From the very beginning he felt like an entrepreneur. He knew the only way he could have something was there and it. He taught himself to think outside the box and after a string of ventures while still in his teen years. His challenge to the status quo continues to this day. I invited this high flair to flyer to join us in the singapore flyer to tell us about his past, present and ambitious future. Haslinda welcome to high flyers. You have this big idea, this lightbulb moment while shopping for an lcd tv at age 23. Ruslan the roots for the idea came when i was studying in miami. I noticed all the local kids were buying everything online. And were buying it for much cheaper prices than all the international students. We would go to walmart to buy our stuff because that is what the university told us. They are buying things online for much cheaper and i realized a small online retailer can operate with greater efficiency than a goliath like walmart. A few months or years later in australia i was searching and looking to buy an lcd tv. I saw that i could not afford one. They were really expensive at the time. I decided to contact some companies out of china to tell them i want to buy 100,000 tvs, hoping that would give me a quote and then i could ask him for a sample and a sample was going to be my tv. When they started providing quotes and pricing, i saw there was a huge gap in the market. A tv was about 1000. It was selling the shops are for about 3000. I noticed that gap and i thought back to my days in miami and i i thought online tvs are a perfect product because online retailers are about maximum value per cubic centimeter. Here you are shipping a thin box around the country, perfect for logistics, perfect for everything. I quit my job and started importing tvs. Haslinda it wasnt that easy as that because you needed convince the chinese suppliers to provide you with a small number of tvs and other products as well. How did you convince them . Ruslan things came to a halt pretty quickly. After i chose the factory to work with i contacted them and said i dont want to do in order for 100,000 tvs. I just want to do one container of 80 tvs. And they laughed at me. I was in a tough position because i quit my job, when to went to start this business, but the factories are telling me no, we can do 80 tvs because china is about mass production. Haslinda you did something for them first . Ruslan to me business is about winwin. How can i make this winwin . Out of all the factories i have spoken to in china, even these multibilliondollar organizations, a lot of their marketing material was in chinglish. It didnt make sense. Their spreadsheets had numbers censored. I really dont like it when people sensor numbers. Numbers need to be right in line with two decimal places. I read it all of this for them. I redid their marketing brochures. I translated into english. I inserted diagrams of the user manuals. I annotated it. I made it look like a professional western document and i sent it back to them and said it might not be of any value for you in my tiny order of 80 tvs, but there are other ways i can add value to this transaction. As a result of that they replied a few hours later, thanking me and they excepted by order and gave me a better price than we have previously negotiated. Haslinda not everybody is buying into this kogan. Com story. You have a lot of criticisms. Some say you dont respect intellectual property rights. The biggest criticism came from jerry harvey. He says you are a con. Everything you promised is a con. Your response . Ruslan to get that sort of reaction out of jerry, i take that as a compliment. [laughter] haslinda is there truth in that . Ruslan that we are a con . We operate a business with millions of customers in a country with an amazing legal system. If we were a con, we wouldve been found out by now. Instead we have millions of happy customers. We believe we respect all intellectual property law. Weve never have had anyone prove otherwise. But there is no doubt we are going to have critics. We are changing the way retail is done in australia. Haslinda your mom was not convinced. When you tried to start your own company you had a fulltime job. She said why are you leaving a wellpaying job to be a tv salesman . Ruslan not only did she say that, she started crying. It was tough because im trying to explain to a crying mother im not really got to be a tv salesman. Im starting a direct to Consumer Online retailer where we manufacturer our own private label products. And deliver them with better prices. She did not really understand that. Now she understands what we do and she no longer cries and she is very happy. Back then it was tough to convince her. In fact, i didnt convince her. I had to go out on a limb and do what i thought was right. Haslinda what is the biggest setback you have faced . Ruslan i should have bought kogan. Com domain on day one. We did not buy kogan. Com. We expanded internationally, then i had to buy kogan. Com for a number with a lot of zeros on the end. That was a mistake. I have learned how important intellectual property is. And how important it is to protect all of your intellectual property. Mistakes happen along the way. The most important thing is that every mistake you learn you you learn the hard truth, you acknowledge the facts, then you ensure it never happens again. Coming up ruslan when the social Network Movie came out, everybody wanted to be an entrepreneur. Which is weird. I didnt watch spiderman and thought i wanted to be a spider. Haslinda you essentially equate unconventional. Anyone looking for a job at the with you better not be sending in his or her resume the via hotmail. Why . Ruslan somebody he was using hotmail, chances are they set their email address up 15 years ago and have just never bothered to look at what else is out there. Newer technologies have come along like gmail that lets you search email much easier which we use internally in our organization. Also, we look favorably of people that have their own domain name. If you can purchase their name. Com and use that as an email. We want tech savvy people. We want people who know how to Research Online and keep up with technology. To swim against the current. And that is one of those little things. Like your email address we believe says a lot about you. We have proven it. We have logical reasoning tests. Tests that we send to everybody who applies for a job. Haslinda is it true to say that the typical profile of your employee is either the gen y and millennials . Ruslan people who grew up with the internet are much more likely to succeed when they apply for a job at kogan then if they dont know how to use the internet. Haslinda the average age is 26 . Ruslan 26 or 27 is about average. 