She Didn’t Want to Play It Safe- She Built a Startup Around Risk

Lorenza Binkele was supposed to take the safe path.

She’d studied at prestigious schools in Germany and the UK, launched her career at Google, built products for The Economist, and earned her stripes as a world-class product manager. By every conventional measure, she’d made it.

But safety was never the goal.

“I wanted to be an entrepreneur ever since I left college,” she says. “I just couldn’t afford to do it right away.”

She grew up in Colombia, raised by a family of independent creatives. Her mom—a successful artist—would be away for months at a time to do exhibitions in New York and Florida. Her dad ran his own architecture firm. Entrepreneurship wasn’t a buzzword in her house. It was how you lived. How you worked. How you got paid.

But after finishing school in London, Lorenza felt the pressure to get stable. She needed a visa. She needed a salary. So she joined Google and stayed in tech for 12 years, helping ship high-impact products while quietly plotting her way out.

What made the leap possible wasn’t funding or a flashy exit. It was furniture.

“I built a dropshipping furniture business on the side while I was working full-time,” she says. “Eventually, it paid me enough to leave my job.”

It wasn’t glamorous. She wasn’t pitching investors or building a personal brand. She found a supplier, set up a site, and figured out how to sell chairs while working 9 to 5. “I felt like the queen of the world,” she laughs. “I had my full-time salary and this business that gave me real financial freedom.”

That business funded her next move—her real goal.

In 2024, Lorenza launched Secure AIs, a startup built to tackle one of the most complex problems in tech: securing and sanitizing data for AI development. But unlike the dropshipping days, this wasn’t an immediate win. It’s been slow. Strategic. Painful, at times.

“I chose one of the hardest problems to solve,” she says. “AI governance and security is still so new—even billion-dollar companies are just starting to think about it.”

At first, she pitched large enterprises on post-deployment compliance. But the sales cycle was too long. The urgency wasn’t there yet. So she made a hard pivot: offer tooling at the beginning of the AI development process, not after.

Now, instead of chasing security teams, she’s building tools for engineers—products that redact and sanitize sensitive data before it’s injected into models. It’s faster to sell. Easier to implement. And it gives her startup a real shot at getting in early with teams as AI adoption explodes.

“It’s still a big problem. But now we’re solving it in a way that fits how people actually build,” she says.

That kind of clarity didn’t come overnight. It came from testing, adjusting, and surrounding herself with people who understand the grind. She’s done trying to scale alone.

“Dropshipping can be solitary,” she says. “But a startup? You need a team. You need people around you who are just as obsessed.”

She’s building that team now—mentors, interns, partners. Anyone who shares the belief that security and speed don’t have to be at odds. She’s still bootstrapped. Still figuring it out. But the mission is bigger than her.

Because the next wave of AI won’t just be about what gets built. It’ll be about how safely it gets done—and who’s responsible when it doesn’t.

Lorenza isn’t waiting to be picked. She’s building anyway.