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Ruslan Kogan

@ruslankogan • 12,100 subscribers

Tech connoisseur. Founder and CEO of @Kogan

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Anya Rossi

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What sort of Australia are we building? What are we trying to incentivise? What do we want our country to look like in 10, 20, 30 years time?

What sort of Australia are we building? What are we trying to incentivise? What do we want our country to look like in 10, 20, 30 years time?

8,904,437 views • 1 month ago

Company culture isn’t written in a document. It can be found in small invoices. After I posted a video washing my t-shirts in a hotel bathtub, a lot of people told me: “Hotels aren’t targeting you. They’re targeting the corporate credit card, and your own team is probably expensing it." That comment gets to the absolute heart of culture. At Kogan.com , we don’t need a 50-page corporate travel policy. Our policy is much simpler: Spend the company’s money the exact same way you would spend your own. Because every dollar we spend ultimately belongs to our customers and shareholders. This reminds me of a meetup we hosted years ago. A team member needed to order 100 pizzas for our guests. They simply called a shop and ordered 100 pizzas at the normal, full retail menu price. 🍕 That’s not how we think. If you’re ordering 100 pizzas, you don’t pay 100x the price of one pizza. You call the best-reviewed local shops and ask: “I want to order 100 pizzas. What’s the best deal you can do?” Then you compare quality, price, and service, and make a commercially minded decision. That’s not being cheap. That’s forcing efficiency and creating a win-win. Small invoices reveal big cultural truths. Laundry bills. Pizza orders. Flights. Hotels. Software subscriptions. The small stuff is never just small stuff. What do you think? Do companies need strict, detailed expense policies, or should a strong culture make the right decisions obvious? 👇

Company culture isn’t written in a document. It can be found in small invoices. After I posted a video washing my t-shirts in a hotel bathtub, a lot of people told me: “Hotels aren’t targeting you. They’re targeting the corporate credit card, and your own team is probably expensing it." That comment gets to the absolute heart of culture. At Kogan.com , we don’t need a 50-page corporate travel policy. Our policy is much simpler: Spend the company’s money the exact same way you would spend your own. Because every dollar we spend ultimately belongs to our customers and shareholders. This reminds me of a meetup we hosted years ago. A team member needed to order 100 pizzas for our guests. They simply called a shop and ordered 100 pizzas at the normal, full retail menu price. 🍕 That’s not how we think. If you’re ordering 100 pizzas, you don’t pay 100x the price of one pizza. You call the best-reviewed local shops and ask: “I want to order 100 pizzas. What’s the best deal you can do?” Then you compare quality, price, and service, and make a commercially minded decision. That’s not being cheap. That’s forcing efficiency and creating a win-win. Small invoices reveal big cultural truths. Laundry bills. Pizza orders. Flights. Hotels. Software subscriptions. The small stuff is never just small stuff. What do you think? Do companies need strict, detailed expense policies, or should a strong culture make the right decisions obvious? 👇

812,977 views • 21 days ago

I never thought I'd be posting a video from a hotel bathroom 🤯 I refuse to pay $20 to wash a $10 t-shirt. It doesn't matter what kind of hotel I'm staying at. Instead, the bath tub becomes a makeshift laundromat. My family came to Australia in 1989 with $90. Growing up, I watched my parents meticulously stretch every single dollar. That approach to frugality didn't just shape me personally, it became the DNA of Kogan.com We view it as our duty to our customers and shareholders to respect every dollar we're entrusted with. That means always comparing pink lady apples with pink lady apples and making value choices. Naturally, this drives our core strategy: push prices down to drive volume up. Lower prices actually make us more profitable. Which brings me back to hotel laundry. I can't help but think hotels are shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring basic price elasticity. By inflating the price of a basic necessity, they completely kill their volume. If they just charged a reasonable amount for laundry services, they'd capture the massive hidden demand. What do you think? If hotels halved the price of laundry, would demand 10x?