32 i amone of the one of the oldest staff. Haslinda you dont believe in official training, formal training because you say all the answers are right there. Google. Ruslan correct. We think formal training is for people that want to look like they are learning, whereas google is for people that actually want to learn. For a lot of our senior managers formal training is not an option because most of the things we are doing, no formal training exists. By the time something gets into a University Degree or some sort of formal training it is old information. Whereas if a new piece of Software Comes out today, you can learn about it tomorrow on google. And we are solving problems for the first time. That is why we need to teach our staff not to rely on others for information, but they go out there and get it themselves. Haslinda you dont reward employees in the natural way. There is no onetimer you look at promoting them or reward them as compensation. Anyone is able to walk up to you and justify a promotion. Ruslan when i worked in the corporate world i learned a lot about what not to do to keep staff motivated and to build a great workforce. One of those was to do the annual review process where once a year in september you sit down with your boss and they discuss things to make them give you justify a 5 pay rise. All of a sudden in august everyone is there at 7 00 a. M. And going home at 9 00 p. M. And working so hard. Your pay review and nobody is there in october. So we learned to run in a meritocracy. Any staff member, whether you are male or female, what University Degree you have, we care about University Degrees when we hire you because a degree means you can read and write and you can commit to something for three or four years. But beyond that we dont care what you have done in your previous jobs. We care about what you are doing right now. As a result of this meritocracy we have had staff who have had six pay raises in six months. There was a 19yearold with six pay raises in his first six months, earning six digits on the Senior Management team. We value when your actual performance is rather than any other external bureaucratic measures. Haslinda nine years ago when you started it was one store. Nine years later it is still one store but you have grown from one employee to almost 200. How big do you think kogan will become . Ruslan you were spot on. One year ago 19 nine years ago one store. , in 10 years time we will still have one store. We are about scalability. We are building the Online Presence and we will scale it from there. If he said to me five years ago how big will kogan be in five time, i would not have guessed it is where it is today. Being a retailer in turning over hundreds of millions of dollars. If he said to me where is it going to be five years time, i am not even brave enough to have a guess. Haslinda when did you know you had Something Big . What was the turning point . Ruslan the business started by selling a true kogan brand of tvs. Then it grew. When we started that growth and i realized this Business Model works for whatever product we decide to put through our manufacturing, our supply chain and our logistics. At that point i realized the Growth Potential of this business is enormous. Haslinda a 1 billion company in a couple of years, is that possible . Ruslan if you drew the graph of what was done in the last nine years, you would have a set of billion dollars within the next five years. Haslinda more and more people are calling themselves entrepreneur. Do you think the market has been diluted by it all . Ruslan ive never called myself an entrepreneur as such. Its more a title that others call me. My Facebook Says i am the toilet paper roll changer because i still change the toilet paper rolls. You still have to do everything in a business when it is growing fast. When the social Network Movie came out i think that it made entrepreneurship more glamorous. Everybody wants it and said going by this movie two hours ago Mark Zuckerberg had zero and now hes got tens of billions of dollars and everybody wanted to be an entrepreneur after that movie. Which is weird. I did not watch spiderman and decide i wanted to be a spider. That movie made entrepreneurship glamorous. I think thats a great thing because what people failed to acknowledge a lot of the time is the contribution business makes to society. There was an entrepreneur losing sleep over every product and service losing sleep over how they can make it better. Haslinda how much sleep did you lose . Ruslan i dont the guy lost any think i have lost any sleep. I voluntarily jump out of sleep every single morning. It is tough. Ive had at conferences people coming up to me and say things like, you know what . I want to be an entrepreneur like you. I am sick and tired of the 40 hour week. That makes me laugh on the inside. The last time i did a 40 hour week was when i was in the corporate world. Haslinda you do up to 100 hours a week . Ruslan sometimes even more. Usually between 70 and 100 hours per week mark. The best thing about it is i love what im doing. I jumped out of bed in the middle of the night and i run to my laptop to write myself an email. It doesnt always make my girlfriend happy, but its a great feeling when you love what you do. Coming up ruslan you get addicted to the game and thats what makes me jump out of bed in the morning. Haslinda yours is a perfect immigrant story. Your parents met in russia and came to australia in 1989 which with just 90 in their