Collaboration, founders and entrepreneurs – profession path of 2025’s Most Influential Girl in UK Tech
“I arrange a enterprise known as Enterprise Lab with two guys I met on Twitter,” says Naomi Timperley, who has been topped as this 12 months’s Most Influential Girl in UK Tech. “This was when Twitter was good, so many cool issues occurred.”
Timperley is well-known within the expertise sector for co-founding the northern arm of Tech London Advocates, however her foundations are in expertise recruitment, which gave her the information she wanted to pinpoint the challenges of encouraging underrepresented folks into the tech sector.
After establishing her personal recruitment firm and spending 4 years working the UK arm of a US occasions enterprise, Timperley and her Twitter comrades began Enterprise Lab in 2011 to span the “hole between schooling, employment and enterprise” by providing entrepreneurs assist and taking part in occasions to help younger folks to find their future careers.
“Loads of it was round entrepreneurial considering and ideation, and I suppose what you’d now name design sprints. Serving to folks with concepts and creating options,” she says.
The enterprise was born from the “frequent objective” of supporting younger entrepreneurs and additional understanding how the schooling system is letting down younger individuals who have a inventive entrepreneurial spirit.
Whereas computing and digital are actually a part of the varsity curriculum, it’s not unusual for younger folks to don’t know what’s really concerned in a tech job, and Timperley accuses some faculties of being “examination factories” moderately than selling the inventive considering and gentle expertise concerned in tech roles and entrepreneurship.
Her emphasis has at all times been on founders, and Enterprise Lab later led Timperley to quite a lot of tasks and roles over time specializing in digital expertise, in addition to encouraging social enterprises and charities to assist improve digital expertise and entrepreneurial considering for younger folks to take them right into a tech profession past programming.
“I completely love working with very early-stage founders, however then additionally working with them all through that journey,” she says.
Shopping for into the North
When taking up Tech North Advocates in 2016, International Tech Advocates and Tech London Advocates founder Russ Shaw ran an occasion in Manchester to search for people to run and develop the organisation’s northern arm within the UK.
Timperley recollects sitting subsequent to co-founder Volker Hirsch on the occasion: “We have been sat subsequent to one another and the licence was £1. I mentioned to Volker, ‘Have you ever bought 50p?’. The remaining is historical past.”
Timperley explains that she and Volker have an “ethos” for Tech North Advocates, which incorporates “becoming a member of the dots”, “making introductions”, and “supporting the tech ecosystem”.
“I really like working with very early-stage founders, however then additionally working with them all through that journey”
Naomi Timperley, Tech North Advocates
However Timperley highlights that it additionally runs barely in another way to its London and International counterparts, involving itself with different organisations’ occasions within the ecosystem moderately than working its personal.
With a remit that covers areas corresponding to Higher Manchester and Leeds, Timperley describes the massive variety of tech initiatives throughout the North of England and the Midlands – together with startup and scaleup neighborhood Enterprise Group in South Yorkshire and Baltic Ventures and Lyva Labs in Liverpool – which are sometimes overshadowed by London’s tech ecosystem.
Timperley claims the North has “so many superior tech communities and ecosystems [that] are massively supportive, not solely of their regional areas but additionally of different areas”, and it’s this assist that has guided her by means of the challenges she has confronted on account of on-line stalking.
A beneficial assist community
For the previous 4 years, Timperley has been stalked throughout a variety of social media platforms, with the perpetrator writing posts, typically so long as 20,000 phrases, containing false “merciless, hideous accusations and feedback”.
Timperley shouldn’t be the one goal, and she or he and one other sufferer went to the police in regards to the harassment, with social media platforms providing no assist.
The lady in query has now been sentenced to time in jail, however earlier than her sentencing, she continued harassing Timperley on-line, not even stopping when she had been initially charged, breaking bail a number of occasions.
“It’s not simply the messages or the posts, however it’s the emotional, psychological {and professional} toll that takes on victims. So yeah, it’s been fairly hideous,” says Timperley.
“I do know that I wouldn’t have gotten by means of this if I didn’t have the assist and resilience throughout the neighborhood that I’m a part of.”
Setting founders up for achievement
Subsequent on the horizon is the newly launched Finish Recreation, which works with founders to determine their trajectory as they arrange their companies.
Timperley arrange the enterprise firm with a number of different “seasoned” founders who’ve efficiently navigated by means of fundraising and exits. She describes Finish Recreation as “founder-led”, particularly working with founders of every kind, whether or not they’re scaleup founders or those that aren’t certain the place they’re headed.
Giving again to the neighborhood she has spent the previous 15 years working with is essential to Timperley, who claims that in that point, she has mentored round 600 folks, largely by means of working with programmes providing assist to founders and entrepreneurs.
“It has been good as a result of I’ve learnt hundreds as nicely,” she says.
Timperley is requested commonly whether or not she would change something about her profession. “Completely not,” is her reply. “I form of weirdly imagine in destiny, and I’m glad that I’ve mentioned ‘sure’ to numerous issues. Every part has purely been by chance.”
