Hank Goddard

Hank Goddard is an entrepreneur, operator and investor based in the Boston area, and the founder, Managing Director and CEO of Mainspring Capital Partners, which he established in 2016. His career is unusually varied: he began as an engineer designing jet engines (Pratt & Whitney) and later served as an engineering manager at Dayco, spent time flipping houses, and worked in consulting and analytics roles associated with IBM and Analysis Group before moving into hands-on company operating and investing. He holds an undergraduate degree from Florida State University and an MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

His most prominent operating role was as Chairman and CEO of Mainspring Healthcare Solutions, a healthcare software company that was underperforming when he took it over. Goddard led a restructuring and turnaround, pivoted the business from perpetual software licenses to a recurring SaaS model, grew it roughly five-fold, and sold it in early 2016 at a high multiple of revenue. That valuation journey — turning down a 1x-revenue offer in 2014 and a 2x offer in 2015, then selling at 5x revenue in 2016 — became the subject of his interview on the *Built to Sell Radio* podcast (Episode 110) and is central to how he thinks about building enterprise value through recurring revenue.

After that exit, Goddard built Mainspring Capital Partners as a family-office-style vehicle that provides "patient" and "flexible" capital plus hands-on operating help to growing businesses. Rather than running a traditional fixed-life fund, the firm emphasizes partners who "have founded, built, acquired, and sold companies" and invests across the full lifecycle from seed through buyout. Goddard remains actively engaged with portfolio companies, taking board and executive roles — for example, serving in board/advisory capacities and interim executive roles (including Chief Commercial Officer and CFO pro tem) at additive-manufacturing company Fortify, and as a board member at Dauntless Air and Empire Group.

• Invests through Mainspring Capital Partners as flexible, patient private capital — explicitly "Seed to Sale," spanning seed rounds, growth equity, and full buyouts, with "no artificial timelines."
• Core belief, in the firm's own words: *"When committed teams and great ideas are aligned with smart capital and hands-on experience, Big. Things. Happen."*
• Prizes committed founding/operating teams and businesses where his own operating experience (turnarounds, SaaS transitions, manufacturing, engineering) adds value beyond the check.
• Strong tilt toward advanced/additive manufacturing and industrial/product-development companies (Fortify, Empire Group, ISC Suspension), plus software and AI/ML (Mainspring Healthcare Solutions, NanoNets) and niche operating businesses (Dauntless Air).
• Values recurring revenue and durable business models — his Mainspring Healthcare exit thesis was that shifting from one-time licenses to SaaS is the key driver of enterprise value in software.
• Willing to take hands-on, control-oriented and interim executive roles (Chairman/CEO, CCO, CFO pro tem, board seats) rather than passive minority checks.