Thread by @JackWOwen

Am flying back to the UK for Christmas tomorrow. It's almost been a year since I moved to Berlin to set up the @join_ef office here.

I thought I'd do a thread of one of the most interesting things I have learnt from the last year of talent investing

1/ Talent in Germany is fragmented

Unlike France or the UK (where we also have offices) the capital city does not have a monopoly on talent.

This is particularly the case for deep tech talent which exists scattered across the German academic network

2/ This is largely due to historic reasons

The founding of the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg, Leipzig and Munich all predate the creation of the nation state of Germany by a couple of centuries

3/ Additionally, Germany's tumultuous 20th century stopped the capital becoming a conventional talent magnet

Ambitious UK talent will always be drawn to London

In Germany the most ambitious people head to Berlin for politics, but Munich for industry and Frankfurt for finance

4/ Fragmentation obviously creates difficulties for sourcing the best talent

But mainly decentralised talent networks just result in a huge need for aggregation

IMO 90% of the value in talent investing comes from the curation element

This opportunity creates a virtuous cycle

5/ The more spread a talent network, the more people within it desire curation

The more people want curation, the higher the chance you capture an outlier

The more outliers you have, the more attractive you are to other outliers

The scope of your talent search can then expand

6/ Why is this important?

Because I think the 21st century will see further fragmentation of talent

Remote work is already common

Normalisation of job hopping increases talent mobility

Models like @LambdaSchool are unlocking talent potential without old geographic constraints

7/ Smart people will become more spread and the barriers to potential will be reduced. This means outliers will emerge far from traditional talent hubs

And as the network of the smartest people becomes more distributed, the need to connect the best becomes even more important

8/ So much of venture capital to date has been built off serendipitous talent aggregation and curation by traditional institutions and cities.

The next century represents a huge opportunity to be far more conscious about how this curation is done.