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.
Hilmer says that Goanna will scan its portfolio companies for open positions, then use its own proprietary scraping tools to find prospective candidates and even conduct interviews before introducing them to the startup. He says the project has proven to be a hit with its portfolio companies, and it has even offered the service to startups the firm hoped to become an investor in, including the enterprise browser company Island, which was last valued at $4.8 billion in a Coatue-led round. Goanna was able to invest through secondary exposure. Goanna has helped portfolio companies, including Discord, Airtable, Talkdesk, and Wiz, hire employees, according to Hilmer, placing more than 15 employees to date.
The VC firm is now doubling down on the initiative by launching a public-facing job board, called Go-Hire, later this month, which Hilmer expects will list around 80 to 100 positions at any given time. “It’s an at-scale, more effective recruiter who actually cares a lot more about the long-term outcome, and who also doesn’t charge,” Hilmer said.
Whether a venture firm can successfully stand up a centralized recruiting marketplace remains to be seen, though Goanna plans to invest in the platform, including having partners involved in the interview process and assigning two full-time employees to business development. But Hilmer says it’s Goanna’s way of differentiating itself. “To have enduring franchise value and enduring success as an investment firm, you need to originate proprietary investment opportunities,” he told me. “And the way you originate proprietary investment opportunities is by having some repeatable, scalable set of processes that other people don’t have.”
Founders, would you try it out?
Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
