Building a venture can be an isolating journey. Between navigating product-market fit, structuring fundraising rounds, and hiring early teams, founders face high-stakes decisions every week. The best support in those moments doesn’t come from generic advice or theoretical frameworks - it comes from operators who have been in the trenches and navigated those exact challenges themselves.
That’s why the Entrepreneur in Residence programme is at the core of what we do.
We are excited to welcome Jessica Mullen and Steve Jeans to the team. With their arrival, Techscaler members now have direct access to a roster of seven experienced EIRs across Scotland, offering practical, founder-led mentorship to help companies grow sustainably and scale faster.
What Does an EIR Do at Techscaler?
Techscaler EIRs are seasoned founders, operators, and angel investors who offer hands-on, confidential 1:1 guidance to our members. They are trusted sounding boards who understand the emotional and operational realities of building a business.
Whether you are eyeing growth for your startup business or an established scaleup gearing up for institutional investment, our EIRs can help you:
- Stress-test strategy: Pressure-test your business model, pricing strategy, and go-to-market execution.
- Navigate fundraising: Demystify investor expectations, refine your pitch, and structure realistic cap tables.
- Build scalable operations: Implement the systems, processes, and leadership habits needed to grow without breaking your culture.
- Avoid costly pitfalls: Learn directly from the hard-won lessons and operational missteps of founders who have walked the path before you.
Meet Jessica Mullen
Jessica is an adviser, coach, and active angel investor dedicated to helping founders get more clarity, resilience, and commercial impact from their businesses.
Having co-founded and successfully exited the strategic design consultancy CreateFuture, Jessica understands firsthand what it takes to bootstrap, scale service offerings, and navigate an acquisition. Following her exit, she founded HolisticShift, working closely with founders to combine commercial rigour with sustainable leadership.
Beyond her advisory work, Jessica sits on the board of angel syndicate Apollo Informal Investments and serves as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Heriot-Watt University. She is also a passionate advocate for diversity across the startup ecosystem, actively mentoring and working to level the playing field for female founders.
Meet Steve Jeans
Steve is a founder and operator with a proven track record of taking early-stage technology companies from initial concept to global scale.
As the co-founder of Desana, Steve helped build the business from the ground up into an international B2B platform operating across more than 90 countries. During his tenure, Desana raised over $12 million in venture funding, built a distributed global team, and secured enterprise customer contracts with companies including Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.
Having managed rapid international growth and complex venture rounds, Steve now works closely with founders to build repeatable, scalable operations that can survive rapid customer acquisition.
7 Operators in Your Corner
Jessica and Steve join our wider team of Techscaler EIRs, bringing deep, complementary expertise across deeptech, SaaS, hardware, product strategy, and commercial execution:
Our EIR team is here to give you straightforward, unfiltered feedback and practical support to help you tackle your next major milestones.
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