Being in HR takes you into different rooms, introduces you to different people, and exposes you to situations you probably never imagined dealing with when you first started your career. But every once in a while, you find yourself working on something that sits completely outside what you know.
Two or three years into your career, you tend to approach new challenges with a certain kind of enthusiasm. There are two things that usually drive you: the willingness to learn something new and the instinct to take ownership of whatever lands on your table. You don't necessarily know how to do everything at the start, but you are willing to figure it out. You learn the skills you don't have, ask the questions you don't know the answers to, and somehow find a way to make things work.
That was exactly how I approached this project.
I started working on it the way I would any other assignment that came my way. I had a task, an outcome to work towards, and a fair amount of figuring out to do. What I didn't fully anticipate was just how much of that figuring out would involve learning an entirely new vocabulary.
Coming from an HR background, I was familiar with people, organisations, workplace dynamics, and the way businesses operate internally. Fundraising, however, introduced me to a different side of the business altogether.
Suddenly, there were terms like pre-seed and seed funding, investor thesis, deal flow, valuation, equity dilution, cap tables, term sheets, and due diligence. I had to understand not just what these terms meant, but how they connected to one another and, more importantly, how they influenced a business's ability to grow.
Because knowing the definition of a term and understanding how it plays out in a real conversation with an investor are two very different things.
And so, the learning began.
I started identifying investor firms and venture capital funds that might be relevant to the product. I looked at the kinds of businesses they backed, the stages at which they invested, and the sectors they were interested in. It wasn't simply about putting together a list of names. It was about understanding who might see value in what we were building and why.
At the same time, I was reaching out to people who had experience in the space, speaking to founders, and gathering feedback on the product. We needed to understand where the product stood in the market, how people perceived it, and what could be improved.
When you're early in the market, you don't have the luxury of assuming you already know what people need. You have to get out there, ask questions, listen carefully, and be willing to revisit your assumptions. Sometimes, the feedback validates what you're doing. Other times, it makes you question things you thought were already figured out.
Both are necessary.
What made the experience particularly interesting was that the work didn't stay confined to a laptop or a classroom. My weekends started looking very different. Networking events, conversations with founders, meetings with people who had built businesses from the ground up, and pitching the product to venture capitalists became part of the routine.
There was a lot to absorb in every room. You were listening to how founders articulated their vision, how investors evaluated opportunities, and how people spoke about growth, traction, scalability, and the size of the market. You began noticing that a good product wasn't always enough. You also had to communicate why it mattered, who it was for, what problem it solved, and why it deserved to exist in an already competitive market.
And somewhere along the way, I noticed a shift in how I was approaching the project.
I had started out thinking about the work that needed to be done. Gradually, I found myself thinking about the product itself, the people who would use it, the market it was entering, and what it would take for it to survive and grow.
It was less about completing a task and more about making the outcome work.
In a way, I was beginning to think like a product owner — perhaps even a little like a founder. After all, when you're trying to get a business funded, every conversation matters. You start thinking about what investors need to see, what makes a business viable, how much runway it needs, and what the next milestone should look like. You become more conscious of the decisions behind the product, not just the work that goes into building it.
And that's a different way of looking at work.
In HR, you often find yourself understanding a business through its people, its culture, its leadership, and the systems that help it function. An experience like this makes you look at the same business from another angle — its market, its commercial potential, its growth plans, and the capital it needs to get there.
Neither perspective exists in isolation. The more you understand how the different parts of a business fit together, the better you become at understanding the business as a whole.
Looking back, I don't think the most valuable part of this experience was learning fundraising terminology or putting together a list of potential investors. Those were skills I could learn, practise, and improve with time.
What stayed with me was the realisation that you don't always have to come from a particular background to start contributing to a new space. Sometimes, you just need the willingness to learn, the patience to ask questions, and the ability to stay with something long enough to understand it.
You might not know the language when you walk into the room. You might not have the experience everyone else seems to have. But if you're willing to listen, do the work, and learn along the way, you can find your footing.
And sometimes, the most interesting part of a career isn't the work you were trained to do. It's the work that makes you discover what else you're capable of.
