IoD Scotland Autumn 2021

“At Skyscanner we proved you
can grow and build anything in
Scotland if you’ve got the right
infrastructure, the right people
and the right support”
office, always meeting face-to-face.”
These were habits Skyscanner had
broken a decade ago. “Many of our
employees were nearing the point in
their lives where they were thinking of
starting families, and it was clear that
we’d lose some of them if we didn’t
anticipate their need to juggle family
commitments more flexibly. It made
sense for us to put those structures in
place so we could give them that option,
and signal to them well in advance that
we wanted to support them. What’s
good for one group often brings benefits
to everyone. For example, it also gave us
the chance to spread our net when
recruiting. We didn’t have to focus just
on Scotland, but could recruit from
across the UK, globally too. Skyscanner’s
model therefore became one in which
working from home was normalised.”
Such innovative thinking made Mark an
obvious choice to head the Scottish
Government’s plans for a tech-led
recovery from the pandemic, and to say
his goals for this are huge is an
understatement. He has good reason to
be bullish. “Throughout my career
people have said ‘you can’t grow a tech
company in Scotland.’ When I helped
build and then sell Atlantech to Cisco for
$180m, people said, ok, but you can’t
grow a really big tech company in
Scotland… then we built Skyscanner and
sold it for $1.45bn. We proved you can
grow and build anything in Scotland if
you’ve got the right infrastructure, the
right people and the right support.”
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Autumn 2021
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