My guest for Ep178 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & CEO of Creative Cubes, Tobi Skovron.

Tobi has had a fascinating career journey to date

He started his first business, Pet Loo with Sim, who is now his wife, and a $20,000 investment from his father-in law.

They grew that business to $10M in ARR before eventually being acquired by PetSafe in 2012.

It wasn’t always a straightforward journey however with many bumps along the way and in this episode, Tobi opens up on some of these stories including how we owed a manufacturer $1M in payments and only had $15K in the bank account and how overnight he lost almost half of the $300,000 he took with him to the US because of the global market and Australian dollar collapsing.

But Tobi is no stranger to resilience and perseverance – something that has shown through his experience across several businesses including that as the Co-founder & CEO of Creative Cubes, a coworking space and community that not only survived during the COVID period, but opened up new locations!

Timestamps

• 03:50 Tobi’s background
• 14:52 Losing his father
• 22:32 Building Pet Loo
• 31:22 Challenges expanding Pet Loo to the US
• 34:36 Perspective shifts from being in a co-working space, surrounded by Uber, Snapchat etc
• 39:22 Covid challenges for CreativeCubes
• 46:47 Frameworks for getting through challenging periods
• 50:20 Leadership principles
• 55:53 Finding balance and prioritising health
• 1:01:22 Mindset shifts required to take the business to the next level
• 1:04:43 Finding non obvious opportunities

Our partners

A big thank you to Sim Skovron, Louie Gallina and Steve for their help with research for this interview!

Also a big thank you 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.
Get started with a Sydney-based Vanta team member today, or watch a 3-minute demo to learn more, at vanta.com/playbook.

Links mentioned

Tobi’s links

• LinkedIn
• CreativeCubes

People mentioned

• Sim Skovron
• Shaquille O’Neal
• Travis Kalanick
• Evan Spiegel
• Mark Cuban
• Nathan Buckley
• Mark Stern
• Gabby Leibovich
• George Garth
• Gav Fernando
• Geoff Harris
• Rachael Neumann
• Louie Gallina
• Randy Boyd
• Kamaru Usman
• Matt Allen

Companies mentioned

• Pet Loo
• PetSafe
• Google
• Snapchat
• UPG (United Pet Group)
• AWS
• BYOG
• LA Lakers
• Everlab
• Lululemon
• Porsche
• Side Stage Ventures
• Playbook Ventures

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

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