My guest for Ep186 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Rohen Sood.

Rohen is a General Partner at the Reinventure Group, a Venture Capital fund with a dedicated focus on Fintech companies.

Reinventure raised $150M across 3 funds, with the bank, Westpac, being an anchor LP in the fund to invest into emerging global fintech companies.

This led to an investment in Coinbase as part of their $75M Series C raise when the company was just 30 months old and had 2.3M users. Reinventure Fund 1 held 1.2M shares of Coinbase which yielded $546M gross gain.

Reinventure sold half its stake, following Coinbase’s IPO in 2021 which provided it’s LP, Westpac, with a $288M gain on the Coinbase investment alone.

This is Rohen’s first ever podcast interview and in this wide ranging interview we covered everything from:

• the benefits and drawbacks from having Westpac as an LP of the fund
• the story behind their Coinbase investment
• thematic vs generalist investing
• Rohen’s personal journey from Investment Associate to General Partner at Reinventure over the last 10 years
• & much more

Timestamps

• 1:37 Rohen’s background
• 8:23 The path from engineering to management consulting to venture capital
• 15:48 The early days of venture capital in Australia
• 25:29 Thematic vs generalist investing
• 27:21 Navigating founder/investor dynamics
• 32:45 Reinventure’s investment into Coinbase
• 39:47 How he builds conviction in ideas
• 44:36 How he assesses founders and opportunities
• 47:03 Rohen’s 10 year journey with Reinventure
• 55:55 Learnings from going through his first cycle in venture

Our partners

A big thank you to Simon Cant, Paul Weingarth and Damir Cuca 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

Rohen’s links

• Rohen’s LinkedIn
• Rohen’s Twitter/X
• Reinventure

People mentioned

• Maxine Minter
• Paul Weingarth
• Simon Cant
• Danny Gilligan
• Damir Cuca

Companies mentioned

• Blackbird
• Airtree
• Square Peg
• SocietyOne
• Westpac
• Coinbase
• Union Square Ventures
• Draper Associates
• Auror
• Slyp
• Basiq

Feedback/connect/say hello:

[email protected]
@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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