to protect these companies from the ways in which they have been hurt in the past. There had been a lot of young people who had been in various ways taken advantage of, or not dealt with in a very good manner."

The point of a hub like ­CodeBase, Coleman says, is that it allows participants to "swap stories about the people who have helped and those who have not helped quite so much".

The picture he paints of the perils and pitfalls facing young companies with ambitions to grow into the "£1bn companies" that Coleman envisages, is not one you are likely to read on any ­Scottish Enterprise website, but it has the ring of truth.

"There is a whole range, from professional services to individuals who are looking to take sweat equity from start-ups, 'helping' them in some way, in sales or marketing, or whatever.

"There is a range of badness there. There is a small group who are rotters in some shape or form, and then a whole load of well-meaning folks who are just not very useful. They may have done well in industries like property or traditional manufacturing or whatever, they may be good business people in their own right, but they don't have a clue about how to scale a business online.

"Of course they want to give advice. Everyone wants to be a mentor, especially a tech mentor. Everyone wants to be part of it. One of the big problems we have in Scotland is that you have angels who are just doing it for the tax breaks; they don't have a lot of interest or ability in ­creating a big company. That can end up being pretty problematic."

Physical ­collocation is important to innovative companies that share common problems, but so is money, and the "company engineering" that optimises a firm's ability to make a little go a long way. Coleman insists it only takes £50,000 of investment to ­establish the basics of a multi-million-pound company.

"There's a lot to be said for companies working together, and CodeBase offers the company engineering [advice], that's what's been lacking before. The big question is how do you build a company and get them successful quickly, because we don't have Silicon Valley cheques.

"Pre-revenue seed funding in the States tends to be in the region of $1-$2m, here we are lucky if we get £150,000 Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme money. There is a well-acknowledged lack of capital.

"Unlike the States, Europe as a whole does not have the people who made their money in software and want to come back in because they understand the industry," he says.

"As I have been discussing recently with [Finance Secretary] John Swinney, and presented some data on at the recent ­Business In Parliament conference, we have to address the private-equity ­ funding gap in Scotland. We only have Scottish Equity Partners, and Pentec providing VC funding. They are great, but there's only two of them."

Coleman contrasts this with Ireland, which lacks a strong research base but which has "50 VCs". He says: "I'm hopeful this has been acknowledged and that something will happen about it. We need more funds. There's a lot of money behind those Georgian doors in Edinburgh and I want in, but I would prefer they were investing it with fund managers who knew the sector and weren't just happy getting an £11m exit from a £5m ­investment. That kind of underperformance is so poor."

Coleman is not just asking for people to think on a bigger scale, but in an entirely new way about tech's potential to enrich Scotland. The days of thinking of the economy in "sectors" are over.

"I don't believe in that any more," he continues. "The software core of all sectors is where the growth is now. If you look at my old sector, life sciences, it takes $1bn to bring a drug to market. In the Scottish sector it might take £100m and 10 years in a factory to have the chance of making a major new drug. That's great, and I'm glad people in Edinburgh are doing it, but I think that we can have a much more dramatic impact on saving lives if we could build better software around­ ­genomics or provisioning ­healthcare that makes cost savings that prevent cuts.

"If we can build that in Scotland, which we can and we do, we can sell that all over the planet. There may be a lack of capital in Scotland but there is no lack of ambition."

Not if Jamie Coleman is anything to go by, anyway.