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Real Talk, Real Growth: Highlights from Our Key Search Cafés
LeadershipCultureDevelopment

Real Talk, Real Growth: Highlights from Our Key Search Cafés

In the first half of 2025, we hosted five Key Search Café gatherings across innovation hubs in Europe and the U.S. These invitation-only events brought together startup founders, investors, HR leaders, and operators for honest conversations around leadership, hiring, and company-building. Each event was unique in theme and tone, but all shared one goal: […]

By Eugenia Alvarez
In the first half of 2025, we hosted five Key Search Café gatherings across innovation hubs in Europe and the U.S. These invitation-only events brought together startup founders, investors, HR leaders, and operators for honest conversations around leadership, hiring, and company-building.
Each event was unique in theme and tone, but all shared one goal: to build a leaders community through in-person conversations of topics that matter.
Here’s a look back at the stories, insights, and standout moments from Brooklyn, Munich, Barcelona, Berlin, and Palo Alto.

🇺🇸Brooklyn, New York - Hiring at Scale

Co-host: Lisa Eisenstat
Theme: Scaling hiring in high-growth environments
We kicked off the year in Brooklyn with a close circle of tech founders and investors. The focus? One of the most pressing startup challenges: hiring top talent at different growth stages.
Lisa Eisenstat, a seasoned global talent leader, brought sharp insights from her time scaling Supernal from 50 to 650+ employees and redesigning global recruitment at CommScope across 52 countries.
Key Takeaways:
  • Hiring at scale demands clarity in structure, not just speed.
  • Growth-stage teams need leaders who’ve lived through ambiguity and still delivered.
  • Systems save you money - Lisa saved $1M+ in her first year at CommScope by redesigning recruitment ops.
🗣️ “Don’t underestimate the value of structured hiring processes at early stages - it compounds fast.”

🇩🇪 Munich - Growth Mindset in Leadership

Co-hosts: Jamie Turner (SVP People & Talent, IDnow), Franziska Palumbo-Seidel, Leonie Fehr
Theme: Growth mindset as a cultural lever
In Munich, we dove into the psychological foundation of resilient leadership: the growth mindset. Together with Jamie Turner and our Key Search hosts, the group unpacked how mindset shapes culture, hiring, and performance.
Key Takeaways:
  • Growth mindset is not just personal - it should infuse culture and systems, from onboarding to performance reviews.
  • Leaders set the tone. If they avoid failure, so will their teams.
  • Embedding this mindset requires intentional storytelling and consistent reinforcement.
💬 “When leaders own their growth edges, they give teams permission to do the same.”

🇪🇸 Barcelona - Creative Vision Meets Financial Rigor

Co-hosts: Ardavan & Konrad (Key Search Partners), David Sierra González  a seasoned startup growth leader (ex-Uber, Klook, Grover)
Theme: Founder - Investor alignment in scaling startups
Barcelona brought an intimate group of Seed to Series A founders together with operators and investors to explore one of the trickiest balancing acts: how creative founders can align with finance-driven minds as they scale.
Key Takeaways:
  • Don’t just “translate” your vision - build financial narratives around it.
  • Tension between founders and CFOs is normal. But trust comes from shared language and aligned incentives.
  • The best founders adapt how they communicate without watering down their creativity.
⚖️ “Vision without numbers is a dream. Numbers without vision? Just noise.”

🇩🇪 Berlin - Restructuring with Respect

Co-hosts: Franziska, Weronika, Matthias Mittelsten Scheid
Theme: Leading layoffs with empathy and clarity
In Berlin, we tackled a difficult but vital topic: how to restructure without breaking your culture. With economic shifts hitting many tech companies, HR and executive leaders gathered to discuss how to preserve trust while making tough calls.
Key Takeaways:
  • Restructuring is a leadership act, not just an HR process.
  • Transparency, early communication, and dignity are non-negotiable.
  • Culture is most visible in hard moments. How you part ways says everything.
🧭 “You can’t ‘culture’ your way out of layoffs - but you can lead with humanity.”

