There’s a lot more competition for talent both from established tech giants and new companies starting up across Europe. European startups need to treat finding, growing and keeping talent just like they would customer acquisition or product development: have it as a key metric on the management dashboard and see it not just headcount but pipeline, attrition, development programmes and succession planning. It’s up to leaders to ensure their teams are diverse and there are enough highly capable managers to keep them engaged. Digital talent, particularly the top people, has an ever growing number of options in Europe and choose where and who they want to work for. If founders do not prioritise this from the outset, talent will go elsewhere.

There’s never been a better time to be a European angel investor. We’re now witnessing a whole new generation of companies being born from alumni of previous European scale-ups and other tech giants based in the region. With the advantage of having been through the pain, failures and successes of building a company before, Europe has never had such an exciting crop of early-stage startups