VC Voices: HR teams, avoid any tools that don’t ‘truly delight you’, says Antler’s Livia Moore

Antler is a Day Zero investor; this means it backs founders right from the beginning of their journey, sometimes pre-team or eve pre-idea, and supports them all the way to Series C.

“We invest primarily in the team, the idea is secondary as we know that the idea will likely pivot since we back founders at such an early stage,” Livia Moore, an Associate Partner at Antler.

Antler is a global, generalist fund, but it has some standout portfolio companies that sit in the future of work sector, including Casu, Worksense, Semester and Talendary.

Moore is particularly excited about Talendary.

She shares: “They are developing an end-to-end AI recruiter to optimize the potential of human capital and enable better matchmaking.

“They’ve started out with recruiters and hiring managers helping them source and screen candidates 5-10X faster at the top of the funnel.”

UNLEASH is thrilled to welcome Moore as our August ‘VC Voice’. This marks a year since we started our exclusive interview series with leading HR tech investors, and Moore follows in the footsteps of Margaret Wu from Georgian, Eight Roads’ Lucy O’Brien and Thomas Otter of Acadian Ventures.

Read on to get Moore’s exclusive insight into the questions that HR leaders need to ask themselves before investing in tech tools for their organization.

Allie Nawrat: How did you get into investing? What is the one piece of advice you would give to your younger self?

Livia Moore: I got into investing six years ago when I joined Antler after a career in all things marketing at startups and scaleups.

Antler had just gotten started in 2018 when I got in touch with the company and I just found the idea of bringing together fantastic, driven, ambitious people who want to solve real problems and build great companies and support them in finding a co-founder and building along the way to be too brilliant not to join!

My advice to my younger self would be to trust your gut feeling and thoughts about something and to not second guess yourself so much!

AN: Who inspires you, and why?

LM: My daughter!

Seeing the world through a 2-year-old’s eyes, with all the fascination and curiosity she has for people and nature and things is the most wonderful experience. She inspires me every day to be curious and thankful for life.

AN: What gets you up in the morning, and what keeps you up at night?

LM: Building relationships with entrepreneurs and other investors is extremely rewarding to me.

Supporting founders on their journey and being able to offer good advice to them is something that really gives me energy.

AN: You work with a lot of founders as they grow their teams and their company. What makes a great founder? What are the common mistakes you see when companies are building their teams?

LM: The best founders I see just never lose momentum.

They execute and experiment and learn and move way faster in their iterations than others out there.

They are obsessed with the problem they want to solve and don’t lose focus from the mission, they are not afraid to question the ‘usual’ way of doing things and they are amazing at attracting other intelligent and ambitious people to join them in their mission.

When building a team, the most important thing is to constantly hire people who are better than yourself, as this sets the talent density flywheel spinning.

Livia Moore, Associate Partner, Antler.

Another recommendation is to not hire until you absolutely are 110% convinced that you need someone additional on the team and you know how to shape that role.

This is necessary to create clarity for the organization to move forward at speed and in full alignment and in order to avoid too much unnecessary overhead.

AN: What makes a company, and a founder, really stand out in the overcrowded HR and future of work space?

LM: As you say, the space is very crowded, so I think to succeed and to be able to raise capital to get you to the next stage, you really have to stand out.

We look for founders who we see have a large amount of resilience, dare to think outside the box, have high ambitions and visions for what they want to build and have a bias toward execution and moving fast.

If we see a fantastic founder who fits the above and wants to build within HR tech, we will back them on their journey.

To me, investing in the broader future of work and HR space is really about finding those extremely capable and driven people.

AN: Our audience, HR leaders, are the key customers of HR tech. What is your advice on what HR leaders should look out for when buying tech? What should they avoid, and why?

LM: You have to ask yourself, will my co-workers adopt this technology, and will it create extraordinary value in their everyday work?

Since there is so much competition, I would avoid anything that doesn’t immediately stand out or truly delight you as an HR leader.

AN: What are the most exciting innovations on the horizon for HR tech? Is there a HR technology that is overhyped, or that the world would be better without?

LM: I honestly think 95% of early-stage HR tech I see is something the world would be better off without.

It’s often overestimating how much value the employees will gain from it and how much they will love using it.

However, I am a firm believer that ML and AI will continue to help HR workers automate processes and become more efficient.