Little-known young fund manager Robert Hilmer bursts onto Richest 250 after $1.3bn deal

Former bottle shop employee Robert Hilmer is just 37 and now worth almost $1bn after clinching investment from a British billionaire for the firm he started just five years ago.

Australian investor Rob Hilmer is nearing billionaire status after clinching a big deal for his Goanna Capital. Picture: Andrew Kelly

Florida-based Australian and strident opponent of Labor’s unrealised gains tax Robert Hilmer stormed Australia’s Richest 250 list after agreeing to sell part of his funds management firm Goanna Capital to British billionaire Will Adderley in a deal valuing the company at more than $1.3bn.

The 37-year-old Palm Beach resident, a former BWS bottle shop employee who talked his way into trading floor jobs at prestigious New York financial firms fresh out of the University of Queensland, has a stake in his business now worth about $US600m ($924m) after the deal.

The transaction means Mr Hilmer is already one of Australia’s most successful young founders closing in on billionaire status under 40.

He would place about 175th on The List – Australia’s Richest 250 as it stands, ahead of notable business names such as Nicky and Simone Zimmermann, John Symond, Nicholas Moore and Graham Turner.

Mr Hilmer has about doubled the Goanna funds management business every year for the past few years, and told The Australian the US had been a breeding ground for business opportunity while in Australia, Labor’s plan to introduce an unrealised capital gains tax on superannuation was shameful.

Goanna manages about $US850m for its clients, including stakes in Australia’s Canva, Elon Musk’s xAI, and other businesses such as Ramp, Databricks, Rippling, Figma, Island and CoreWeave.

Australian investor Rob Hilmer moved to America in 2011. Picture: Andrew Kelly

Mr Hilmer said the deal with Sir William’s WA Capital opened up further growth through Goanna’s provision of hiring expertise to the tech companies it invests in.

“The investment from WA Capital recognises Goanna’s tremendous success investing in the most generationally important private technology companies globally. The capital will allow us to continue investing in infrastructure to support our leading portfolio companies with their hiring needs,” Mr Hilmer said.

WA Capital purchased its 4 per cent stake for $US36m.

The nephew of Fred Hilmer, who wrote Australia’s National Competition Policy, Robert Hilmer built a credo of “outworking my competitors”, a behaviour sharpened while working with hedge fund manager Philippe Laffont who founded the technology-focused investment firm Coatue.

Concerned with competitiveness, Mr Hilmer said the federal Treasurer’s unrealised capital gains tax would be detrimental to investment in start-ups.

“The unrealised gains tax is an unfortunate erosion of Australia’s ‘fair-go’ ideology. It’s unfortunately an unserious policy by a country that isn’t on the world stage and without hopes to get there.”

Mr Hilmer believes Labor’s plan to tax unrealised gains on super balances worth $3m and above, which would raise $40bn for the government over a decade, would distort incentives for investors.

“For the investor, they are disincentivised to continue investing if the founder performs. As the start-up succeeds and generates revenue and the valuation increases, the investor will be forced to pay taxes, despite an exit being uncertain both in terms of time as well as quantum,” Mr Hilmer said.

“Rather than continue investing in the business as it succeeds, the investor will look to sell down their stake to raise liquidity to pay the taxes. This is the opposite of what you want investors doing.”

Mr Hilmer’s business which spans 45 co-investment vehicles, has also built a reputation among tech companies for the provision of top human talent. He told Fortunehow he had been able to help tech companies fight for human resources by using proprietary scraping tools to find applicants.

His clients include Australian, Middle East, UK and Swiss family offices as well as a New Zealand pension fund. Goanna charges a private equity type fee schedule of a 2 per cent management fee and 20 per cent for performance.

Rob Hilmer started Goanna Capital in late 2020. Picture: Andrew Kelly

Goanna Capital – named as a reminder of Mr Hilmer’s home country he left in 2011 – was founded in late 2020 after he had spent a decade in the US, firstly on Wall Street and then Silicon Valley.

“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,” he told The Australian in a 2021 interview. “So every night until 3am I would stay up, cold calling and emailing investment banks in New York.”

Mr Hilmer used a credit card to pay for the trip. Returning to Brisbane empty-handed, he then called a managing director at Royal Bank of Scotland which led to another introduction to another MD 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. In early 2016 he left for Silicon Valley in California to join a start-up then called Equidate as its second employee.

Now Forge, the company established a trading platform for employees of tech unicorns to sell their shares in pre-IPO firms. Mr Hilmer left Forge when it raised $US85m in Series B funding in February 2019, selling his large shareholding.

At Goanna, Mr Hilmer’s day starts at 4am in front of a red light machine where he drinks a coffee and begins checking emails before his competitors are awake. By 5am he said he has responded to emails and hops in his cold plunge at his house in Palm Beach.

He will begin taking calls between 5am and 8am. He said by 8am, he has probably done more work than most people.