From BWS to big time on Wall Street for quiet Aussie achiever Rob Hilmer of Goanna Capital

A 34-year-old Brisbane-bred investor has packed plenty into his career since leaving home fresh out of university to hit the big time in New York and Silicon Valley.

Rob Hilmer, above in Manhattan this week, talked his way into trading-floor jobs at Wall Street firms and now runs his own boutique investment fund. Picture: Andrew Kelly

Meet the little-known young Australian who in a decade has gone from turning up out of the blue on Wall Street with a $150,000 debt and no job prospects to now managing hundreds of millions for billionaires around the world.

Rob Hilmer, 34, has packed plenty into his burgeoning career in the US, having managed to talk his way into trading floor jobs at prestigious New York financial firms fresh out of the University of Queensland, then helping build a fast-growing tech investment start-up from a living room floor in San Francisco.

And that is only the half of it.

After a stint working at a prominent US billionaire’s hedge fund, helping invest $US30bn around the world, Hilmer now runs his own boutique investment firm that is about to top the $500m funds under management mark about 10 months after he founded it.

Goanna Capital – named as a reminder of Hilmer’s home country he left in 2011 – invests in technology start-ups at the pre-initial public offering stage. It is currently raising $US250m ($340m) for its second fund after quickly raising $US150m last year for the first fund, which has an internal rate of return of 55 per cent since inception.

Hilmer now flits between an apartment overlooking New York and a house he owns in the snowy hills of Utah. All of which is a far cry from when he worked at a BWS bottle shop while studying commerce and law at UQ, dreaming of Manhattan.

“If you told me when I was at BWS in 11 or 12 years this is going to be your life, you’re going to be living in Park City (Utah) in this house and with billionaire clients – and you’d worked for a highly scaled start-up in San Francisco – I would have thought you’d lost your mind,” Hilmer recounts with a laugh.

It was a family holiday to New York when aged 10 that first fired Hilmer’s imagination. “It doesn’t matter if you’re 10 or 50,” he says. “When you walk around Manhattan there’s nowhere else like it. If you thrive on energy and entrepreneurship that’s where you want to go.”

Hilmer would go on to UQ and have a stint on the equities desk in Sydney under the highly respected George Kanaan, now at Barrenjoey. While there was a chance to move south from Brisbane, Hilmer kept his sights set further afield. He set about his task with a mixture of self-confidence and naive audacity – and a big credit card debt.

“As odd as it sounds, getting a job on a trading floor in New York was what I wanted to achieve. I set that as my goal and then I had to figure out how to make that happen. So every night until 3am I would stay up, cold calling and emailing investment banks in New York. After doing that for three months I had built a calendar or personal roadshow for an about three-week trip to NY that I self-funded.”

Hilmer rented a flat in Harlem and went from building to building on Wall Street meeting with executives, human resources officials and anyone else he had somehow convinced to catch up. “I said ‘I’m going to be in New York, why not meet me for 20 minutes’. Little did they know that I was flying across the world to do it.

“I had 10 meetings per day for three weeks. I went from meeting to meeting telling the story ‘I’m from Australia, I go to this place called UQ. I want a job in your investment banking graduate program. So please give me a job.’”

Though he had no guarantees, Hilmer flew back to Queensland and spent a few more months organising another trip that culminated in his own “super day” of endless meetings.

But he still was yet to crack a job. So he called a managing director at the Royal Bank of Scotland who he had briefly met and finally achieved a breakthrough.

Australian investor Rob Hilmer in New York City. Picture: Andrew Kelly

“The way I got through to him was I called the front desk and said I need to do a trade; it‘s really big [so] put me through right now. I’m not answering any questions, hurry up. They put me through to the head of the credit trading desk. He was 45 and making $3m per year. He said ‘send me an email, I’ve gotta go kid’.”

Hilmer eventually clinched a face-to-face chat – he remembers his interviewer chewing and spitting tobacco in his office – and was introduced to another managing director who “loved hustlers off the street” and offered him a job.

He joined the RBS graduate program in 2011 and stayed for 2½ years before moving to Goldman Sachs in late 2013, where Hilmer worked in the investment management division until early 2016.

By then, the tech scene in Silicon Valley on the west coast was booming and Hilmer figured if he was to get really wealthy he couldn’t work at an investment bank forever. He saw a job ad in an obscure tech website, sent an email and flew to San Francisco.

After a weekend hanging out and sleeping on a beanbag in the living room of the founders, Hilmer became the second employee of what was then Equidate.

Now called Forge, the company established a trading platform for employees of tech unicorns to sell their shares in pre-IPO firms, and was backed by the likes of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Singapore’s Temasek fund and Munich Re.

“Basically you could trade BHP shares on, say, CommSec, but why is there not something for Uber or Airbnb to trade when they were private?” says Hilmer. “They are huge companies – why not buy and sell stock in these like you can for BHP. So we built a trading platform. It was the Silicon Valley dream and we were on a rocket ship. It was exhilarating.”

Hilmer left Forge when it raised $US85m in Series B funding in February 2019, selling his large shareholding in a firm now worth $US500-$US1bn.

He then worked for billionaire Philippe Laffont at Coatue Management, a hedge fund managing $US30bn, focusing on tech sector.

“I worked at this tech hedge fund and it was awesome (but) I realised I was an entrepreneur at heart,” Hilmer explains. “It was an amazing place but it made me want to go again. Yes, you can do a lot of cool stuff but being there for two years made me want to start something myself.”

With Covid raging around the US last year, Hilmer hatched his plan for Goanna Capital, so naming it became he missed his home country – though he ­laughed when a Swiss investor asked if he’d named it after the late Kerry Packer. Hilmer says he had never heard of what was the Costigan royal commission in the 1980s.

Hilmer says he raised $US150m last October for Goanna Capital’s first fund in about six weeks, tapping into the network he has developed in his career – and, oddly, a New Zealand pension fund.

His fund has stakes in more than 30 pre-IPO tech companies, including restaurant payments firm Toast, which recently filed for an IPO with a potential $US20bn valuation, and Discord, a competitor to messaging service Slack that is valued at $US7bn after a fundraising round last December. Goanna Capital also has a stake in Calm, a meditation app with a $US2bn valuation.

“I’m looking at companies already valued at $US500m or $US1bn but are private and … the management team might be raising $US100m-$US200m and going public in three years,” says Hilmer.

He is raising $US250m for Goanna Capital’s second fund, which will target 20 to 40 companies for of up to two years and have scope to invest $US300m.

Hilmer says about 10 per cent of the fund will be set aside for underserved or disadvantaged groups, such as endowment funds of historically Black colleges, LGBTQI and indigenous groups. He will not charge fees for these groups, which traditionally don’t have access to investing in private tech firms.

Hilmer talks about perhaps returning to Australia one day and pursuing a political career. Whatever happens, he says budding entrepreneurs should following an unconventional path.

“What I would tell them is if you hustle you will make it. Australians are outperformers in every arena, education, sport, socialising, whatever, but they don’t go to other fields to play enough.

“Sink your teeth in and have a crack. Aussies are great but don’t get out of their comfort zone always, but the ones that do are a roaring success.”

Originally published as From BWS to big time on Wall Street for quiet Aussie achiever Rob Hilmer of Goanna Capital