Changing The Game with Wilson Casado - Cheryl Mack

Cheryl Mack is a connector.

She takes pleasure in bringing people together and driving them towards genuine connections within the communities she creates, be them big or small.

With a description like that it would be natural to assume she helps businesses with community building with the end of creating harmonious work environments, but that is not where the surprises stop.

Today we are going to do a deep dive into Cheryl’s work at Aussie Angels, her journey towards becoming the amazing professional she is, and how she is changing the game for the Australian market today.

Check it out:

Real Connections

Cheryl finding her calling in helping people connect was a natural development from her natural inclinations as an extrovert.

Cheryl graduated in business with a major in marketing, but if you asked her, she’d tell you that the biggest takeaways from college were less about social media strategies and more about how to reach out and “work with difficult people”.

Soon after graduating and cutting her teeth as a team member at freelancer.com, she went on to found “StartCon”, where she got to put founders and investors in the same room for the very first time.

There was, however, a slight problem, a simple, yet nonetheless hard to solve issue where “If you put over one thousand people in the same room expecting them to make the right connections, that isn’t really going to work out.”

And so, Cheryl began to figure out how to facilitate these matches made in heaven by herself.

In doing so, she brought to the forefront of her brand a fact that is often neglected, especially when on the subject of investments: that they care about people and work with the same dynamics other human relationships work.

Angelic Investing

Cheryl’s way with people has been instrumental in her role as an angel investor, after all, Investments are all about people talking, sharing ideas and getting into ventures together.

And according to her that made all the difference in the world.

Now, she’s relatively new to angel investing, and some people have even (however timidly) pointed out that she was rather divergent from the mental picture most people have of an angel investor.

On the other hand, that hasn’t really stopped her from going into this space with everything she has, to the point where she could eventually own up to a portfolio of over ten companies.

Connections also played a large role in this aspect, as Cheryl was able to help her founders not only through financial support, but also in helping new start-ups reach out to other investors and manage their interpersonal relations on an in-house level.

At the end of the day, more than anything she learned in classes, it was Cheryl’s ability to see investing as a team effort and coordinate it as such that made her successful in what she does today.

Aussie Angels

Now, if you were paying attention to the intro for this episode of Changing the Game, you might remember me mentioning how Cheryl is the founder of Aussie Angels, an initiative which she described in the following words:

“Aussie Angels is a place where angels can co-invest in the most seamless and fun way possible.”

What sets this group apart from the rest is how it allows angels to follow other investors whom they like and share their own ventures. They can also join a syndicate without a minimum investment and work under a lead investor.

Lead investors are the people looking for new companies, making deals and explaining why they are investing in particular ventures and sharing it with their syndicate who can decide if they’ll join in or not.

It also makes the whole process of forming an angel syndicate that much easier and cheaper, which as someone undertaking that task right now, I can’t thank her enough.

Sophisticated Investor

A little-known fact about Australia is that early-stage investment is extremely regulated, with aspirant angels and regular investors alike being required to hold certain amounts in assets and other prerequisites that make investment limited for the general public.

I asked Cheryl, at the risk of making her uncomfortable, what was her first check-size was to gauge what a new investor could expect to spend in the land down under.

Luckily, she was rather understanding and told me, without hesitation, that her first investment as an angel was 10 thousand dollars for two different start-ups.

She made it very clear, however, that this was under half the minimum amount most founders were willing to take, which made it hard for her to begin investing, which is 25 thousand dollars.

On the other hand, having less than that doesn’t mean you’re locked out of angel investing if you are regarded as having a higher value as an investor, it all depends on the needs of the founders.

Conclusion

Cheryl Mack perfectly demonstrates through her story and expertise that before even mentioning anything remotely technical about business, it must first be understood in a human light.

Human relations are at the basis of any conjoined effort, and if neglected, no other aspect of an enterprise can work the way it was supposed to, a fact that can easily become buried under the talk of deadlines, bottom lines and other lines of such.

So, for our mental exercise for today, I’d like you to take a look at your current work relations, are there any tensions getting in the way? Or better yet, is there any way you can make the people you get along with feel like they can rely on you?