A 17-year veteran of Schreiber Foods, Blair Tritt has worked across supply chain, procurement, expansions and the commercial side, giving him a broad view of the business. This would come in handy when he later proposed, got approval for, and began what is today Schreiber Ventures, where he is director of corporate ventures and partnerships.
“Use the resources within the community,” Tritt says to those just starting out or building their own CVCs from scratch. “In all of the internal presentations, people ask me: how did we build? How did we learn? How did we put together what we have? How did we do that? It’s really about the community. I’ve had a ton of support from other CVCs at a global level that have been willing to offer their support. Because what we do is hard, right?”
“Blair has jumped into this challenging role with the appropriate level of passion, curiosity, humility and patience as he is drinking from a firehose while engaging and bringing along senior leaders of the organisation”
Tritt set the new CVC up with a three-pronged approach – investing, partnerships, and venture clienting. The ability to bring – to an $8bn organisation with 10,000 employees – new awareness of capabilities out in the market has been a highlight across the CVC’s nascent stage, as has being able to complement the work other Schreiber business units are doing and bolstering executives’ understanding of the value CVC can bring.
“In a short 12-15 months, he was able to fully immerse into this new ecosystem, learn the fundamentals, build a network and has led the organisation in creating a venture strategy, venture charter, formed an investment committee, led the discussions to align on themes to focus on and we have been able to make our first set of indirect investments in VC funds aligned with our strategic objectives and actively working on our first set of investments,” says Vinith Poduval, senior vice president and chief innovation officer at Schreiber Foods.
“Blair has jumped into this challenging role with the appropriate level of passion, curiosity, humility and patience as he is drinking from a firehose while engaging and bringing along senior leaders of the organisation.”
See the full list of GCV Rising Stars for 2024 here.