ENTREPRENEUR DIARY OF AN

ENTREPRENEUR DAVID HAMILTON HAS BEEN NAMED AS ONE OF SCOTLAND’S TOP INNOVATORS AFTER SCOOPING THE JOHN LOGIE BAIRD AWARD FOR KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER CHAMPION.

Hamilton set up his company ATEEDA, to help solve some of the expensive problems facing the electronics industry. His main product, the OptimATE, has been a huge hit, greatly reducing test costs during manufacturing of electronic chips. He shares a typical week with New Start.

Monday

Good news from a prospective customer’s French site in Grenoble. Our ‘champion’ there has managed to secure a meeting we’ve been after. Luckily, one of our project managers speaks the lingo.

We’ve been inundated with CVs for a software engineering post we advertised only last week. Having reviewed them with a colleague, we select

a shortlist of four. I’m hoping to recruit quickly as business is good, so I arrange interviews for Thursday. Unfortunately one candidate has already taken another post.

Tuesday

I spend the morning with the engineers, reviewing the specifications for two new sister-tools to sit alongside our core product. Our technical team is very strong and getting the technology exactly matched to the customer’s needs is key for start- ups in this sector. It is great to be able to turn our customers technical needs into exciting products. We have been getting excellent results for a German-based customer and I briefly review these with one of our engineers before planning some material for an event tomorrow.