🛰️ Aurora deal, MyWay Digital Health raise, Tailored Spirits Expansion, Good/Bad leaver deep dive
Here's your Campfire for the 8th of September, 2025.
💼 This issue of Campfire is sponsored by Shepherd and Wedderburn's initiative to supercharge start-ups and scale-ups. Be sure to follow the Start to Scale LinkedIn page for useful videos and posts designed to help founders.
🌊 Updates
🛰️ Edinburgh-based Aurora Avionics signed an agreement with Barcelona-based Pangea Propulsion to supply space-ready avionics, in a deal worth £525,000. DGT EW SS
🩺 MyWay Digital Health, a Dundee University spin-out programme, has raised £3m from Foresight to scale its diabetes self-management platform MyDiabetes MyWay, already used by 50,000+ people in Scotland and abroad. TC DGT
🥃 Edinburgh-based Tailored Spirits Co. (bespoke whisky services for private cask owners and independent bottlers) expanded its service to its 14th country. The business was launched in January 2024. TWW
📣 Asks & Offers, Deadlines
🚨 Start to Scale by Shepherd and Wedderburn is offering eligible subscribers of Campfire exclusive access to their ‘Start to Scale Hub’ which helps companies create template legal agreements in minutes for free. To learn more and request access click here.
♻️ Edinburgh’s Greentech Futures applications close 22 Sept, backing founders tackling climate and environmental challenges with peer support, tools, and founder spotlights to help scale sustainable solutions.Apply Today
👭 Interested in connecting with possible co-founders? Fill in your listing on Cofounder Curious today! Connect with others for possible cofounder matching here.
👷Are you hiring? Send us a blurb and we’ll include it in the next newsletter!
✍️ Want to write something for Campfire? Have an opinion you'd like to share? get in touch!
Good vs Bad Leavers
By Robert Gelb, in partnership with Shepherd and Wedderburn
The end of a business relationship isn’t something we usually fantasise about when starting a company. But the reality of any fast-moving business is that team members will come and go. Whether through change in circumstance, performance, or just not being the right fit, a certain amount of team turnover is healthy and isn’t something to be feared.
Not putting thought into what happens when someone leaves, however, especially from an equity incentive perspective, can slow you down, cost you money, and potentially sink your business.
I sat down with Rodger Cairns and Gavin Charlton, Partners in Shepherd and Wedderburn’s Employee Share Schemes team, to learn the basics of good leaver/bad leaver provisions, why they exist, and what you should be thinking about when looking at share incentive arrangements.
So, what’s a good leaver/bad leaver?
When someone leaves your company, they might hold share options or equity in the business. What happens to these share interests might depend on several things. Why did they leave? Were they made redundant? Did they commit fraud? Did they decide they wanted to become a seaweed farmer in Thurso?
“Good leaver/bad leaver provisions give a business different options for how to treat former employees and deliver a variety of different benefits,” Rodger says. “When they leave the business, the circumstances under which they leave may be the main drivers for how they will be treated. If they left for a ‘good’ reason, they may get certain benefits that are not available to ‘bad’ leavers.”
It also impacts things like compulsory share buy-backs that companies might have in place to keep the cap table as clean as possible. A company could make all leavers subject to a compulsory buy-back provision if an employee left for any reason unless the board decides otherwise.
“It’s very attractive to the company because, within the bounds of reasonableness, they have the ultimate discretion,” Rodger adds, “but, that's probably not particularly attractive to an employee because they are basically fully at the whim of the employer in terms of how they're treated on their departure.”
Gavin highlights the issues around fairness, “If someone leaves involuntarily and it’s a no-fault termination of employment, they might feel they have a greater right to retain an interest in the business than someone who left to work for a competitor, where it would be more of a problem if they still owned shares in the company.” You might want to treat each of those situations differently.
There’s also an issue of fairness in terms of length of service. “If they're contributing to the business, are they treated as a good leaver because of the effort they put in until that particular point? If then they're away from the business, for example, for five years, and the people who are in the business at that time are the ones that are really driving the benefit,” Gavin says, “is it fair to the newer people if they're delivering value to people who've left a long time ago and aren't really doing anything anymore? So that's why there's a balance to be struck when you go down the fairness route.”
How should you be thinking about good/bad leaver provisions?
Rodger and Gavin, as you might expect, advise to keep things simple.
“When you’re putting in a share plan, if you can’t explain it simply, your employees aren't going to get it,” Gavin says. “And if they don't get it, you're wasting your time. If you spend all your time talking about leaver provisions, what’s the message the employees are going to take out of this? If they are telling themselves ‘They think we're all going to leave’, it’s the opposite of what you're trying to do.”
