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Who

Robert Gelb runs Campfire and works on founder mentality. He has long experience in Scotland’s startup ecosystem and brings a direct, sometimes provocative perspective on what support structures actually produce.

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What is the core argument?

Scotland does not need more support — it needs less noise so founders can confront the real market faster. Excess support can create dependency, delay the moment of truth with customers, and generate an ecosystem industry that justifies its own existence rather than producing founder outcomes.

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What are the key themes?

Over-definition and over-complication. Terms like “ecosystem”, “scale-up”, and “entrepreneurial nation” often obscure rather than clarify. Founders need to understand fundamentals: what problem they solve, who pays, and what experience they need next. Support can create dependency. Too many grants, programmes, and frameworks delay the most important confrontation: whether the market wants what is being built. Founders wait for grants rather than customers. Comfort becomes a trap. Funding-seeking over business-building. A growing pattern of founders prioritising investment over building something people will pay for. Wanting investment is not the same as wanting to build a company. Support organisations as an industry. The ecosystem has become an industry that must justify its existence. Programme providers become upset when funding is reduced, as though their survival were the purpose of public investment. Celebrating the wrong things. Scotland celebrates funding rounds, not hard yards. Participation, not progress. The real builders work quietly, focused on revenue and survival. Experience over knowledge. Founders learn by doing. Programmes can expose ideas but cannot manufacture capability. Avoiding discomfort delays the moment where insight is earned.

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What ideas were discussed?

  • Do less, better — reduce overlapping programmes that create dependency. Prioritise depth over volume with fewer initiatives, more explicit aims, and more rigorous outcome expectations.
  • Redesign support around rapid market confrontation — refocus on helping founders validate demand quickly through customer interviews, prototypes, and pre-sell experiments. Reduce time spent on theory and frameworks.
  • Introduce outcome-based funding for ecosystem organisations — tie funding to measurable founder outcomes like validated revenue, early customers, and export activity, not participation levels or programme completion.
  • Require honest post-mortems — support organisations should publish open retrospectives of what worked and what did not. A culture of “everything works” prevents learning.
  • Respect non-VC paths — profitable solo operators and lifestyle businesses are legitimate successes. Stop treating them as second-tier. Build support that fits non-venture paths alongside the scaleup narrative.
  • Attract external scaleups if the goal is jobs — if the government aims to increase tech employment, incentivise scaling global companies to base operations in Scotland, alongside supporting local startups.

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Pledge

Robert Gelb committed to championing a “do less but better” mindset by helping founders confront the market earlier and emphasising founder autonomy over dependency on ecosystem structures, through his Campfire platform and founder-mentality work.

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