🇺🇸Palo Alto - Driving AI Adoption in Teams

Co-hosts: Maren Marcelis (Key Search), Josh Blackburn (ex-Slack), Akshaya Murthy (Zendesk)
Theme: Future-proofing leadership and teams with AI
In the heart of Silicon Valley, our final H1 event brought together VCs, founders, and people leaders to discuss one of the biggest shifts of our time: how AI is reshaping organizations.
Key Takeaways:
  • AI adoption isn’t just tech - it’s cultural. Leaders need to model experimentation and curiosity.
  • Equip teams with the right mindset, not just tools.
  • Human-centric strategy wins: “How can AI help your people do their best work?” should be the guiding question.
🤖 “AI won’t replace people. But leaders who fail to adapt might be.”

Across Cities, Common Threads

No matter the city or topic, a few truths kept showing up:
  • Leadership is evolving - vulnerability, clarity, and adaptability are essential.
  • Hiring is a strategic act, not just filling seats.
  • Culture shows in the hard moments - in layoffs, in growth, and in experimentation.
  • Communities like ours matter - when leaders connect in honest ways, we all move forward faster.

No matter the city, company stage, or discussion topic, a few deep truths kept surfacing across every Key Search Café this H1. These are more than insights - they reflect the evolving fabric of leadership in today’s fast-changing world.
First, leadership itself is clearly evolving. The most effective leaders we encountered aren’t the ones with all the answers, but the ones willing to show up with vulnerability, communicate with clarity, and adapt with intention. Time and again, we heard stories that proved how being human, honest, and transparent earns more trust than being perfect ever could.
Second, hiring is no longer viewed as a transactional process. Founders and people leaders increasingly understand that hiring is one of the most strategic levers in building a company. Each decision carries long-term weight, influencing not just output, but culture, morale, and growth trajectory. The best hiring stories we heard were not about filling roles quickly, but about aligning values, mindset, and mission for the long run.
Another recurring theme was how company culture reveals itself most clearly during difficult moments. Whether facing layoffs, fast scaling, or internal change, the real test of values happens when things get uncomfortable. Culture isn’t defined by team offsites or value posters - it’s defined by how leaders act when hard decisions must be made. The companies that led with empathy, honesty, and consistency through these moments were the ones whose cultures didn’t just survive, but strengthened.
And finally, perhaps the most uplifting insight of all: communities like ours matter deeply. Every event reminded us that leaders need safe, intentional spaces to be honest - to challenge each other, share lessons, and find clarity. When founders, operators, and investors connect with openness and humility, the exchange doesn’t just benefit individuals. It lifts the entire ecosystem.

What’s Next?

We’re already planning Key Search Café gatherings for H2 - and we’d love to hear from you.
Want to co-host in your city or explore a new theme with us? Let’s make it happen.
➡️ Follow us on LinkedIn or subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the loop.
Let’s keep building world-class leadership for world-changing companies.
Interested in joining the Key Search Café in a different city?  Let us know when and where you would like to attend, and we will inform you when there is an event near you. 🌍
☕️Good conversation and good coffee is on us 🙂
Want to get involved or sponsor a future edition?
Reach out to eugenia@keysearch.com
To dive deeper into the executive hiring landscape and leadership trends shaping today’s business world, explore more insights from the Key Search blog. Whether you’re decoding the executive search process, building a senior team that drives investor confidence, or championing women in leadership, our expert content offers practical guidance and strategic clarity.
Don’t miss these standout reads:

Stay ahead of the curve - explore, learn, and lead with confidence.

Key Search

Key Search specializes in expansion hires across Europe, the US, and transatlantic searches. To find out more about our US and North American hiring capability, visit us below.

Visit us.keysearch.com

This article and its photos were created with the use of A.I. and reviewed by a human Key Search Partner.

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