You can break our offering down into three broad areas:

Growth funding: when you join Skalata, you’ll receive $50k to $300k of initial funding, with follow-on rounds available up to $1 million. In return, we’ll receive an equity stake in your business. When you’re ready for more, we’ll introduce you to our fund investors, and handle all the heavy lifting. You’ll never need to look beyond Skalata’s network for growth funding.

Coaching: founders are matched with a dedicated Venture Partner. Someone with deep seed-stage experience. These are founders, investors, operators and SaaS experts. Our Venture Partners provide coaching week-in and week-out.
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Advisory Network: each company also gets access to a network of experienced business leaders, operators and founders. These advisors will help you with governance and discipline within the business. They can also open doors to talent and new customers, or help facilitate international expansion.

Short answer? With a lot of hard work! It’s taken time, trial and error to refine our development process, but we think we’ve got it humming along nicely now. It involves three main ingredients.

‍The team: the Skalata team and board has created, built, advised and exited successful companies across Australia, Asia and the US. We’ve also funded and worked with hundreds of companies at the seed stage for over a decade. It’s literally all we do. Our CEO, Rohan Workman and COO, Maxine Lee were part of the founding team of the first university-based accelerator in Australia (Melbourne Accelerator Program – MAP) back in 2012. 

International best practice: to inform our approach, we used insights from people who run the world’s leading accelerators, seed funds, universities and venture capital firms. These include Y-Combinator, StartX Stanford, Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Techstars, Oxford, Cambridge and Right Side Capital Management, among others. 

Extensive local research: prior to launching Skalata, we conducted five intensive months of customer discovery in Australia and abroad. We interviewed 100+ people, including: pre-seed/seed-stage founders, founders at a later stage (post Series A), and people who invest in or work with early-stage companies. Through these interviews, we uncovered: what early-stage founders need help with, what later-stage founders wish they’d done earlier, and what investors need to see in companies in order to back them.

First week: we spend a lot of time getting to know the founding team, understanding your vision, your goals, and your high-level plans.

Second week: we conduct a deep-dive into what’s worked well in the past (and what needs work moving forward). We also want to know what you're feeling more or less confident about. Next, you’ll meet with our Venture Partners as a team and be allocated a lead point of contact depending on your goals and priorities, and who we think might be the best fit for you.

Third week onward: our venture team will support you within your working style – whether you prefer short check-ins, longer working sessions, or something totally different. It’s all about finding a cadence that suits you. In the first instance, a weekly check-in is usually a good way to go, but this depends on your specific requirements and preferences.

Definitely not! For the same reason that no two companies are the same. The Skalata experience is unique to you and your business. There will always be fundamentals and best-practices to keep in mind, but the goals, challenges and strategies will be tailored exclusively to you.

There are no workshops, no homework and no compulsory lectures. Our support will suit your stage, your cadence, and your growth plans. You’re in the driver’s seat, and you get to manage your own time. The last thing we want to do is micromanage our founders.

Ultimately, to make you a success. But there are a few objectives that can lead to bigger and better things. These include:

Develop a growth engine: helping you achieve your growth targets. We also help you build the team, systems and infrastructure to scale.

Achieve product-market fit: helping you measure where you stand in respect of product-market fit. What it means, and how to optimise it. 

Build a sustainable business model: helping you develop a viable business model with healthy margins and unit economics to ensure consistent, sustainable growth.