“I see companies fall across a spectrum when it comes to good/bad leaver provisions,” Rodger adds. “Aside from everyone being considered a bad leaver unless the board determines otherwise, you sometimes see a situation where everybody is a good leaver unless they fall within certain stated bad leaver categories. Many PLCs, for example, fall somewhere in the middle. Private companies interestingly often go to one of the more extreme ends of the spectrum to give themselves more discretion.”
“I think fundamentally,” Gavin says, “one of the main reasons for providing share options is to keep the key people in the business. So, you want to say, ‘If you leave, you don't get it’, which provides a bit of a disincentive for them to leave. And that's where the provisions come in. And then the good lever/bad lever is just about, okay, well, how do we moderate that for fairness? Even though it needs thought, it’s also important not to overthink it.”
This is part one in our three-part series diving into more specific areas of share-option schemes. Next time, we’ll look at exit-only options and vesting. Following that, we’ll look at how and why the system is different in the US and how best to approach building a scheme that works well for both geographies.
In the meantime, you can learn more about Rodger and Gavin here, and get in touch with them and their team at Shepherd and Wedderburn regardless of what stage you’re in.
📅 Events
♟️ 09/09, 1830 🗺️ Edinburgh: Monthly Meetup: Judson Cowan & Kickstarter deep-dive. Monthly tabletop game industry meetup, this month’s guest, Judson Cowan digs into his approach to Kickstarter, through which he has raised over £1.4m for his 3 board games to date. MORE INFO
🛡️ 10/09, 08:20 -16:30 🗺 Glasgow: Scot‑Secure West Summit 2025. Scotland’s biggest annual cybersecurity conference, featuring live keynotes, workshops, and an exhibition at the Hilton. This curated event brings together InfoSec leaders, IT experts, researchers, and law enforcement to explore emerging threats and resilience strategies. MORE INFO
💡 10/09, 9.30 am-12pm 🗺 Edinburgh: Equal Value Thinking - building a truly inclusive and creative workplace. Join Jay Davies, an autistic ADHDer with dyslexia, helps you understand how to create a truly inclusive and creative workplace. MORE INFO
🤖 10/09, 13:00 🗺 ONLINE: Navigating an AI-First Ecosystem as a Globally-Minded Scottish Founder This webinar asks whether Scottish founders can keep pace as AI reshapes Silicon Valley’s playbook, featuring three Techscaler founders who spent three weeks in the Valley on market research, investor connections, and global growth. MORE INFO
👩💻 11/09, 17:00 🗺 Glasgow: DATA:Scotland Pre-Event Meetup Databricks Scotland Meetup with Summit recap, AI/BI Genie demo and networking MORE INFO
🤖 15/09, 12:30pm, 🗺 Falkirk: AI & Collaboration for Future-Ready Businesses. An event in Forth Valley exploring how businesses can use AI to strengthen resilience, improve decision-making, and build long-term adaptability, featuring a talk and Q&A with AI strategist Abi Odedeyi. MORE INFO
🤖 16/09, 09:30 🗺️ Edinburgh: AI for Business Innovation & Impact Explore how businesses are using AI to improve performance and drive growth. Talks, Q&A, and networking. MORE INFO
🎯 18/09, 17:30 🗺️ Edinburgh: Scotland Women in Technology - Bold Moves: Career Change Stories from Inside & Outside FanDuel Panel event exploring career pivots, transferable skills, and lived experiences from FanDuel staff, SWIT award winners, and external speakers. MORE INFO
💻 18/09, 18:00 🗺️ Edinburgh: Edinburgh Data Science & AI Meetup Pizza, drinks, networking + talks: Why good code fails to make an impact + AI agents. MORE INFO
👩🏭 18/09, 10:30 🗺️ Perth: Coworking Day, A free coworking day in the Famous Grouse Idea Centre for the tech and business community. MORE INFO
🌞 23/09, 17:00 🗺️ Edinburgh: Good Ideas Class Showcase Meet the next generation of entrepreneurs and changemakers as they launch bold new ideas to create a fairer, greener and more inclusive world, starting right here in Scotland. MORE INFO
🏗️ 23/09 -25/09, 🗺️ Hilton Glasgow: APACT Conference
Organised by CPACT, the APACT conference brings together experts in process analytics and control to share innovations, research, and industry applications. The three-day event offers technical sessions, networking, and insights into the latest developments in process technology. MORE INFO
💰 24/09, 09:00 🗺️ Edinburgh: Fintech Summit 2025 brings together Scotland’s financial technology community to discuss innovation, regulation, investment, and the future of financial services. MORE INFO
💸 24/09, 19:00 🗺️ Edinburgh: DIGIT’s 5th annual Scottish Financial Technology Awards celebrates achievements across Scotland’s fintech ecosystem, with categories recognising outstanding individuals and organisations. MORE INFO
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That’s all for this week - have a great one!
Team 🔥 Campfire