My guest for Ep198 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Rohan Workman.

Rohan is the Co-founder & CEO of Skalata, a seed stage venture capital firm that was established in 2018 and count a portfolio of over 80 companies across their 2 funds.

Prior to this, he was the Director of MAP, Melbourne Uni’s Accelerator program that he built to become the 8th ranked program in the world.

Rohan also previously founded RosterCloud, a cloud-based software management tool for events and catering businesses. RosterCloud was acquired by Rision in 2016.

In this interview we covered a range of topics including:

• What his first job out of uni, working in corporate recovery, taught him about business
• Lessons from his first startup, Roster Cloud
• Why Skalata evolved from an accelerator program to a more traditional fund structure
• & much more!

Timestamps:

• 1:43 Rohan’s background
• 4:02 Importance of health & fitness as a founder
• 12:08 Tough lessons from his time at McGrathNicol
• 15:25 Advice for navigating challenging people situations in business
• 21:24 Balancing speed with discipline
• 26:50 Mistakes and lessons from RosterCloud
• 30:36 Time at Melbourne Accelerator Program in the early days
• 39:45 The genesis for Skalata
• 46:35 Skalata’s investment thesis and process
• 57:10 Taking risks and being bold

Our partners:

A big thank you to Maxine Lee, Laura Williams and Rosemary Workman for their help with this interview!

Also a big shout out to our partners for the show:

Scendar 

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

Vanta helps businesses get — and stay — compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks. And with over 300 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on.
Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
Startup Playbook Podcast listeners get access to an exclusive offer of USD$1000 off their plans. Head over to vanta.com/playbook to get access to this exclusive discount.

Links mentioned:

Rohan’s links:

• Rohan’s LinkedIn
• Skalata VC

People mentioned:

• S. N. Goenka
• John Berry
• Sam Kothari
• Leigh Jasper
• Jocko Willink
• Darrell Wade
• Maxine Lee
• Lisa Paul
• Daniel Madhavan
• Sarah Morgan
• Anthony Glenning
• Kate Cornick
• Justin Lipman
• Connor Hagan
• Alex Ewart

Companies mentioned:

• KPMG
• McGrathNicol
• Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP)
• Melbourne University
• RosterCloud
• Vipassana Meditation
• Everlab
• The Big Group
• LaunchVic
• Explorate
• EVP

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Paycheck

Other channels:

Find all of the links for the podcast on Linktree here