When he was about 10 years old he spotted discarded golf balls along the fence of a golf course close to the Melbourne housing commission flats he and his family called home after leaving Belarus a few years earlier.
“We made the decision, when it was all going nuts that, ‘hey, this is going to continue’,” Kogan tells the podcast. “Now, obviously, that changed. And we pay the consequences for those decisions.” “The internet was starting to become a thing, we had eBay and you could buy a second-hand something on eBay, but e-commerce was unheard of in Australia,” he says.Side hustle selling TVsIn his spare time, he started working out how to get himself a flat screen TV without having to pay $4000 the big name retailers were selling them for. He discovered there were only a handful of LCD panel manufacturers, despite there being thousands of TV brands.
He didn’t have the capital to set up stores. But he knew he could sell them online. After his request to take leave without pay was knocked back, he threw in his job at Accenture and, within a week, was taking pre-sales orders for TVs.“I didn’t see it as risky because I think that if you look at the concept of supply and demand, as long as there are two people in Australia that want the TV, it’s going to get the right price,” he says.
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