Most founders start with an idea and work backwards to find a market. Samuel Weatherstone started with five years inside one of the world's most iconic venues and worked forward from what he saw.
As senior programming manager at the Royal Albert Hall, he oversaw live events and managed the technical teams behind them. It was the kind of role that builds fluency fast: in how the industry operates, in what works, and in where the gaps are. When he relocated to Edinburgh, spent a year in study, and co-founded ESK three years ago, he was building on ground he already knew well.
ESK licenses iconic intellectual property from rightsholders and turns it into live entertainment formats, backed by a proprietary media control system the company built from scratch, bespoke hardware and software combined to deliver audio-visual playback for live events. Over the last three years, ESK has delivered over 550 shows worldwide, produced live experiences for brands like Netflix, Paramount and BAFTA, and recently closed a £2.6 million round from Maven and the British Business Bank. For most of that journey, the company ran entirely on its own revenue.
Cash is the strategy
ESK bootstrapped from day one, and Samuel is clear-eyed about what that actually meant in practice. Once they decided there would be no debt and no outside equity, the path simplified. They had to sell something. So that's what they did, starting by approaching rightsholders and offering to sell their content into markets where they felt it wasn't reaching its potential. Revenue came in, and the business grew from there.
"Once you decide that you're not going to get debt and equity, it's sort of quite simple because you need to sell something." - Samuel Weatherstone, CEO, ESK
Year one closed at £250k. Year two, £500k. Year three, £2.1 million. The year just finished came in at just under £4 million.
Growing that quickly without a financial cushion taught Samuel the lesson he'd pass on first to any early-stage founder: get a proper finance function in place from the start, earlier than feels necessary, before the absence of one becomes a real problem.
Cash flow management is unglamorous, but it's the reference point against which every other decision in a bootstrapped business gets made. ESK built their finance function later than they should have, and when payroll entered the picture without adequate reserves behind it, Samuel understood exactly what that kind of exposure feels like.
Know what's coming in. Know what's going out. Build from there.
What a mentor is actually for
When Samuel moved to Scotland, he came without a local network, without prior founder experience, and without familiarity with how funding and support worked in that ecosystem. That's what drew him to Techscaler and, through the programme, to his mentor Callum Stuart.
The sessions with Callum were grounding. For a first-time founder trying to orient quickly, having someone who could map the funding landscape, explain how Scottish Enterprise grants work, and point toward the right resources made a tangible difference. The introduction to Scottish Enterprise grants alone opened up projects ESK might not have pursued at all, or would have approached much more slowly.
Grants are retrospective, Samuel notes, you still have to spend the money before you see it back, but they create the conditions to take on work you wouldn't otherwise take on, or to move faster than you could have done independently.
His advice on how to actually use a mentorship session is worth sitting with: Bring the real problem. The version before you've tidied it up. The question that's actually keeping you awake, whether that's running out of cash in a week, or wondering whether to keep pushing on something that's generated no traction after six months. The sessions that move things forward are the ones where you're honest about where you are.
"Getting a mentor who I now speak to a lot, all the time anyway, and know really well — that was really helpful. It was all about setting that landscape out." - Samuel Weatherstone, CEO, ESK
The deal that didn't happen and what came next
In the early days, ESK spent six months in negotiation with a major media organisation on what looked like a significant collaboration. Samuel had the existing relationship and used it. The conversations went on. And then, at the end of six months, the organisation walked away.
With nothing else lined up, it forced him to reach out to people he'd previously assumed were out of their league: contacts he wouldn't have approached under normal circumstances. One of those conversations led somewhere. Looking back, Samuel identifies that failure as a turning point. When something falls through, the choice becomes whether to accept it and find the next action, or to carry it. The companies that keep moving are the ones where founders accept the reality quickly and ask what they can do about it, rather than holding on to what didn't work.
"The failure is more important because at that point you just have to accept it first, and then decide what is the next tangible action — and sometimes that might be picking up the phone to people you normally wouldn't have called." - Samuel Weatherstone, CEO, ESK
The funding round
When ESK did go out to raise, they did it methodically. The round with Maven took close to a year, with the first six months spent entirely on preparation before they talked to a single investor. They built the financial model, interrogated the valuation, changed the model, built it again. The discipline was deliberate: if you don't fully understand your own valuation, you can't have a serious conversation with anyone about it.
From there, they approached around 50 venture capital and private equity firms. That narrowed to serious conversations with ten, in-person meetings with five, and two final offers.
The part Samuel wants more founders to hear about is what came after the term sheet: the due diligence process.
In UK private equity especially, the rigour is significant. Everything you've claimed about your business has to be verifiable. For ESK, a company valued on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA), that meant every revenue and profit figure was examined in detail. Samuel came through it, but he's candid that he wishes he'd been better prepared for how demanding that phase actually was.
Where ESK goes from here
The capital unlocks the next chapter. North America is one of the key target markets, consumer spending on live entertainment at that scale is substantial, and ESK sees it as the biggest near-term opportunity. Alongside that, the company is looking to deepen its presence across Europe, the Middle East and Australia, markets where it already has content running but wants to go further than the light-touch presence it's had so far. New hires in sales and production are already in works to support that expansion.
Samuel reflects that Scotland gave him something he didn't have in London: the instinct to look outward. Living in a city where he had no existing network pushed him to travel more and use his global contacts in ways he hadn't before. When he was in London, he expected the work to come to him. Scotland changed that orientation, and he credits it with shaping how ESK thinks about international growth. His advice to anyone weighing up whether to get involved with Techscaler and the wider community is to do it, and to think bigger than their immediate geography from the start.
Click here to follow ESK's progress on LinkedIn.
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