Times are tough for venture capital firms. Shed a tear for the partner who once had pensions and endowments tripping over themselves to throw money at their next fund—now they’re competing against 30 identical firms backing seed-stage, AI-enabled, B2B SaaS startups, while limited partners fret over distributions and a rapidly closing IPO window.
So, how does a fund manager stand out? Every firm touts some edge to both prospective backers and portfolio companies that makes it seem like their only purpose isn’t being an allocator of someone else’s money. For some, it’s their go-to market team; for others, it’s their network of potential customers. But, as Robert Hilmer of Goanna Capital told me, everyone seems to agree on one thing about the current state of venture capital: “Capital is the ultimate commodity.”
Hilmer, who previously worked on the private markets team at the investing giant Coatue Management, has taken a unique approach to the Florida-based Goanna Capital, which he started in 2020. Goanna has around $800 million of assets under management with a focus on secondaries and has managed to get into some of the hottest tech companies on the market, including Rippling, Anthropic, and Ramp.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about how Goanna is going to add unique value to the most generationally important private technology companies,” Hilmer told me. “That’s not an easy task.”
One way has been to help companies, including Figma and CoreWeave, put together employee tender rounds. But Hilmer says he realized that the main barrier for many of the top tech companies isn’t capital, which they have plenty of access to, or even customers. It’s talent. “They always have open roles,” he told me. “Why are there not investment firms focused on these roles?”
This is not uncharted territory for venture firms. Many top operations with storied histories and deep networks, such as Andreessen Horowitz, often help their portfolio companies find executive-level candidates—their next CFO or even CEO. Hilmer admits this is an area where Goanna can’t really compete. But where it can, he argues, is with more run-of-the-mill hires, like software engineers or sales representatives.
It’s a function normally reserved for job platforms like LinkedIn or recruiting firms, which can be impersonal and costly. But Goanna has been experimenting with standing up its own operation by taking on recruiting duties for its own startups. The pitch is that Goanna not only has a vested interest in their success but also a deep knowledge of what they need, and that it will handle the recruiting process for free.
