“I set up a business called Enterprise Lab with two guys I met on Twitter,” says Naomi Timperley, who has been crowned as this year’s Most Influential Woman in UK Tech. “This was when Twitter was good, so many cool things happened.”
Timperley is well known in the technology sector for co-founding the northern arm of Tech London Advocates, but her foundations are in technology recruitment, which gave her the knowledge she needed to pinpoint the challenges of encouraging underrepresented people into the tech sector.
After setting up her own recruitment company and spending four years running the UK arm of a US events business, Timperley and her Twitter comrades started Enterprise Lab in 2011 to span the “gap between education, employment and enterprise” by offering entrepreneurs support and participating in events to assist young people in finding their future careers.
“A lot of it was around entrepreneurial thinking and ideation, and I suppose what you would now call design sprints. Helping people with ideas and creating solutions,” she says.
The business was born from the “common goal” of supporting young entrepreneurs and further understanding how the education system is letting down young people who have a creative entrepreneurial spirit.
While computing and digital are now part of the school curriculum, it’s not uncommon for young people to have no idea what’s actually involved in a tech job, and Timperley accuses some schools of being “exam factories” rather than promoting the creative thinking and soft skills involved in tech roles and entrepreneurship.
Her emphasis has always been on founders, and Enterprise Lab later led Timperley to a number of projects and roles over the years focusing on digital skills, as well as encouraging social enterprises and charities to help enhance digital skills and entrepreneurial thinking for young people to take them into a tech career beyond programming.
“I absolutely love working with very early-stage founders, but then also working with them throughout that journey,” she says.
Buying into the North
When taking on Tech North Advocates in 2016, Global Tech Advocates and Tech London Advocates founder Russ Shaw ran an event in Manchester to look for individuals to run and grow the organisation’s northern arm in the UK.
Timperley recalls sitting next to co-founder Volker Hirsch at the event: “We were sat next to each other and the licence was £1. I said to Volker, ‘Have you got 50p?’. The rest is history.”
Timperley explains that she and Volker have an “ethos” for Tech North Advocates, which includes “joining the dots”, “making introductions”, and “supporting the tech ecosystem”.
“I love working with very early-stage founders, but then also working with them throughout that journey”
Naomi Timperley, Tech North Advocates
But Timperley highlights that it also runs slightly differently to its London and Global counterparts, involving itself with other organisations’ events in the ecosystem rather than running its own.
With a remit that covers areas such as Greater Manchester and Leeds, Timperley describes the large number of tech initiatives across the North of England and the Midlands – including startup and scaleup community Venture Community in South Yorkshire and Baltic Ventures and Lyva Labs in Liverpool – which are often overshadowed by London’s tech ecosystem.
Timperley claims the North has “so many awesome tech communities and ecosystems [that] are massively supportive, not only in their regional areas but also of other areas”, and it’s this support that has guided her through the challenges she has faced as a result of online stalking.
A valuable support network
For the past four years, Timperley has been stalked across a range of social media platforms, with the perpetrator writing posts, sometimes as long as 20,000 words, containing false “cruel, hideous accusations and comments”.
Timperley is not the only target, and she and another victim went to the police about the harassment, with social media platforms offering no support.
The woman in question has now been sentenced to time in prison, but before her sentencing, she continued harassing Timperley online, not even stopping when she had been initially charged, breaking bail several times.
“It’s not just the messages or the posts, but it’s the emotional, psychological and professional toll that takes on victims. So yeah, it’s been pretty hideous,” says Timperley.
“I know that I wouldn’t have got through this if I didn’t have the support and resilience within the community that I’m part of.”
Setting founders up for success
Next on the horizon is the newly launched End Game, which works with founders to decide their trajectory as they set up their businesses.
Timperley set up the venture company with several other “seasoned” founders who have successfully navigated through fundraising and exits. She describes End Game as “founder-led”, specifically working with founders of all types, whether they are scaleup founders or those who aren’t sure where they’re headed.
Giving back to the community she has spent the past 15 years working with is important to Timperley, who claims that during that time, she has mentored around 600 people, mostly through working with programmes offering support to founders and entrepreneurs.
“It has been brilliant because I’ve learnt loads as well,” she says.
Timperley is asked regularly whether she would change anything about her career. “Absolutely not,” is her answer. “I kind of weirdly believe in fate, and I’m glad that I’ve said ‘yes’ to lots of things. Everything has purely been by accident.”
