Rohan Workman knows what it takes to be a technology start-up founder.

12 years ago, he started a company he called RosterCloud, a cloud-based staff management tool for events and catering businesses and sold his beloved blue Volkswagen Polo to fund it. For many months, while house-sitting for a friend, he ate eggs on toast as his main meal of the day as he waited for his first bill to be paid.

Workman had started the business after turning his back on a promising career at insolvency firm McGrath Nicol, where he spent three years at the height of the Global Financial Crisis.

“I learned what a professional firm looked and felt like. But I wanted to be at the other end of the business life cycle and was keen to have a crack at doing something on my own. After I quit McGrath Nicol, I didn’t appreciate that when you start a company, there is a long lead time till you make your revenue,” he now says.

“Your first customer paying your first bill is the biggest thrill. I now have a deeper sense of empathy with founders and an understanding of some of the challenges that get thrown at them in terms of raising capital.”

While he was trying to get RosterCloud off the ground, Workman also took a part-time role at Melbourne University in 2012. It became full time a year later when he joined the University’sAccelerator program known as MAP, developed as a mechanism to back young and bright entrepreneurial graduates.

RosterCloud remained a side-hustle for Workman for the next three years until 2016 when he sold his stake in the company for a handsome sum. A year later he resigned from the University and founded a firm called Skalata Ventures with former Toll Holdings founder and CEO Paul Little, Darrell Wade and Martin Adams. Then Reserve Bank of Australia director Carol Schwartz was a foundation director.

Skalata’s first fund offered up to $250,000 to early-stage ventures and backed firms such as financial literacy platform Flux and digital freight forwarder software company Explorate.

In 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic, it morphed into being a stand-alone, for-profit company with a high-powered board boasting relationships across the Victorian university sector. Little remains chairman.

Skalata now vets, invest in, and mentors business talent coming out of top universities and works collaboratively with them to support early-stage companies.

The VC had its first 10x+ investment mark-up with Preezie, a B2B eCommerce platform enabling guided online shopping experiences.

“Skalata is trying to create the level of funding that wasn’t around when I started my business.”

One of Skalata’s first employees was Maxine Lee, the firm’s inaugural chief operating officer. She met Workman when she was previously in charge of running the accelerator at MAP and at Skalata has been responsible for all founder-facing activities since inception.

“A big reason why I came across to Skalata is that Rohan has the big ideas, he has this enduring commitment to any vision he sets out to accomplish. He has also been able to rally incredible people around him to accomplish a goal,” she says.

“What I bring to the relationship is someone with a lot of stoic resolve, optimism and someone who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty.”

Workman says they are not afraid to have difficult conversations.

“The depth of trust between us means we can move through challenges quickly. A lot of my role is external facing so there is a good dynamic with Max that I can know the home base is taken care of while I am doing that. She can break down challenges, pragmatically implement and operationalise things,” he says.

Skalata’s biggest challenge came during COVID, when its cash runway was dwindling and the world pivoted from face-to-face to virtual relationships, mostly previously alien to venture capital. Workman and Lee moved to restructure the business and raised $7 million.

The latter says the key to navigating the difficult times was working with people she could trust and had high integrity.

“Putting your ego aside and being willing to have hard conversations when the chips are down is very important.”

“I’ve learned a lot about vulnerability and honesty over the past 10 years. I’ve learnt from Rohan’s style of leadership to put people first,” she says.

“Through all of the mistakes we have made, we have learned what doesn’t work, so we can narrow our focus down to the things we know might work,” says Workman.

Now as a fully-fledged seed venture capital firm, versus previously being a seed investment program, Skalata is currently deploying its Fund II raised in 2021.

Workman says its investment criteria values founders having unique insights into the industry in which they operating, plus a curiosity to solve its problems. But he says their most important attributes must be humility and self-awareness.

“The most successful people I have worked with know the power of their personal brand, but they are aware of where they are weak and they bring people in to cover them off in that area.”

“Sometimes in early-stage companies, people wrap up their own self esteem in their business. They put up this facade that they want every thing to be perfect. It isn’t.”

Lee says a big part of successful early-stage investing is also about supporting a team.

“We test that team dynamic in any founder meeting we go into and support the founders who take a customer centric approach to what they are doing,” she says.

“We are looking for people who have the resilience and endurance to get it right, pivot their model when required and have the tenacity and vision to do that.”In total so far Skalata has made 57 investments, half of which are in Victoria. The rest are spread across the nation.

Five years on, Paul Little continues to be an inspiration to Lee and Workman. The former says the billionaire has taught her to be prepared to back herself, to go after the biggest opportunity as opposed to aiming low and limiting yourself in your potential. But Workman most admires the way Little “holds himself” in business.

“It is no surprise he has had the success he has had. He surrounds himself with capable people and thinks at a very high level,” he says.

“He is very strategic in the way he thinks through challenges. He always keeps that long term vision and view. It helps us stay on course.”