Introducing “STAR”, our data driven assessment of team quality In spite of a recent slowdown in the volume of new company creation, entrepreneurship has exploded across Europe over the past decade. Europe’s never had a deeper and stronger bench of founder talent. But it takes more than just exceptional founders to build a successful breakout company. It takes a whole team of exceptional leaders, and the ability to attract and retain top talent is a crucial factor in determining the success of any founding team. And thanks to the growing depth of Europe’s talent pool, there’s never been a stronger base of talent to help build the current and next generation of European tech companies. This year, we set out to quantify this with data by developing a proprietary rating called STAR (Startup Talent Attraction Rating) to objectively assess the quality of teams by evaluating the excellence of their senior hires. We’ve done this with a particular focus on the strength and relevance of their professional networks, as research indicates network quality can drive commercial success. Hence, the team rating uses co-employment networks to map employees’ movement between companies. As you’d expect, if you look at the total universe of all tech startups created in any given year, very few ever succeed in building a truly exceptional team, especially in the initial years post-founding. In fact, only around 2-3% of the total count of tech startups are rated as exceptional by this measure, even 昀椀ve years post-founding. STAR ratings (0-10) distribution (%) for European tech companies founded after 2010' Exceptional (5+) 100 Very good (3-4) Standard (0-2) 80 s g n i t a 60 r R A T S f o ) % ( 40 e r a h S 20 0 1Y post founding 3Y post founding 5Y post founding Notes: The STAR rating uses co-employment networks to map employees‘ movement between companies. Data is Sources: Powered by as of 20 September 2023. | 184