Campus - a place to launch startups from Google

For many, working at Google is perceived as a real dream - every year more than two million people try to get a job in a company. Only in London thousands of employees work at Google, but some of them are ready to leave the company to launch their startup. But Google only supports this approach.

Some of the former employees of Google after leaving the company are starting to develop their startups - and for this purpose they use the space to launch startups at Campus, located in East London. Over the past few years, this space has been restored and redone in co-working style.
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Campus itself is a five-story building located next to the Old Street Roundabout, the local “technology city”. On the first floor of the cafe and a working area that can be used by anyone who simply registers on the site. On the second and third floors are paid TechHub members, and on the fourth is the Seedcamp accelerator. On the fifth floor of the building is a Google office for several small teams with a separate terrace.

“The number of former Google employees who work at Campus is amazing. I worked on the Google Maps engineering team and constantly stumble upon former engineers at a local cafe, it's quite funny, ”said Sara Drinkwater, Campus head at Google.

Campus residents include such specialists as former designer Pete Johnston, who launched Lystable business service, Rich Plit, marketing manager, who launched the Sup messenger app, and Maxim Demeges, head of social media advertising.

“Campus is a great place. You can always find someone to talk on any topic that will help you to solve a problem. Even events that take place at Campus are also useful, ”Rich Plit shared with Business Insider.

Most of the Campus startups say that they left Google because of the typical problems of a large company - excessive bureaucracy, the difficult process of launching new things. In 2015, Campus residents raised almost $ 70 million dollars, and startups created more than 1040 jobs.

The idea of ​​Campus caught on not only in the UK - Google opened similar sites for startups in Madrid, Seoul, Tel Aviv and Warsaw. In 2016, another Campus will open to Sao Paulo. The Campus project is developing as part of the Google for Entrepreneurs project - but the company does not disclose spending on this area. For Google, this is a great way to gather the founders of potentially successful projects for later takeovers at the initial stage.