pockets. They had a hard life to ensure you had a better one. Ruslan definitely. I appreciate it so much more now that ive grown up and i get to understand what they went through. I also now credit a lot of what i have achieved with kogan with the life lessons they taught me. Because when you think about what it takes to be an immigrant or an entrepreneur, its very similar. To be an immigrant you have to take a massive risk, travel into the unknown, work your butt off for a potential benefit that might not be there. And entrepreneurs do the exact same thing. Watching my parents arrived with 90 in work three or four jobs each my dad worked as a taxi driver in the night and deliver pizzas and worked at the victoria market. Mom and be a cleaner at one cafe and a waitress at another. They were studying english at the same time, trying to educate themselves for a better life for their kids. It made me have an incredible work ethic and determination. I knew from a very young age that i can do anything as long as i work my butt off to do it. Haslinda mom qualified medically. Dad, an engineer by training. How did you feel seeing your dad and mom holding those jobs when they were highly qualified back home . Ruslan i was five and a half years old. It did not really click with me. I didnt understand dad has a masters in engineering and here he is driving a taxi or working at the victoria market. The same with mom. It just does not click. You learn to appreciate those things as you get older and you reminisce about it. I think about it now and i think thank them every single day for what they did. Haslinda in the early days you lived in Public Housing . Ruslan grew up in the Housing Commission flats in melbourne. Haslinda and you always crossed the canal. Tell us about that canal and how significant it is. Ruslan its significant in the sense that as a little kid all the bigger kids were jumping over it. I would always climb the bar large wire fence barb fence and try to jump it. I would come home with wet shoes and all of that and finally managed to jump over it. Also it ran to the golf course. You would find washed up golf balls and along the fence line. I would like them, put them in, wash them and then sell them back to the golfers. That was the first money i ever earned myself. Haslinda you have actually started about 20 or so ventures. That was the start of your entrepreneurship experience. Ruslan from a young age my parents taught me if i want something, i have to earn it. So with the golf balls it wasnt big money. It was like 10 or 20 a weekend, but at the age of nine that makes you pimp of the milk bar. Whenever i would go to the shops elected by whatever cant yet wanted. Candy i wanted. After that it led to my parents giving me five dollars to wash their car. Until we were at a Shopping Center and i saw a big billboard that said car wash, halfprice only 40. I thought hang on a second, im getting ripped off here. These businessll cards and dropped them around the neighborhood. I went to all the houses and packed a hose with a few sponges into a backpack and people would pay me 15 to watch their car. Then started taking bookings and i hired some of my friends because i couldnt do it all on my own. And there was phone repair, website design through high school. There has always been a lot of injuries along the way. Along the way. It all, needed in kogan. Com, my baby. Haslinda you are worth about 350 million and counting. One of the richest young people in australia. Has life changed . Ruslan certain things changed. Like i never got to go into the high flyer before and here we are seeing all of singapore. I fly at the front of the airplane now. Drive a nice car. Live in saint kilde. Its a modest apartment but the money hasnt really changed. I love fishing. I wish the fish knew how much money was in my bank account but they dont. I dont catch any more. Haslinda isnt a cliche to say money does not matter when you already have money . Ruslan when you look at Business People around the world, like steve jobs kept going up until he had a few weeks left. Why . Because he wanted the money . What is Richard Branson turning up to work at the moment . Because he really wants the money . Why is Rupert Murdoch working . Because he really wants the money . I could have whatever i want. My kids will never have to work a day in their life and their kids and their kids. You get addicted to the game and you love the challenge. And entrepreneurs create all the products and services that enhance our lives. And they thrive on competition. That is what makes me jump out of bed in the morning. Haslinda speaking of Richard Branson, you put a down payment of 200,000 to go to outer space . Ruslan when i saw the Virgin GalacticProgram Launch it struck a few chords with me. One was that as a little kid you say you want to be an astronaut by the time he reached 10 or 15 years old you realize it will not happen. Then at about the age of 28 i realized again it might happen. It struck a chord with me. Both russia and the u. S. Have sent 498 people into space. They have spent over 500 billion on their space programs. That is over 1 billion per person into space. Richard branson is doing it for 200,000. Im a capitalist. I love free markets. This is a perfect symbol of what a private enterprise can achieve and what government can achieve. Richard branson is sending people into space for 1 5,000th of the cost of what other governments have done. Based on that i felt an affinity to the program. That is why i joined. Haslinda mom is not liking the idea of you going to space . Ruslan she despises the idea. Mom keeps telling me youre not going to go as long as im alive. Yeah. She really doesnt like the idea. But i might have to do what i did with skydiving with her. Where i flew to new zealand saying i have a few business meeting and she saw the video on youtube and nearly killed me. She told me nothing go skydiving. I might just tell her im going camping in the mojave desert. We will see what happens. Haslinda you are a lot of things to a lot of people. How would you like to be remembered . Ruslan how would i like to b