DANA RAMNARINE, RHUM.HR, PORTFOLIOYVR, BC BUSINESS, WEST COAST ENTREPRENEURS, HELEN SIWAK

Dana Ramnarine & Rhum.HR: Building Something Worth Staying For

Dana Ramnarine (she/her) is a seasoned entrepreneur and people-operations leader recognized for empowering innovative ventures and driving operational excellence within collaborative, creative teams. With nearly 15 years of experience supporting startup founders and building purpose-driven organizations, she brings together strategic vision and hands-on leadership in equal measure.

As Chief Operating Officer at rhum.hr, Dana leads initiatives focused on streamlining business operations and scaling emerging companies with the kind of HR infrastructure that founders actually use. Her approach is grounded in the belief that performance, retention, and culture all begin at the emotional foundation of an organization, and that honest, rigorous people strategy is what separates companies built to last from those built to pitch.

Dana also serves as Head of Talent at BKR Capital, a Toronto-based venture capital firm investing in diverse founders, where she designs HR programs, advises on talent strategy, and supports portfolio companies through the complexity of early growth.

A board member of QueerTech and member of the Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce, Dana brings her full self to the work of building more equitable, human-centred ecosystems. She is a mother, a builder, and someone who has learned, the hard way, that sustainable leadership starts from within.

DANA RAMNARINE, RHUM.HR, PORTFOLIOYVR, BC BUSINESS, WEST COAST ENTREPRENEURS, HELEN SIWAK

BUSINESS BIO

rhum.hr is what happens when HR consulting grows a spine and a heart at the same time. No bloated playbooks. No corporate jargon. Just sharp, honest strategy built on an obsession with creating organizations where people actually want to stay and do their best work.

rhum.hr designs systems that put humans before org charts, because performance, retention, and culture all start at the emotional foundation of a company. That means hard conversations, clean data, and policies that do not treat people like liabilities to be managed. It means showing up as a genuine partner to founders rather than an arm’s-length consultant, getting under the skin of what a company is actually trying to build and helping them build it with intention.

The clients who find rhum.hr are founders and ecosystem builders who want companies that last, not just logos for pitch decks. Less performative people-first messaging, more honest, heart-led leadership backed by rigorous, pragmatic HR operations built for a world that keeps changing.

rhum.hr is a member of the Canada Queer Chamber of Commerce, and that membership is not incidental. Inclusion, equity, and community are not afterthoughts here. They are the starting point.

DANA RAMNARINE, RHUM.HR, PORTFOLIOYVR, BC BUSINESS, WEST COAST ENTREPRENEURS, HELEN SIWAK

IN HER WORDS

“I have always been career-driven. From early on, I knew I wanted to design a life where I could feed my passions and creative outlets while navigating an ambitious career. What I did not know was how long it would take to understand what that actually meant, or how much it would cost me to figure it out.

The first signs showed up early. As a teenager, I ran a side hustle selling used sneakers and shoes out of our school store, a Facebook Marketplace before Marketplace existed. My marketing teacher was not exactly thrilled, but he appreciated that I had spotted a real opportunity and moved on it. That instinct, seeing a gap and filling it without waiting for permission, has never left me.

What I could not have told you then was that the deeper entrepreneurial reckoning was still decades away, waiting on the other side of one of the hardest seasons of my life.

DANA RAMNARINE, RHUM.HR, PORTFOLIOYVR, BC BUSINESS, WEST COAST ENTREPRENEURS, HELEN SIWAK

A SEASON OF RECKONING

My son was born, and something in me broke open in ways I had not prepared for. I was experiencing postpartum depression and career boredom at the same time, a combination that is more common than anyone talks about and more disorienting than I had words for. I was physically present and emotionally adrift, simultaneously grateful and grieving a version of myself I was not sure I would find again.

What became clear in that fog was something I could no longer ignore: I am not built for a standard nine to five. It has to be all heart or nothing. That realization did not arrive as a revelation. It arrived as a slow, uncomfortable certainty that the life I had been living no longer fit.

I started a community during my maternity leave, connecting parents to caregivers, and while that project eventually gave way to what came next, it taught me something essential: that my deepest instinct is toward people, toward connection, toward building structures that make someone else’s life a little less impossible. That instinct led me back to human resources, but with a different intention. My business partner Pierre-Luc Labbée and I dreamed of something that was a genuine departure from arm’s-length consulting. We wanted to get under the skin of founders and help them build. rhum.hr was born from that dream.

THE COST OF EVERYTHING

In the early years, I held everything together by sheer will. I said yes to almost every opportunity, over-functioned for everyone around me, and pushed through my own exhaustion to prove I could be a great founder, mother, and operator all at once. On the outside it looked impressive. On the inside it was quietly eroding my health, my joy, and my ability to be fully present with the people I love most.

Burnout is not a buzzword. It is the moment you realize you are physically in the room but not actually there, that your drive to succeed has become something that is costing you your humanity. I arrived at that moment more than once. Each time, it asked harder questions of me than any client or business challenge ever had.

