VDS Conversations: Building Growth-Driven Teams with BrainCompass

In his keynote at VDS 2025, Wouter van den Berg, Founder and Head of Talent Activation at BrainCompass, challenged the audience to rethink how the “perfect employee” is defined and how growth-driven teams are built, addressing a key question: are great employees born, or are they built?

He opened his talk with a clear message to the entrepreneurial community: there is no magic formula or universal “ideal employee profile” that guarantees a company’s success. What does exist is the constant need to activate the right talent at each stage of growth.

Throughout his career, van den Berg has analysed more than 85,000 professionals across companies worldwide. Drawing on this experience, he dismantled one of the most persistent leadership myths: hiring the same type of person based on the success of past experiences. As he explained, this approach is not only subjective and insufficiently inclusive, but also overlooks a fundamental reality: organisations evolve, and the people who drive them must evolve with them.

For van den Berg, neuroscience plays a key role in this process. “Our biases and automatic decision-making patterns keep us in our comfort zone, but they can also slow down team growth. Scaling a startup is not about finding a single isolated superstar, but about creating star employees at every level by aligning individual ambition with the company’s strategic vision,” he noted.

To achieve this, the founder of BrainCompass outlined three core pillars for building growth-driven teams: clearly defining what success looks like, aligning the company’s purpose with the growth ambition of its talent, and exercising leadership that acts as a launchpad for people. “Leadership that creates safety, trust, and space to evolve.”

As a final takeaway to inspire leaders to unlock and elevate talent, van den Berg left the VDS audience with this thought: “Life is not about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself.”