Leif Abraham is the co-founder and co-CEO of Public, the investing platform he launched at the end of 2019. In this episode of Very First Win, Leif tells Robert Hilmer about the stretch from 2022 to 2024 that reshaped the company. Public had raised $220M in early 2021 with very little revenue. The easy money pulled the company toward vanity metrics and the wrong hires. Leif explains how they cut the team, went all in on serious long term investors, and why product velocity went up about 5x while headcount barely moved. He also gets into the tenure data behind Public's tight core team, why he keeps process to a minimum, and how Cody, Public's in-house AI engineer, turns Jira tickets into finished fixes.

Very First Win is hosted by Robert Hilmer, founder of Goanna Capital.

Leif Abraham on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leifabraham/

Robert Hilmer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GoannaCapital

The companies mentioned do not represent all portfolio companies purchased, sold, or recommended. Readers should not assume an investment in them was or will be profitable.

Dave Morehead is the Chief Investment Officer at Baylor University's Office of Investments. In 2025 he was named Endowment/Foundation Chief Investment Officer of the Year by Institutional Investor, voted on by his peers, and he says that award at 53 was basically his very first win.

He joins Rob Hilmer to talk about why capital moves faster than it used to, how his team decides which markets to play in years before there's an opportunity there, and what happens when everybody runs at the same trade at the same time. He also tells the story of managers who lowered their own fees without being asked, which almost never happens in any other business.

The last stretch is about people. Waco is 100 miles from Austin and 100 miles from Dallas, so recruiting mid career talent is hard. Dave's answer was to hire Baylor undergrads and hand them more responsibility than they'd get anywhere else.

Connect with Dave Morehead:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmorehead/

Connect with Robert Hilmer:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/

Listen to Very First Win:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0cTzEJW3juIZEBnyswNl9c?si=674c885122c64a70

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GoannaCapital

Goanna Capital is an investment firm focused on late-stage leading private technology companies, managing around $3Bn - to give you a sense of our portfolio, we are shareholders in SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenEvidence, Databricks, Canva, Harvey, Anduril and Stripe.

Alex McLeod is the co-founder and CTO of Serval, the AI-native IT service management platform. Serval builds AI agents that handle the requests piling up in IT queues, things like software access, password resets, MFA resets, group and distribution list changes. Once it lands in a company it usually spreads past IT into HR, finance, legal and beyond.Alex went to University of Melbourne planning to do a Bachelor of Arts and then a law degree. A friend told him to take an elective called informatics. He took it, fell for programming, and switched into computer science full time.He also gets into a student entrepreneurship program that made him realize he wanted to build companies, not just write software, and how he ended up in San Francisco.Hosted by Robert Hilmer, founder of Goanna Capital.Alex McLeod: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmcleodio/Robert Hilmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/Listen to Very First Win:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GoannaCapital

Dean Karnazes was 30 years old with the corporate job, the stock options, the company car, all of it. And he was miserable. So on the night of his 30th birthday he walked out of a San Francisco bar at midnight and ran 30 miles to Half Moon Bay in his underwear. He quit his job somewhere along the way.Three decades later he's run on all seven continents three times, run a marathon in all 50 states in 50 straight days, run across Australia and the ancient Silk Road, and won the Badwater Ultramarathon across Death Valley.Rob talks to Dean about what actually made him do it, plus two pieces of advice depending on where you're starting from: one for anyone trying to get moving, and one for the founder who already has their life dialed in. Dean joined us from Athens.Robert Hilmer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/https://goannacapital.com/Listen to Very First Win:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0cTzEJW3juIZEBnyswNl9c?si=674c885122c64a70Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GoannaCapital

Yoni Assia is the co-founder and CEO of eToro, the social investing platform with more than 40 million registered users that listed on the Nasdaq in May 2025.

He sat down with Rob Hilmer for Very First Win to walk through the moments the company was actually built on.

His first trade at 13, sitting in his parents' basement, watching the price move on a Yahoo Finance blotter and realizing everything was connected. The 2008 financial crisis, when the banks unplugged the system and he started writing about what a 24/7 financial infrastructure should look like instead. Finding Bitcoin, working on the colored coins protocol with Vitalik Buterin, and listing Bitcoin on eToro in 2013 when almost nobody was paying attention. Then 2017, when the market finally showed up and eToro went from 200 new funded accounts a day to 20,000.

He also gets into the last 30 days at eToro, where AI has gone from writing about 30% of their code to 70-80% on some teams, what OpenClaw unlocked internally, and why he thinks every retail investor is about to have a team of agents trading on their behalf.

