Eileen Burbidge was 33 and had recently split from her first husband when she moved from Silicon Valley to London in 2004, to become one of Skype's first employees. She was entering the prime of her career as a single woman in a new country and she didn't want to put any undue pressure on herself.

“I told myself it would be OK not to have children,” she says.

Fourteen years later, Burbidge is one of the most powerful women in the UK's burgeoning tech scene and an advisor to HM Treasury. She is a co-founder and partner at Passion Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that has invested in the likes of Monzo, Go Cardless and Lulu, a private social network for single women.

But unlike many of her high-flying female counterparts, she didn’t have to compromise on family life to achieve success. Burbidge now has a happy brood of five; the first of whom she gave birth to at 35; the fourth at 41. The fifth, aged three, is the daughter of her new partner, Tom Powell, and his ex-wife. “We co-parent with my ex-husband and my partner’s ex-wife,” she explains. “The whole thing, it takes a village.”

To balance career and family life, Burbidge and Powell look after the children every other week, with their respective ex-partners sharing the care-giving duties equally. They have a full-time nanny and Burbidge has supportive colleagues, who are happy for her to keep flexible hours that allow her to do the school run.