“I started a business called Enterprise Lab with two guys I met on Twitter,” says Naomi Timperley, who took home the crown this year Britain's most powerful woman in tech. “That was when Twitter was good, so many interesting things happened.”
Timperley well known in the technology sector as co-founder of the northern division of Tech London Advocatesbut her background is in tech recruiting, which has given her the knowledge needed to identify the challenges associated with attracting underrepresented people to the tech sector.
After setting up her own recruitment company and spending four years running the UK arm of US events management, Timperley and her Twitter mates founded Enterprise Lab in 2011 to bridge the “gap between education, employment and entrepreneurship”, offering entrepreneurs support and participating in events designed to help young people find their future careers.
“A lot of it had to do with entrepreneurial thinking and ideas, and I guess what you would now call design sprints. Helping people come up with ideas and create solutions,” she says.
The business was born out of a “common purpose” – supporting young entrepreneurs and further understanding how the education system is failing young people with a creative entrepreneurial spirit.
Although computers and digital technologies are now part of the school curriculumyoung people often have no idea what technical work actually involvesand Timperley accuses some schools of being “exam mills” rather than promoting creative thinking and soft skills deals with technical issues and entrepreneurship.
Her focus has always been on founders, and the Enterprise Lab later led Timperley into a number of projects and roles over the years, with a particular focus on digital skills, as well as encouraging social enterprises and charities to help young people develop digital skills and an entrepreneurial mindset to help them pursue careers in technology beyond coding.
“I really enjoy working with founders at a very early stage and working with them throughout the journey,” she says.
Buying in the North
Having become involved with Tech North Advocates in 2016, Global Tech Advocates and Tech London Advocates founder Russ Shaw held an event in Manchester to seek people to manage and develop the organisation's UK northern arm.
Timperley remembers sitting next to co-founder Volker Hirsch at the event: “We were sitting next to each other and the license cost £1. I asked Volker, 'Have you got 50p?'. The rest is history.”
Timperley explains that he and Volker have a Tech North Advocates “ethic” that includes “connecting the dots,” “representation,” and “supporting the tech ecosystem.”
“I enjoy working with founders at a very early stage and also working with them throughout the journey.”
Naomi Timperley, Tech North Advocates
But Timperley stresses that it also operates slightly differently to its London and global counterparts, participating in events of other organizations in the ecosystem rather than running its own.
With a remit spanning regions such as Greater Manchester and Leeds, Timperley describes a large number of tech initiatives in the north of England and the Midlands, including the start-up and scale-up community Venture Community in South Yorkshire, and Baltic Ventures and Lyva Labs in Liverpool, which are often overshadowed by London's tech ecosystem.
Timperley argues that the North has “so many great technology communities and ecosystems.” [that] provide great support not only in their regions but also in other regions,” and it was this support that helped her overcome the problems she faced as a result of online harassment.
Valuable support network
Timperley has been targeted on various social media platforms over the past four years, with the offender writing posts, sometimes up to 20,000 words long, containing false “vicious, disgusting accusations and comments.”
Timperley is not the only target: she and another victim contacted police about stalking, and social media has provided no support.
The woman in question has now been sentenced to prison, but before her sentencing she continued to stalk Timperley online, even without stopping when she was originally charged, breaching bail several times.
“It's not just the messages or the posts, it's the emotional, psychological and professional toll that the victims suffer. So yeah, it was pretty horrific,” Timperley says.
“I know I couldn’t have gotten through this if I didn’t have the support and resilience within the community I’m a part of.”
Setting founders up for success
Next on the horizon is the recently launched End Game, which works with founders to determine their trajectory as they build their business.
Timperley started a venture capital firm with several other “experienced” founders who successfully managed to raise funds and exit the company. She describes End Game as “founder-led,” specifically working with founders of all types, whether they're scale-up founders or those who aren't sure where they're headed.
Giving back to the community she has worked with over the past 15 years is important to Timperley, who says she has trained around 600 people in that time, mostly working with programs offering support to founders and entrepreneurs.
“It was great because I learned a lot too,” she says.
Timperley is regularly asked if she would change anything in her career. “Absolutely not,” is her response. “I somehow strangely believe in fate and I’m glad that I said yes to many things.” it was purely by chance“