I am the mother of a bright, beautiful twelve-year-old, and becoming her mother changed me in ways I never expected. In those early years, I fought to hold three identities at once: the present, nurturing mother; the ambitious, career-driven woman; and the individual who still needed space to simply be herself. I did not always get it right. I pushed through exhaustion. I said yes when my body was screaming no. I tried to prove I could do it all without dropping a single ball. More than once, that pressure boiled over into burnout that left me empty, short-tempered, and disconnected from the very people I loved most.

Learning to name that tension, to ask for help, to redesign my life around what actually matters, has been a long, messy, and genuinely beautiful process. I am still figuring it out. But I show up now with more honesty, more boundaries, and considerably more compassion, for myself and for anyone else trying to hold all of these worlds at once.

BUILDING WITH INTENTION

Losing a client who abandons their commitments after your team has poured everything into supporting them is one of the more quietly devastating experiences in consulting. It has happened to us. More than once. What those experiences taught us was to be far more intentional about the clients we say yes to, to move beyond what looks good on paper and spend real time understanding what someone is actually trying to build and whether they have the resources and the will to follow through.

That discernment became one of our greatest strengths. Getting brutally clear on who we are as a company, and owning that clarity as our differentiator, has been one of the most stretching and rewarding parts of this journey. The rebrand rhum.hr is currently moving through is not a new logo or fresh copy. It is a decision to speak in our real voice, stand firmly in our values, and accept that not everyone will be for us. That kind of clarity acts as a filter. The clearer we are, the more we attract aligned founders and companies who care about building sustainably rather than scaling at any cost.

Over the years, we have done work that still surprises me when I say it out loud: staffing post-production for major television productions, supporting the launch of new game studios, building nationwide talent programs from the ground up, designing learning experiences for some of the most visionary people I have encountered. Each project reinforced the same lesson: when you expand your sense of what is possible and pair it with discipline and execution, the opportunities that arrive are often larger than anything you could have written for yourself.

DANA RAMNARINE, RHUM.HR, PORTFOLIOYVR, BC BUSINESS, WEST COAST ENTREPRENEURS, HELEN SIWAK

PEOPLE WHO CHANGED ME

Caroline Stokes was my executive coach when I was a new founder on the edge of burnout, and she fundamentally changed the way I lead and care for myself. She held space when everything felt fragile, and helped me build the practical and emotional tools I needed to become a more resilient, grounded entrepreneur. She has since written Elephants Before Unicorns and Aftershock to 2030, both of which speak directly to founders and leaders who are ready to do the inner work and lead with courage.

Pierre-Luc is one of the most generous, beautiful humans I have ever known. Sharing values with the person you are building with changes everything. He brings deep foundational knowledge and heart-forward leadership in equal measure, and our styles complement each other in ways that make the work feel both expansive and sustainable.

Hassan Pardawalla, whom I originally hired years ago, has since become a collaborator, co-creator, and trusted confidante. He does not network in a surface-level way. He brings real presence, curiosity, and warmth into every room, and his ability to genuinely connect with people is something I admire deeply.

Samantha Powell, a mother of two who has just launched Crème, a new product line celebrating menopause and the powerful transformations women experience, inspires me constantly. Her creativity, her vision for community-building, and her rare gift for making the people around her feel truly seen, these are qualities I return to when I need to remember why this work matters.

WHAT COMES NEXT

rhum.hr is looking for a senior fractional finance partner, a Fractional CFO or Controller, to help model sustainable growth, price thoughtfully, and structure the business for scale without losing what makes it worth building. Alongside that, we are seeking a part-time content and community partner who can help us share stories, frameworks, and practical tools more consistently with founders, studio heads, and talent leaders across our ecosystems.

We are also calling in deeper embedded partnerships with venture capital firms, accelerators, and ecosystem builders who want a dedicated people and culture partner for their portfolios, particularly in creative tech, games, and the future of work. And we are actively looking for values-aligned clients in growth mode, early-stage and scaling companies ready to invest in real people strategy rather than firefighting.

The legacy I hope to leave is straightforward. I want people to look back and say that rhum.hr helped build companies that were as good to work inside as they were impressive from the outside. That we helped founders understand that caring for their people and caring for their business were never separate things. That we showed up honestly, built with integrity, and made the ecosystem a little more human than we found it.

You do not have to burn yourself down to build something meaningful. That is the thing I most wish I had known. The point is not to do it all. The point is to do what matters, in a way you can live with, and live well.”

Author Profile

Helen Siwak, Collaborator: This story is created in collaboration between Helen Siwak and the featured subject. As the founder and publisher of Portfolio.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine, Helen works closely with entrepreneurs to share their paths of innovation, resilience, and growth. Each story in this series is co-developed through interviews and first-person insights, blending authentic voices with Helen’s editorial expertise to highlight the remarkable individuals shaping British Columbia’s business landscape.