Success doesn't start with a headline. It starts with a first win.
Very First Win takes you inside the exact moment top founders, investors, and operators realized they could actually make it. Each episode unpacks the deal, decision, or breakthrough that changed everything, and what that moment taught them.
Hosted by Rob Hilmer of Goanna Capital, with guests spanning founders, investors, and industry leaders shaping what comes next.
New episodes weekly.
Public Raised $220M With Almost No Revenue. Then Came the Reset | Leif Abraham
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.
27 Aug 2026
Baylor's CIO Won His First Award at 53 | Dave Morehead, Very First Win
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.
20 Aug 2026
He Almost Became a Lawyer Instead of a Founder
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
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