Aberdeen’s entrepreneurial ecosystem came together last week for a packed day of events with Mark Bjornsgaard, founder and Chief Innovation Officer of data‑centre heat‑reuse company Deep Green and CEO of venture studio System Two. Organised with Scottish Enterprise and held on National Unicorn Day, the programme asked a pointed question: how can ambitious founders build genuinely high‑growth ventures without chasing mythical valuations?
Entrepreneurship as a discipline
Across three sessions, the city’s start‑ups, investors and academics explored how to move beyond pitch‑deck theatre and treat entrepreneurship as a discipline grounded in experiment and evidence. Bjornsgaard drew on two decades of building and exiting ventures to argue that the root cause of start‑up failure is structural, not sentimental: “We begin with ideas rather than with customer need.”
Rethinking how Aberdeen backs growth
The day opened at ETZ Energy Works in Altens with a breakfast roundtable on what Aberdeen is – and is not – doing to create the conditions for the next generation of high‑growth businesses. Dr Heather May Morgan, Vice‑Principal, Regional Engagement & Innovation at the University of Aberdeen, said there remains “a real question mark in universities about whether entrepreneurship can actually be taught – the assumption that it is something you are born into, the Elon Musk archetype, rather than a discipline you can develop.” She highlighted Bjornsgaard’s focus on the scientific method and his “Monopoly versus Battleships” image – strategy versus chance – as cutting to the heart of his argument.
Deep Green and the power of rigorous testing
A lunchtime fireside chat at the Net Zero Technology Centre, hosted by Startup Grind Aberdeen, unpacked how Deep Green turned the waste heat from AI compute into a commercial opportunity for leisure centres and, increasingly, enterprise CIOs wrestling with soaring compute costs. An evening session at ONE Tech Hub brought the same challenge‑driven message to students and aspiring founders, with themes from Bjornsgaard’s forthcoming book, What’s The Because?, resonating strongly among those beginning to commercialise research.
A growth city in transition
For a growth‑minded city in the midst of an energy transition, the call was clear: treat venture building less like a unicorn hunt, and more like rigorous, repeatable science.
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