Why hiring is a fund-level asset, not a portco cost.

Funds report IRR, MOIC, DPI, TVPI to LPs every quarter. None of those numbers contain a line called 'cost-per-hire portfolio-aggregated'.

A typical Growth fund holds 22 portcos. Those portcos hire 80 to 150 senior roles per year, VP Sales, Heads of Finance, Senior Engineers, Product leads. Each hire generates 3 to 5 qualified finalists; the company picks one, rejects the rest. Across the portfolio, that's 6,000 to 12,000 qualified rejected candidates per year flowing through the fund's collective hiring funnel, and disappearing.

Each of those rejected candidates was, on average, vetted through 4 hours of internal interview time, 2 hours of external recruiter screening, and represents €15-30k of recruiter fees paid (or about to be paid) by the next portco that finds them on a different channel.

Run the math on a 22-portco portfolio at 100 hires/year, 3 qualified rejections per hire, €20k average recruiter fee per re-acquisition: that's €6M of duplicated spend per year. Over the 10-year life of a fund: €60M. That number doesn't appear anywhere. Not in the LP letter. Not in the operating partner KPIs. Not in any post-mortem. It is the largest unmeasured operational leak in the modern venture model.

The talent pool for 'VP Sales who scaled $5M to $50M ARR in SaaS' is, conservatively, 800 people in Europe. The pool for 'Head of Finance with a SaaS exit on the CV', maybe 400.

A Growth fund with 22 portfolio companies has, at any given time, 6 to 9 active searches targeting the same candidates. The portfolio companies know nothing of each other. They retain the same firms, who present the same profiles sequentially, billing on each signature. The fund pays multiple times for the same candidate. The portfolio's reputation as a talent destination erodes silently.

Take a €500M Growth fund. 2-and-20 economics: 2% annual management fee (€10M/yr), 20% carry on returns above hurdle. Assume a 3x net MOIC outcome, that's roughly €300M in carry distributed to the GP team over 10 years.

The €60M lost to duplicated hiring spend in the portfolio represents 0.4% to 0.8% of fund returns, directly, because every Euro overspent on recruiters is a Euro that could have been deployed to runway, R&D, or distributions.

In carry terms: that's €5M to €10M off the GP cheque. Per fund. Per cycle. For a Partner managing carry of €30M to €60M over a 10-year fund cycle, that's a 6 to 15-month delta on retirement timing. The difference between fully funding the kids' education and not. This is not a marketing-tech problem. It's a partner-level economic problem.

In 2017, Sequoia hired its first dedicated Talent partner. By 2023, the team was 15 people. They built internal tooling: a CRM tracking every senior candidate ever interviewed at any Sequoia portco, a quarterly process mapping open roles against rejected finalists, a relationship manager assigned to each portco's CEO for hiring escalation.

a16z built Talent × Opportunity, 30 people at peak. Index built Talent Lab, 10 people. Atomico, Bessemer, Insight, Accel, General Catalyst all have similar teams of 5 to 15.

For these top-tier funds, talent infrastructure is now table stakes. They can absorb the €2M to €5M annual cost of running a Talent team because their fund size is €1B+ and the basis-point recovery on hiring inefficiency more than pays for it. For the next 200 funds, €200M to €1B AUM, 12 to 35 portcos, internalising is uneconomical. A 5-person Talent team costs €750k/year fully loaded. On a €400M fund, that's 7.5% of the management fee budget for one operational function. Most don't do it. Those that do, do it understaffed. The result: a structural divide between funds that can afford talent infrastructure and those that can't. Skalisto closes that gap.

Some categories of cost are best amortised across institutions: legal templates, financial reporting tools, cap-table management, compensation benchmarking.

Talent has been an exception. Every fund built, or didn't build, its own. The reason was that talent felt strategic, a competitive edge, and partners hesitated to share what looked like proprietary advantage.

That was never true.

Talent infrastructure is operational plumbing, not strategy.

The competitive edge in venture is conviction, sourcing, and price discipline at investment time, not the ability to refer engineers to your portfolio companies. The first fund to recognise this compounds two advantages: a structurally lower cost-per-hire than peer funds, and a more attractive value proposition to founders.

Skalisto is not an ATS. We don't replace Greenhouse, Lever, or Ashby, we plug into them. Your portfolio companies keep their hiring stack untouched.

Skalisto operates one floor up: the fund-level network where finalists rejected by one portfolio company become available to the next. Anonymised by default. Confidential by construction. Reportable to LPs in basis points.

We exist for the 200 funds that won't build a 15-person Talent team but will not accept losing 0.5% of carry to an avoidable operational leak. If that's you, we should talk.