Introducing our Venture Analyst: Hannah Cyr
Written by Black Sheep Capital and @venturehannah
At Black Sheep Capital we pride ourselves on the value we add to our portfolio companies and believe that embracing a “Venture Capital as a Service (VCAAS)” attitude will be critical to our long-term success. It takes two months to invest and 7–10 years to harvest, so we see the post investment engagement as the most critical phase in our business. During COVID — and now in the post shock environment — we believe this stance is more important than ever.
In order for us to be “as helpful as we can” we realised very quickly there was gap in our capability, and we were missing a key team member. Given this was the case, we decided it was time to bring another person into the fold, as such we went out to market to hire a “Venture Analyst”.
Very quickly we worked out that the task wasn’t going to be as straight forward a process as we thought. A perfect storm of hiring a rare role in Australia, as well as the multiplier effect of COVID meant that our expectations of receiving 100–150 candidates got blown out; the number was much closer to 750. It is exciting times for early stage tech investment, knowing so many talented people were looking to enter the industry.
We wanted to make sure we had a robust process for ensuring that we got the candidate that fit the Black Sheep mould and would be a great fit for our team. Without going into detail, a special shout out to the following who played a critical role:
- Ashling Turner — an extremely talented organisational psychologist who helped build our process and educated us on the importance of taking the time to correctly define the role and what success would look like. I cannot stress that we now view this as the most important part of the hiring process.
- Parampara — an early stage chat bot tool which allowed us to effectively communicate with candidates in order and collect data on them which we could then easily review
- Curious Thing — a fantastic conversational AI tool which allowed us to undertake phone interviews at scale. The data collected was presented extremely well and was critical to screening candidates on a consistent benchmark.
The decision on who to hire was an extremely difficult one, but at the end of the day, we have conviction that process we developed has led us to hire a candidate who is a great fit for our team and will be an asset both Black Sheep Capital, our portfolio companies and the industry in general.
And now that you have the background, it is Black Sheep’s pleasure to introduce the newest member to the Black Sheep herd, Hannah Cyr.
Now we’ll let Hannah introduce herself by way of a quick question and answer.
The Venture Capital industry attracts people from diverse backgrounds and experience, tell us a little bit about you?
I grew up in Dallas, Texas and studied chemical engineering and nanotechnology for my undergraduate degree back home at the University of Southern California. After volunteering in South Africa and Thailand during university summer breaks, I knew that I wanted to live abroad and made the move to Brisbane shortly after graduation in 2016. I spent the last four years at the freight rail company Aurizon as an analyst, working in projects across the Strategy, Inbound Supply & Procurement and Safety functions. Just a few weeks ago I completed my master’s in international economics and finance from UQ, so it’s been perfect timing kicking off my career in Venture Capital!
So why Venture Capital?
I’ve always had a keen interest for new technology and its impact not just on the end customers, but on how we can improve our global economy and promote sustainability and social equity through those resources. The thing that drew me to Venture Capital was also the dynamism of the ecosystem. As someone who loves to always be learning, I feel very grateful to be able to immerse myself in new things for a job. Plus, Black Sheep felt like a great fit with a mission that I believe in and a focus on being proactive, flexible and growth minded.
What has your first week been like?
The first week has been nothing short of epic. The team has taken great care in helping me dive into learning about our portfolio companies and getting the opportunity to chat with several of the founders on their current projects and growth plans. We also built some model rockets as a team building activity, which sounds deceptive since these “model” rockets took about 4 hours to build. Despite the herculean effort, we couldn’t figure out how to launch them once we got to the park. I’ve realised how VC works — we learn from our failures and come back stronger next time round — fingers crossed for this week’s re-attempted launch.
What are you most excited about?
One of the best things about this job thus far has been getting to do some deep dives on new companies and industries. But I think I’m most excited to get to work with and learn from all the founders in our portfolio (and the ones still to come!). We’ve got some projects in the pipeline that I’ll get to help with, so can’t wait to kick them off.
What is your favourite food?
I like a lot of food, but if I had to choose an all-time favourite meal, it would be a Hawaiian ribeye with a loaded baked potato followed by Peach Cobbler for dessert.
Any final comments?
Being new to the industry, I am super keen to connect with the ecosystem — feel free to reach out via my linked in profile here
