Reboot

Chapter 10Can we please move the status quo? Thanks.

Australia was very new to developing online retail when we started out in 2009, but, a few years in, Australian consumers were showing that they truly had no fear around buying online. I had read in various news articles that Australia, despite having a relatively small population, was the second-biggest market for both Net-a-Porter and ASOS.com.

Unlike in the United States, Australia did not have an existing culture of catalogue buying so there wasn't a solid process or standard already in place for purchasing something and having it delivered to your door. There were no suppliers for online image photography, for example. We were all figuring out by trial and error what e-commerce best practice was.

There also wasn't an established, accessible ecosystem for entrepreneurs. Venture capital funds were few and far between, and at the time their cheque size and valuations were known to be typically lower than that of their US counterparts. There weren't yet co-working spaces, incubators or much in the way of fostering entrepreneurs at the seed stage.

So we needed to build and figure out everything for ourselves — we needed to move forward without a map. We read books, we watched videos online, we read blogs. We talked to people with expertise in the areas where we felt we needed help.

One of the places where the Australian system needed to catch up to support this new e-commerce economy was in our banking system, which didn't ...