Hambro Perks hires veteran Burns to lead new media arm

As Google’s first employee outside of America, Kate Burns knows a thing or two about growing large companies.

The online advertising veteran will be putting that nous to good use at early-stage incubator and investment firm Hambro Perks, having been hired to spearhead its new media division.

Burns, who has been running her own consultancy since leaving Buzzfeed as its European boss last year, will oversee Hambro Perks’ media investments which include video app Seenit and social media influencer firm Takumi.

She was managing director of Google’s UK business from 2001 until 2006 before becoming regional director of UK, Ireland and Benelux as the US web giant expanded. Later, she became the chief executive of AOL’s European business.

“I joined Google when it was a start-up – I was the first international employee. People tend to look at my CV as a long list of huge, dominate internet powers, but really I was there when there were just a few of us so hopefully I can give them quite a unique perspective on both companies large and small,” Burns said.

She added that building consumer-led digital companies is hard because of the dominance of Facebook and Google.

“It doesn’t mean they can’t be creative, they just need to know how to work with Facebook and Google otherwise you’ll die. Having worked many years at Google, I understand how that works,” Burns said.