His family arrived in Australia from Belarus with $90 in 1989. Today entrepreneur Ruslan Kogan is worth $320 million.
He has built his brand of electronics, Kogan.com, into one of the country's best performing businesses with blinding speed.
Not bad for a boy from Belarus who liberated himself from the shackles of communism to become a king of capitalism.
“There’s crazy laws there like you must still have a portrait of the president at the front entrance of every business. We definitely don’t have a portrait of Tony Abbott at the front door of Kogan.”
His first enterprise in Australia was collecting discarded golf balls near his family's public housing flat in Melbourne's southeast. Then cleaning them and selling them back to golfers.
The entrepreneurial bug bit and by age 23 the enterprising upstart came up with a business model for feeding Australia's love affair with plasma TVs by buying bargain basement electronics from China.
"They don’t really teach supply and demand or economies of scale in communist schools or universities," he said.
Ruslan Kogan credits Australia's freedoms and values with allowing him to follow his dream and live a life unimaginable in Belarus.
If anyone is dreaming of emulating his success - here's a quick tip: “My main advice to newcomers is: you’ve entered an amazing country, a free country, a prosperous country, a land of opportunity. Don’t try to bring where you escaped from to Australia. Come to Australia to become Australian.”
