Tech Billionaire Kogan Chooses Mother's Table Over Fine Dining

Ruslan Kogan is worth about $300 million, down from $575 million at the pandemic's peak. He has just cut his own salary by roughly $800,000 as part of a share incentive scheme. When asked to name his favourite restaurant for this conversation, he does something most executives never do: he asks to eat at his mother's house.

The Belarusian-born tech founder, now 43, arrived in Australia in 1989 with his family—his parents Alex and Irene, and his sister Svetlana—carrying $90 and nothing else. They had fled the Soviet Union for a country where, as a six-year-old, he had never seen a banana or a pineapple. The family first settled in housing commission flats in Elsternwick, a working-class corner of south-east Melbourne. Today, Irene and Alex live in Toorak, one of Melbourne's wealthiest suburbs, in a home that resembles, by Kogan's own description, a scaled-down British Museum. Gravel crunches under foot as visitors pass two Teslas on the way to the grand portico.

When Kogan speaks about his mother's cooking—the 18-hour slow-cooked brisket he tends with obsessive precision, the chicken soup he ranks among the world's best—he is describing something more than food. "When I've been overseas, and no matter how much fine dining we've had in restaurants, as soon as I get back to Melbourne, what you've got in front of you is exactly what I'm craving," he says. At lunch, Irene serves chicken soup with carrots and parsley-flecked noodles, followed by kotleti—moist pan-fried chicken cutlets—alongside pickles, buckwheat, and Olivier salad. For dessert, nalisniki, crêpes with jam. His wife Anastasia, a marketer and philanthropist involved with the Melbourne Opera and Arts Centre Melbourne, sits beside him in a pink jumper and jeans, matching Irene's outfit, both women delighted by the coincidence.

Kogan founded kogan.com in 2006 after working at Telstra and Accenture, frustrated by the difficulty of buying a decent television. He started the business on credit cards. His parents' journey shaped his hunger to build. His father, a major projects engineer in the Soviet Union, worked as a pizza delivery driver, at Queen Victoria Market, and in a sponge factory. His mother, who held medical qualifications, worked in cafes and as a cleaner. Kogan began his own entrepreneurial life at ten, cleaning and reselling discarded golf balls at a local golf club. "What it takes to be an immigrant is very similar to what it takes to be an entrepreneur," he reflects. "During my most formative years, I witnessed my parents drop everything they've got in the Soviet Union, take a massive risk, travel into the unknown, work their butt off for a potential benefit that might not be there."

He remembers June 29, 1989, the day they arrived. At his cousin's house in Carnegie, a south-eastern suburb, his cousin showed him a computer. They played Space Invaders. For the six-year-old, it was mind-blowing. He went on to Melbourne High School, a selective government school, where classmates noted his ability to move comfortably between vastly different worlds. In 2010, at Justin Hemmes' Ivy bar in Sydney, drunk and convinced he had spotted a Russian woman, he approached her with certainty. She replied: "I can tell with 100 per cent certainty you're an idiot." That woman was Anastasia. Sixteen years later, they have three children—two daughters and a son.

Kogan runs marathons, often along the Yarra or the Tan track around the Royal Botanic Gardens, without phone or headphones, only his Garmin fitness tracker recording progress. He ran the 2022 Paris marathon in four hours and 44 minutes. "There's something about running that has always been really attractive," he says. "A form of meditation almost." On these runs, he listens to conversations around him, and increasingly hears people talking about the cost of living. The squeeze suits his business: cost-conscious consumers compare prices more carefully, and kogan.com benefits. He believes Australia must foster entrepreneurship because the nation has limited natural resources but one unlimited one—the human mind.

The company rode both zenith and nadir during COVID-19 lockdowns. At one stage, kogan.com's market capitalisation exceeded Myer's by more than ten times. But the comedown was severe: massive overstocking forced price slashing and created a business crisis. The market caps are now similar. Kogan prefers to look forward. He deploys an AI avatar to deliver annual results presentations to investors, a more efficient use of his time than re-recording when forecasts change. He believes artificial intelligence will help customers find deals on his website. "Not only are we surviving," he says. "We're thriving. We are winning market share against global organisations who are many times bigger than us." His rise has not been without controversy—a long-standing feud with rival retailer Gerry Harvey, a "work from home" comment he later regretted, and a joke about the Australian cricket team's sandpaper scandal that tied it to Caitlyn Jenner, which offended some. When asked how he feels about it now, he pauses and looks out over the manicured lawn. "My parents went through a lot of shit to escape a place without freedom of speech," he replies. He admits he may have done a poor job trying to be funny. "That's one of the leading indicators to a decline in a free society," he says, "when comedians need to start apologising."