Alicia Navarro
Alicia has an IT degree from Sydney, Australia, and has worked in internet and mobile application product management for 10 years.
However, in 2006, as a result of a failed Google job interview, Alicia decided to implement an idea for a web application she had come up with years before, and start her own web start-up.
She used her savings, and worked full-time while developing the proposition, and hired Romanian developers to make her vision a reality. It was hard unforgiving work, but her passion and dedication to her vision kept her working day and night.
Thus, Skimbit (www.skimbit.com) was born... a social decision-making tool that skims the best bits of sites users like to help them make group or tricky decisions.
She calls Skimbit 'just social enough', as she feels passionately about web applications which are primarily useful, and social only when the user deems it necessary.
Then in 2007, an opportunity arose to move operations from Sydney to London, which she did within a month. As a result of this change, she launched a white-label version of her web application and sold it to a major client.
Now Alicia is a regular in the London entrepreneurial scene, was voted one of UK's 20 most promising start-ups, and is a passionate endorser of both women-led and UK-based tech start-ups.