Catch of the Decade

CHAPTER 10The Catch culture

We've never understood why employees who leave the corporate sector to set up their own business often drag with them the exact culture they were trying to escape. Why would you take so much risk and invest so much time and energy only to recreate the same bullshit atmosphere that you hated in the first place? Most of us spend more than one‐third of our lives at work (maybe more!) so it makes sense to create a workplace culture that excites you and your team.

By mid 2013, it was obvious that we were successful in creating a place where people wanted to work—maybe too successful, as we now had 400 people crammed into three sites around the suburbs of Melbourne. To say this wasn't ideal was an understatement, and the problem wasn't going to go away. We were still hiring like crazy and we had nowhere for them to sit! The workplaces were bursting at the seams.

The fact our office and warehouse locations were not located in the hipster suburbs of Richmond and South Melbourne—where the millennial technerati prefer to work from—said volumes about our culture. Despite our daggy suburban locations, we attracted the best and the brightest from around the country and they didn't mind working far from the epicentres of disruption because they loved working for us. So, as we looked for a new home for all of our businesses under one roof, we were fortunate that we didn't feel the need to move to one of those expensive innovation hubs. We could go where we had ...