EU-Startups covered us yesterday. I was grateful for it. I was also more unsettled than I expected.

Until now, inBeta has mostly existed as work. Conversations. Notes. Early client calls. A small team of people I trust. Seeing it written down by somebody else made it feel public in a way it had not before.

I did not leave executive search because I had a plan. I left because I had stopped believing the model I knew so well was honest about how leadership decisions were actually being made.

I remember reading The Economist briefing on headhunting last year and feeling recognition more than curiosity. A closed market. Familiar networks. A narrow, often unspoken idea of what leadership is supposed to look like. I had spent years inside that system. I knew how easily confidence and pattern recognition could pass for judgment.

What troubled me most was that the ingredients to do better were already there. Better data. Better behavioural signals. Better ways to understand whether someone could thrive in a role, not simply interview well for it. And still, too many decisions were being made on who felt safe, polished and familiar.

That was the thread I pulled. At the time, it felt less like starting a company and more like refusing to keep pretending I trusted a set of assumptions I no longer believed. I did not know then what this would become. I still do not know its full shape. We are early. Some of what we are building is encouraging. Some of it is rough. Most days still feel like a mix of conviction and nerves.

But the question that pushed me out of search has not gone away. If the evidence for a better leadership decision already exists, why are we still so willing to ignore it?

Read the EU-Startups article →