Chrissy Farr was ready for a new challenge.
The former CNBC reporter announced Wednesday that she was leaving journalism, an industry where she had spent roughly a decade, to join OMERS Ventures as a principal focusing on health tech investing.
"As I was moving into my mid-30s, I was thinking it would be interesting to try something new while I still had the energy," Farr told Business Insider. "I had the advice of a friend that I should have 100 conversations, and I don't think I had nearly that many, but I went to people in my network that I respected and asked about their jobs."
Farr was eager to see where her reporting skills could overlap with roles in other industries, she said. Venture capital was a natural fit, based on the emphasis of deep industry research and robust professional networks that new entrants need to be successful.
That became obvious to Farr quickly, and she narrowed down her list of potential opportunities to focus on venture capital. But she would only make the move if she found a firm that was the right fit, she said.
The right fit ultimately turned out to be OMERS Ventures, the venture capital arm of Canadian pension behemoth that manages $1 billion CAD, or roughly $780.9 million USD. Managing partner Michael Yang, who also focuses on healthtech investments, built the Silicon Valley team from scratch since leaving Comcast Ventures in January 2019. A year later, he started searching for a second-in-command for the healthcare investing practice and had yet to find any promising candidates when his colleague suggested reaching out to his mentee, Farr.
"Chrissy has covered healthcare and digital health for a decade and she has a tremendous network," Yang told Business Insider. "I'm aware of how she thinks and which topics are near and dear to her. It was easy in our conversations when it came to this process and our lists of interests lined up, so I said let's go do this and make some investments."
Farr wants to bet big on behavioral and environmental health
Aside from its relationship to the Canadian pension fund, OMERS Ventures is also unique in that it tends to hire investors from less than traditional backgrounds, Yang said. Many existing partners did not have prior venture capital experience and instead specialized in operations, accounting, or were founders themselves.
Because of that, Yang has insisted the firm develop an apprenticeship model for new employees. Farr will join him on investor calls, observe his board meetings, and join pitch meetings in her first few weeks in addition to learning from the rest of the team and heading up the firm's new newsletter.
"It's what I love about what I do now but affords me a career that lets me work with a team," Farr said. "I reached a place where I wanted to work with people I could learn from and I wanted to challenge myself. It's scary to make a transition like this but I think that's a good thing."
Yang said that Farr will eventually be making investments herself, in all that entails. Her first assignment, an investment memo during the recruiting process, highlighted behavioral health as an area of investment and a topic she had reported on extensively but rarely saw companies that were making it work.
"When she picked behavioral health, I was curious about it because I had been looking at it for a decade and just have not invested in the space," Yang said.
Other areas Farr is interested in backing include women's health, pediatrics, public health, and payment models given the complexity within the United States' healthcare system. She's also curious to see more companies working on environmental health, she said, even though it may feel tangential to the current crises roiling the healthcare system.
"Environmental health and climate solutions could be touching on what we're doing on the health-tech side," Farr said. "As the climate changes, we tend to see negative health effects."
The jump from reporting to investing
Farr is not the first career journalist to make the move over to the venture side, and she is likely not the last. Earlier in 2020, TechCrunch editor-at-large Josh Constine joined VC firm Signal Fire as a principal and head of content.
Although the two industries can be at odds on social media at times, they're more similar than they are different. Venture capital and reporting share many core skills, such as building robust, trustworthy professional networks and heavy research. Successful reporters and successful investors aren't afraid to pick up the phone to contact people they may not know and ask hard questions when the person on the other end picks up.
"I got to know people on a deep, personal level and build trust," Farr said of her sourcing as a reporter. "That's the most important thing that will be the most helpful because we are still in a pandemic and it's hard to network."
But while reporting works in hasty news cycles, venture capital firms typically operate on 10-year cycles, an abrupt shift in pace that Farr is already trying to adjust to.
The next few weeks are full of meetings and observation, she said, but she is mentally preparing for the slowdown that could come with making just one or two investments per year.
"There's a rush with reporting that you get daily," Farr said. "The difference will be the pace and entering into something that's slow-paced and figuring out, how do I know if I'm any good. In journalism, you know that quickly."
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