I never thought I'd be posting a video from a hotel bathroom 🤯 I refuse to pay $20 to wash a $10 t-shirt. It doesn't matter what kind of hotel I'm staying at. Instead, the bath tub becomes a makeshift laundromat. My family came to Australia in 1989 with $90. Growing up, I watched my parents meticulously stretch every single dollar. That approach to frugality didn't just shape me personally, it became the DNA of Kogan.com We view it as our duty to our customers and shareholders to respect every dollar we're entrusted with. That means always comparing pink lady apples with pink lady apples and making value choices. Naturally, this drives our core strategy: push prices down to drive volume up. Lower prices actually make us more profitable. Which brings me back to hotel laundry. I can't help but think hotels are shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring basic price elasticity. By inflating the price of a basic necessity, they completely kill their volume. If they just charged a reasonable amount for laundry services, they'd capture the massive hidden demand. What do you think? If hotels halved the price of laundry, would demand 10x?

752,941 views • 22 days ago

In our $KGN earnings call today, it sounded like it's David Shafer and I presenting but it wasn't. Our voices were AI generated and read the script. We uploaded several hours of our prior talks to train our voice model and the results were pretty incredible. This saved us a few hours preparation - valuable time we could spend working on other areas of the business. This is an example of the many one percenters across our business where AI is making us more efficient and helping the team be more productive. Our marketing team uses it to improve our content and make it more enaging. Our Engineering team uses it to get more context of our entire code base quicker and produce production ready code more rapidly. Our purchasing teams are using it for data and trend analysis to bring the latest products to our customers at even better prices. The list goes on. While the productivity gains are exciting, what's even more exciting is the pace at which things are changing and the technology is getting better!

In our $KGN earnings call today, it sounded like it's David Shafer and I presenting but it wasn't. Our voices were AI generated and read the script. We uploaded several hours of our prior talks to train our voice model and the results were pretty incredible. This saved us a few hours preparation - valuable time we could spend working on other areas of the business. This is an example of the many one percenters across our business where AI is making us more efficient and helping the team be more productive. Our marketing team uses it to improve our content and make it more enaging. Our Engineering team uses it to get more context of our entire code base quicker and produce production ready code more rapidly. Our purchasing teams are using it for data and trend analysis to bring the latest products to our customers at even better prices. The list goes on. While the productivity gains are exciting, what's even more exciting is the pace at which things are changing and the technology is getting better!

814,106 views • 11 months ago

"Go f*ck yourself" is what recruiters will probably say after watching this... I deserve it. Never outsource your core competencies. There is nothing more important than the people you hire to obsess over your customers, which is why I still review the hiring for every single head office role.

"Go f*ck yourself" is what recruiters will probably say after watching this... I deserve it. Never outsource your core competencies. There is nothing more important than the people you hire to obsess over your customers, which is why I still review the hiring for every single head office role.

88,607 views • 1 month ago

Wanking From Home? The hard truth about the WFH debate: it’s hurting the people who think they want it the most. Young grads are missing out on crucial moments of learning, networking, and organic growth that you just can't get from clicking into a video call. Let's be honest: the people making the biggest fuss about WFH are usually the ones you least want on your team. Top performers just want to get the job done, with a bit of flexibility along the way. Are we doing young professionals a massive disservice? #WFH #WorkFromHome #CareerAdvice #BusinessTruths #OfficeLife #CorporateCulture

Wanking From Home? The hard truth about the WFH debate: it’s hurting the people who think they want it the most. Young grads are missing out on crucial moments of learning, networking, and organic growth that you just can't get from clicking into a video call. Let's be honest: the people making the biggest fuss about WFH are usually the ones you least want on your team. Top performers just want to get the job done, with a bit of flexibility along the way. Are we doing young professionals a massive disservice? #WFH #WorkFromHome #CareerAdvice #BusinessTruths #OfficeLife #CorporateCulture

16,365 views • 14 days ago

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