MR MATT ROCKMAN

Co-founder & CEO of Australia’s #1 Job Site

Partner, SquarePeg Capital
Director, Zanden Global Inc
Board Director, Nexthire (2011-2013)
Unit: Identify & Evaluate Marketing Opportunities
Topic: Evaluate Required Changes to Current Operations

When Matt Rockman co-founded the employment, recruitment and training website SEEK in 1997, advertising was dominated by the print media. Rockman and his SEEK co-founders took on the newspapers and turned the “rivers of gold” that had fed Fairfax and News Corporation into a fortune of their own: by the time Rockman exited the business in 2006, SEEK had a market capitalisation of more than $1 billion and had completely transformed the advertising landscape. Rockman remains a long-term shareholder in Australia’s number one job site, which attracts more than 30 million visits each month across all devices and platforms. With a current market capitalisation of nearly $6 billion, SEEK aims to be the global leader in online employment.

Today Rockman is an investor, tech entrepreneur and philanthropist. As a partner and investor at Square Peg Capital, a director at Zanden Global Inc, and chief of Zanden Ventures, Rockman backs people and companies across a range of sectors in Asia, the USA and beyond, and has a particular interest in high-growth tech companies. When making investment decisions, he brings to bear his exceptional skills in developing and supporting entrepreneurship.

Rockman grew up in a business-oriented family: his grandfather, Norman Rockman, established the clothing store chain that still bears his name, and his father, Irvin Rockman, was Melbourne lord mayor for several years of Matt Rockman’s childhood. Rockman studied business at Monash University and began his career in the family business, the Eastrock Finance Corporation.