[ochoseis]

The question naturally becomes: how do you find a small, high performing team in the first place? I think maintaining a good network (previous colleagues, involvement in a broader community) will lead to opportunities, but then you have to distill the best ones.

[NickC25]

I would think that would be industry specific, but maybe a decent standardized way of doing so would be finding the people who made it to industry titans (elite tech firms or trading firms) and left for whatever reason who then went off and did their own thing but still managed to reach a specific level of success.

And example of this is (in finance) if some team at a bank or whatever all left as a group founded a small hedge fund or prop trading fund, yet were still able to make a great return.