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.