VC firms
Job board software for VC firms
A venture firm's job board is the only kind in this list that is not supposed to make money. It exists so a founder in your portfolio can fill a role faster, and so a candidate who wants to work at "a company like yours" has somewhere to land. That makes every conventional job board metric the wrong one.
From $79/month · 14-day free trial · No setup feesThe thing that actually decides whether it works is inventory freshness. A talent network showing roles that were filled two months ago is worse than no talent network, because it tells a candidate that nobody at the fund is looking after it.
How the money works
There is no revenue model, and that is the point
The board is a platform service, funded out of the same budget as the talent partner and the founder summit. Its return shows up in founder retention and in deal competitiveness, not in a Stripe dashboard. Trying to monetise it, by charging portfolio companies to list or by selling sponsored placements, reliably kills it.
What it does need is a cost that is defensible when nobody can attribute revenue to it. That is the real constraint: it has to be cheap enough that renewing it is not an annual argument, and good enough that founders complain when it breaks.
The one measurable thing worth tracking is candidate flow to portfolio companies, per company. A fund that can tell a founder "we sent you eleven qualified applications this quarter" has a number that survives the budget conversation.
The question that decides it
“We have thirty portfolio companies. Who keeps the listings current?”
Nobody, and that is the requirement. Any design that depends on founders remembering to post roles will be stale within a quarter, because posting to the fund's board is never anyone's priority.
The working pattern is scheduled imports pointed at each portfolio company's own careers page or ATS feed. Their roles appear on your board when they publish them and disappear when they close them, with no action from the company. New portfolio company means adding one source, not onboarding a founder.
Where a portfolio company has no careers page worth scraping, which is common at seed, the API covers the gap: a role posted through it lands on the board the same way an imported one does.
A board of this shape
Y Combinator's Work at a Startup
The most developed version of this idea, and worth studying even at a fraction of the scale. Notice that it is built as a candidate product rather than as a listings page: profiles, matching, and a reason for a candidate to come back. Most fund talent networks fail because they are a page rather than a product, and the fix is usually inventory freshness and a candidate account, in that order. Y Combinator's Work at a Startup Opens workatastartup.com in a new tab
Look at Y Combinator's Work at a Startup
Named as a reference point, not as a Kardow customer. It does not run on Kardow and we
have no relationship with it.
What maps to your workflow
The parts of Kardow that do this job
01
Scheduled imports from every portfolio careers page
Each company is a source with its own schedule and filters. Roles arrive when the company publishes them, and drop off when they are filled, so the board reflects the portfolio without anyone maintaining it. 02
Unlimited jobs and candidate accounts
Thirty companies hiring across a year is a lot of listings, and a portfolio board that has to prune inventory to stay inside a plan limit is the wrong tool. Neither jobs nor candidate accounts are capped on any plan. 03
Company pages as a portfolio directory
Each portfolio company gets its own page with its roles, description and links, so the board doubles as the portfolio directory the fund site probably already needs. 04
Three boards on one plan
Funds that run a separate board per fund, per geography, or for a specific programme can run up to three on the Scale plan rather than three subscriptions. 05
Code you can take
A talent network tends to grow requirements a platform did not anticipate, usually around matching or candidate profiles. On Pro and above the board is a Next.js application you can download with the CLI and extend directly. The honest limit
Where Kardow is the wrong answer here
Getro is the incumbent here and is built specifically for this job, with portfolio and network features we do not have. If your requirement is a talent network first and a job board second, look at them properly before looking at us. Kardow fits better when the board is also public-facing, needs to rank in search, or has to do something a portfolio-network product will not bend to. Not sure which side you are on? Ask us.
Questions
What people ask before they build one.
- Should the talent network sit on our own domain?
- Yes, on a subdomain of the fund site rather than on the platform's domain. The board accumulates search visibility for the companies on it, and that visibility should be an asset of the fund. It also matters to founders, who are lending you their roles and would rather those roles appear under your brand than under a vendor's.
- How do we handle a company leaving the portfolio?
- Remove its import source and its listings stop refreshing. Existing pages can be left to expire naturally or removed immediately. The company page can be unpublished without deleting the historical data, which matters if you are tracking placements over time.
- Can candidates apply through the board, or should they go to the company?
- Both work and the choice is strategic rather than technical. Sending candidates straight to the company ATS is less work and gives the fund no data. Taking the application on the board gives you the candidate relationship and the numbers to show founders, at the cost of a handoff step. Most funds start with the redirect and move to on-board applications once someone owns the talent function.
Build it and see whether it works
Every plan includes a 14-day trial and there is no setup fee, so the cost of finding out is one month. Kardow starts at $79 a month. Closest to this one
All use cases Accelerators A cross-cohort hiring board that keeps working after demo day, when the companies need it most. Staffing agencies A candidate acquisition channel that feeds the ATS you already run, rather than a second system to maintain. Communities Revenue that members welcome instead of tolerate, because the thing you are selling is access to them and they benefit from it.