A quick reflection on INSEAD ETA Conference 2026 for anyone tracking the European side of the field

Last weekend at Fontainebleau, three independent conversations across 48 hours landed on the same observation. A French operator on Panel 2b in front of 600 people said it plainly: "Self-funded felt very lonely." An Indian searcher said versions of the same thing at dinner the night before. A Dutch searcher said it again in a rental car from Paris the morning of the conference. The European ETA community has the infrastructure now. The conferences fill up. The newsletters multiply. The capital flows. But the peer relationships behind it are still being built one conversation at a time, and the people building it are mostly building it alone. That observation became the spine of the report I wrote in the week after returning from Fontainebleau. For those who engaged with the pre-conference work on this platform back in April and early May, thank you. @redacted‌'s question on investor-perspective AI ended up reshaping a portion of one chapter. @redacted‌ , @redacted‌, and others who engaged in the earlier threads contributed to editorial choices in ways the report does not name individually but which were real. A few other observations from the weekend. The succession crisis is real but unevenly distributed across European regions. The European map is not one market. Investors are stretched, not abundant. Capital is over-spread across too many active fund managers chasing too few qualified searchers. The MBA is necessary but increasingly insufficient. Several conversations across the weekend touched on what investors are actually selecting for, and the credential is the entry ticket more than the answer. For US readers especially: most of what shapes European search funds does not travel cleanly through American case studies. Stanford and Booth frameworks fit only partially. The European succession dynamics, the investor cultures, the deal structures — they have their own logic, and the field is in the middle of working out its language. The longer reflection on all of this is published as a LinkedIn article: → linkedin.com/pulse/european-eta-community-real-shallow-alexander-kelm-ywe5e The full report respects the INSEAD embargo on negotiated session data and is built primarily from named European searchers and investors on the record (@redacted‌ in Belgium, @redacted‌ in France, @redacted‌ in the United Kingdom, @redacted‌ in Spain), plus direct observation of the sessions and conversations beyond. If anyone wants the report directly, drop me a DM. Three more reports coming this year. IESE in October. RSM in November. Year-End Synthesis covering the full state of European ETA in December. For those at IESE this autumn — looking forward to meeting in Barcelona. Alexander