CONNECT

Robert Hilmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/

LISTEN

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0cTzEJW3juIZEBnyswNl9c?si=674c885122c64a70

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GoannaCapital

Very First Win is hosted by Robert Hilmer, founder of Goanna Capital, a global private equity firm investing in category-leading private technology companies.

Karl Stefanovic spent 26 years at Nine, 21 of them on free to air, and won a Gold Logie along the way. On this episode he sits down with Rob Hilmer to talk about the very first win that got him there.
Robert Hilmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/

Listen to Very First Win:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0cTzEJW3juIZEBnyswNl9c?si=674c885122c64a70
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GoannaCapital

Very First Win is produced by Goanna Capital, a private equity firm backing frontier technology companies.

https://goannacapital.com/

Tarek Alaruri is the founder of Stuut, an AI platform that helps businesses collect the money they're owed. Companies like Honeywell, PerkinElmer, and CharterUp use Stuut to automate accounts receivable end to end, collecting 40% more revenue in their first few months on the platform.

But before Stuut, Tarek was a broke kid out of college who took a commission-only trucking job because a recruiter told him people there made $500K. He was the first one in the office and the last one out, sometimes sleeping there overnight, making up to 500 cold calls a day. One month in, he landed his first customer: a salt company selling to Midwest retailers.

In this episode, Tarek and Rob get into why everything worth doing is hard, the fun of failure, reframing rejection as a next step, and why Stuut redesigned its entire platform after two years rather than risk falling behind.

Follow Rob: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GoannaCapital

Very First Win is hosted by Robert Hilmer, founder of Goanna Capital, a private equity firm investing in generationally important frontier technology companies including SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and Neuralink.

Chris Farmer got banned from casinos for counting cards. That same obsession with statistics and risk turned into SignalFire, the data-driven venture firm he founded in 2013.

In this episode of Very First Win, Chris tells Robert Hilmer how a lucky blackjack run in college sent him down the rabbit hole of modeling the game with a UC Berkeley professor, playing semi pro for years, and learning when to lean in on a bad beat versus when to walk away. Those lessons became his framework for startup investing: is the deck backloaded, or are you just chasing losses?

They also get into:

How to know when to double down on a struggling company vs cut your losses

The team, product, technology, timing framework for hard decisionsWhy agility is at a premium when no one can see more than a few months ahead

How AI is reshaping startup teams, entry level hiring, and what a defensible moat even looks like now

Chris previously worked at Bessemer Venture Partners and General Catalyst before launching SignalFire.

Follow Robert Hilmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@GoannaCapital

Chaz Englander has built and sold two companies before most people figure out what they want to do. First was Fat Llama, a peer-to-peer rental marketplace that got into YC and sold for $45M. Then a last mile grocery delivery business he started three months before COVID that sold to GoPuff. Now he's building Model ML, a workflow automation platform for finance that raised $100M in its first year.

In this episode, Chaz talks about doing 30 pitches a day in Canary Wharf for a £5K check, getting the YC acceptance call mid-Uber ride while sitting next to the driver, physically tracking down a stolen drone to save his first company, and what he means when he says perseverance has to be earned, not blind.

What we cover:

Why he started pitching strangers in Canary Wharf with no money and no tractionThe Uber ride where Aaron Harris called to say YC was inChasing a drone across London at 22 years old thinking the company was done"Getting into character" as a founder and what that actually means

Why he and his brother started a third company after two successful exits

Follow Chaz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chazenglander/

Follow Robert Hilmer: https://linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0cTzEJW3juIZEBnyswNl9c

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@GoannaCapital

Andrew Parker is the founder and CEO of Papa, the companion care platform pairing older adults with vetted "pals" who help with rides, tech, paperwork, and the thing nobody puts on a care plan: loneliness.

In this episode, Andrew tells Rob about the moment that changed everything. He almost deleted the YC interview email at 5am, fished it out of his trash, and walked into a room where he was convinced everyone was smarter than him. Papa went on to become one of the hottest companies in its YC batch.

We get into the bet that built the company (cutting bathing and toileting to scale companion care nationally), getting Medicare to cover a service that didn't exist five years ago, and why Andrew thinks you have to be a little irrational to build anything real.

What we cover:

The deleted YC email and the drive home convinced he'd lost

Why he leaned into the two things he's great at and ignored the other 98%

Building the "Uber of caregiving" by rethinking the rules

Getting Medicare Advantage to cover companion care

Being comfortable in the abyss and "absorbing" when things go against you

Very First Win is hosted by Rob Hilmer, founder of Goanna Capital, and explores the early, defining moments behind the people building the future.

Listen everywhere:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0cTzEJW3juIZEBnyswNl9c

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-first-win/id1896315027

YouTube: @GoannaCapital

Rob Hilmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberthilmer/

Andrew Parker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-parker-30904417/