The HR Leader Behind the Venture Portfolio

As a Head of HR at IvyCap Ventures, I operate across an entire portfolio of companies, partnering with founders to build leadership teams, designing scalable HR frameworks, and mapping executive roles from early-stage hires through to CXO appointments. My work spans compensation benchmarking, talent acquisition strategy, and campus engagement to build early-career pipelines.

Before the programme, my recommendations on senior hires leaned on instinct and pattern recognition. The role demanded a more evidence-based lens, a perspective I sharpened through the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) Programme at ISB Executive Education.

From Classroom to Capstone

For my capstone project, I partnered with a high-growth startup to craft an organisational development roadmap for scaling from Series A to pre-IPO. Working with the group, we developed a 100-page report grounded in the McKinsey Org-to-Value model, but stripped out its assumptions about organisational maturity, defined functions, and settled reporting lines. We kept the core logic of tying organisation design to value creation, and replaced its emphasis on optimising established structures with stage-appropriate design: flat frameworks that gain hierarchy as the company grows, mapped to specific funding milestones. We added a founder-delegation lens, recognising that in startups, value gets unlocked when founders transition from tactical execution to strategic, then visionary, leadership.

Our group also built a tailored leadership hiring framework centred on behavioural event interviews and designed a 30-60-90-day induction plan for seamless onboarding of senior hires. Modules on organisation design, workforce strategy, and talent economics within the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) Programme provided the conceptual scaffolding for this work.

Research That Skipped the Enterprise Playbook

What made the project distinctive was its research rigour and its refusal to default to traditional enterprise benchmarks. The team drew on competitor analysis, founder interviews, podcast insights, and social media intelligence from growth-stage and IPO-ready firms to build evidence for their OD model. The result was a set of practical appendices designed for immediate implementation: customisable hiring templates, interview scorecards, induction checklists, and detailed case studies of real scaling journeys, complete with pitfalls and triumphs. A bibliography of over 50 sources anchored the work in real-world founder experience rather than textbook theory.

Why People Decisions Are Business Decisions

Describing the shift in direct terms: I now see myself as a business leader with HR expertise, and that has changed how I engage founders. Twelve months ago, my recommendations were people-oriented first. Today, before any HR decision, I start with the business question: why is this role essential for growth, which roles are critical at this stage, and when is the right time to hire. I now work with founders at the Annual Operating Plan level rather than stepping in at the operational hiring stage. The conversation has moved upstream, from "who do we hire" to "what does the business need, and when."

I counsel portfolio companies against treating CXO hiring as a milestone, and instead help them evaluate whether the timing is right to hire for a role at all. These are precisely the capabilities a structured CHRO training programme is designed to build.

What Comes Next: Driving People-powered Growth

The post-programme direction is clear: people-powered growth, whether that means deeper work with founders or a broader enterprise mandate. The capstone project crystallised the shift for me. It gave me a practical framework for translating strategic thinking into how I advise and work with portfolio companies, day to day. HR operates at the business level now, shaping strategy alongside founders.

A CHRO certification earns its value when participants produce work that changes how organisations build and grow. Our team delivered a ready-to-implement scaling playbook for a real company. The learning had translated into impact before the programme ended.

Synopsis

Sidhi Goyat, Head of HR, IvyCap Ventures, drives organisation development and CXO hiring across portfolio companies. She is an alumna of ISB Executive Education’s Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) Programme. Her work focuses on partnering with founders to build leadership teams, design scalable HR frameworks, and enable people-powered growth in high-growth ventures.