Marta Krupinska is ushering in a new era of diversity at Google Startups UK

“It’s all about generating and educating the next generation of founders"
Marta Krupinska photographed at Google Campus
Adrian Lourie

Marta Krupinska is used to cutting deals around a table. In 2014, the Polish-born serial entrepreneur and co-founder of international money transfer start-up Azimo was approached by Google. The tech megalith wanted to help Azimo grow. And grow it did: the business went on to raise $70 million in funding and became one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the world, while Krupinska was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in the finance division.

Now Krupinska, 31, is on a mission to help other early-stage start-ups write their own success stories. She has just been appointed head of Google for Startups UK, based at their shiny Campus in Shoreditch, which reopens officially today. “It’s all about generating and educating the next generation of founders,” she says, as we begin a tour of the six-floor tech hub off Silicon Roundabout.

Krupinska wants it to be an incubator for the capital’s brightest minds, and the new Campus is full of metaphors for that collaborative message. Take the single barista coffee station installed in the basement. “Our early-stage start-ups are in the basement, so we want everyone from the building to go to the basement and meet these people while they’re getting coffee,” she explains. “It’s teaching people that habit of paying it forward: everyone in the building is the founder of a cool business, so go and give advice to that person on level -1 working on that first big break.”

Meanwhile, floors one to five — an on-brand mash-up of bright co-working spaces, colourful bean bag areas and “collaboration corners” — are dedicated to residency programmes: six-month mentorship schemes for social impact tech start-ups. Alumni include online counselling app Spill, drug discovery start-up GTN and social funding platform Alice, that uses blockchain technology to track charitable spending.

Krupinska feels strongly about using tech to change the world. “Why build a gambling business when you can build one that brings social outcomes as well as financial ones?” she says. She swears by meditation app Headspace for keeping her calm at work and uses food sharing app Karma for her lunch.

The next residency starts in March and Krupinska wants to champion under-represented founders, starting with women and migrants. “It’s about creating a tech community that represents the community in which we live. Obviously 50 per cent of the world is women and there’s a vast proportion of people of colour in the city, so it’s about how we can represent them best.”

“Of course” she’s experienced the tech industry’s bias herself — “when you go to fund-raise and you’re the only woman in the room, when nobody knows where the bathroom is, when you don’t feel heard or seen” — but she hopes nods like her Forbes placing, as well as this role at Google for Startups, will help her to change the tech world for the better.

Marta Krupinska photographed at Google Campus
Adrian Lourie

Largely, it’s an issue of representation. “If you open a newspaper and the person on the front page is a black woman who built a business changing her community, this will change the way you think,” she says. She wants to change the stories that are told: later this year, she wants to open her focus to championing LGBTQI and disabled founders, and she’s introducing a series of non-residential programmes for founders outside London to create “local success stories”. She’ll begin with those from other British cities such as Bristol, as well as those from Africa and central and Eastern Europe.

The more diverse the industry, the easier it is for that to become a new status quo. “If you’re a guy who plays polo and you go into a room and the investor is a guy who plays polo, there’s a better chance you’ll create a meaningful connection. Fund-raising is like a marriage: you’re not only agreeing a financial transaction, you’re agreeing to have a relationship because this person owns part of your business. The better the chance of creating a relationship both parties want to engage with, the better the potential outcome.”

In a world where only five per cent of venture capitalists are women and fewer are people of colour, this means the opportunity for people of those backgrounds is “much less”.

Many Google projects affect a billion people or more, so “suddenly we can reach that billion people more easily”, she explains. “If you pair Google’s connections, products and best practices, that creates a perfect opportunity to be able to create value for start-ups.”

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