About
We passionately believe Scotland has the potential to produce world class technology companies. Each contributor to RookieOven is a founder of a Scottish tech startup and shares this passion for our tech community. We truly feel we can have a positive impact on the Scottish startup community whilst we are all striving to build our own successful businesses by giving back to fellow startups across Scotland and beyond.
Although Scotland currently has some shortcomings we believe our country is a fantastic place to establish and grow tech startups. To this end, we share opinions and advice on the RookieOven blog and also try our upmost to promote talented individuals and quality startups from across Scotland.
As well as regular content on the RookieOven blog there is the monthly RookieOven Meetup in Glasgow. This provides Scottish founders a platform to meet, socialise and support each other on a regular basis. Regular contact with peers is invaluable and essential, even more so as a founder of a tech startup.
Our goal is to see more successful tech startups emerge from Scotland. We want to see a more ambitious startup community with a culture of collaboration and co-operation at its core. We feel together, as a cohesive unit, we can achieve these ambitions.
RookieOven, blog and meetup, does not generate any revenue or receive any funding. It is entirely run, maintained and organised by volunteers – all contributors listed below do so because of their passion for the Scottish tech community.
Scotland might be a small country but it’s bursting with talent.
About the people behind RookieOven
Michael Hayes
RookieOven was founded by by Michael Hayes in April 2011 with the aim of creating a more vibrant tech community in Scotland. Michael is co-founder of CodeCreatedMe a Glasgow based startup making web and mobile products such as Travel Bit. Michael is passionate about tech startups and also curates the Scottish StartupDigest which highlights the best events for tech startups from across Scotland via a free weekly email.
Jamie McHale
Jamie is founder of ‘location pre-check-in’ application seeu.at which aims to make planning informal social gatherings easier. Seeu.at is Jamie’s second startup as he also currently runs a successful web development company - Telaco.com. On RookieOven Jamie shares his experiences building seeu.at.
Greg Cooper
Co-founder and Chief Creative at Interstate, web app for creating and sharing development roadmaps for websites and products. Originally from Dufftown, Greg is an alumni of the highly regarded Silicon Valley accelerator YCombinator.
Greg is determined to improve the Scottish startup community and to foster more collaboration within it.
David Wong
David is a former lawyer who is in the process of launching his first startup - Plantedd, an online marketplace for nurseries to sell plants, bulbs and seeds. David and his team of developers are currently hard at work iterating and constanly improving Plantedd.
For advice on all things horticulture check out the Plantedd Blog, follow the Plantedd Twitter account or like the Facebook page.
Cally Russell
Cally is the founder and CEO of shopping start up Mallzee.com. Their focus is moving online retail past ‘click and buy’ and focussing more on the experience. Users create their own personal malls and find great products thanks to Mallzee. Cally is passionate about Scotland and the endless possibilities for great companies to start, and grow, here.
Richard Smith
Richard is a Technical Entrepreneur having worked for the likes of
Amazon, Skyscanner, IBM, Lehman Brothers, The University of Edinburgh as well a good number of start-ups – like NetPhysic, Solcom Systems, and Scott-Logic. While at Amazon Richard ran a team providing 10′s of millions of personalised ads per day for the Amazon websites around theworld. Richard is a huge start-up-ophile, and now works for Tripbod.
If you share our passion for startups and desire to see Scotland produce more successful started why note contribute to RookieOven? If you would like to contribute to get in touch with Michael.
