The family rule was straightforward: whatever was good enough for Laura and Jordan O’Reilly was good enough for their younger brother, Shane. The same opportunities. The same expectation that he would have something to contribute. Outside the family, the expectations shrank. When school ended, the paths towards work and further study narrowed with it. Laura had grown up taking her brother’s possibilities seriously. She found herself confronting a world that appeared to have misplaced them.
That disagreement became a career. In 2011, Laura and Jordan co-founded Fighting Chance. In 2015, they helped launch Hireup, an online platform through which Australians with disability could choose and manage their support workers. Both ventures grew out of an unusually practical response to exclusion: build an organisation that does the thing you wish already existed. It is a demanding way to express an opinion. An opinion can take the afternoon off; an organisation requires payroll.
A law student with a second occupation
Laura arrived at this work by a route that initially pointed elsewhere. She studied history at Cambridge from 2007 to 2010, graduating with first-class honours, and served as Newnham College’s JCR president in her final academic year. Then came postgraduate law at the University of New South Wales. Her original ambition was human rights law. The attraction makes sense alongside her later work: questions of fairness, who gets heard and whose opportunities are treated as negotiable.
Fighting Chance began while she was studying. At first, there were only two or three people involved in its services. The venture’s early base was her mother’s garage. These are modest beginnings by any reasonable measure, even allowing for the entrepreneurial world’s suspicious affection for garages. What matters is that Laura was trying an answer at a scale she could reach. She could see people missing opportunities, and she had enough capacity to start making some.
“It was never meant to become what it has,” she recalled in 2015. A legal aid placement in South Africa helped clarify the direction of her working life. Legal cases unfolded over long periods; at Fighting Chance, she could see the effect of the work directly. She went on to complete her Juris Doctor with distinction. The legal education remained, but the day job had acquired customers, colleagues and a rather different timetable.
Build more than one door
The useful thing about Fighting Chance is the plural in its business model. It develops social enterprises, allowing different approaches to participation and employment to sit within the same organisation. Laura’s objection to exclusion did not produce a single universal programme. Different people needed different routes. That is a less tidy proposition than a one-size-fits-all solution, which is perhaps why it has room for actual people.
Avenue and Jigsaw became two expressions of that approach. Avenue developed opportunities to contribute through shared enterprise; Jigsaw built a business around work and pathways towards mainstream employment. Laura co-founded Avenue in 2012 and Jigsaw in 2014. The dates show a founder repeatedly returning to the same question through new organisational forms. What would have to exist for someone’s abilities to find a useful place?
“Society should be supporting every person to be their maximum selves,” is how she has put it. The phrase leaves room for individual ambition. It also asks more of a service than keeping someone occupied. Work, learning and contribution carry their own kinds of satisfaction. Laura’s organisations grew around the proposition that these should be available to people whose prospects had too often been decided for them.
The chemistry belongs in the brief
Hireup brought another family observation into business. When someone comes into your life to work alongside you, competence matters. So does whether you get along. Laura and Jordan had watched the difference that a good connection could make. Hireup’s proposition gave people a way to find workers who suited their requirements and shared their interests, then manage those working relationships themselves.
Laura, Jordan and technology co-founder Murray Bunton launched the platform in 2015. The online system gave a familiar human preference a practical mechanism. A shared interest could belong in the search, alongside availability and the work involved. Laura described the importance of common ground between people: a shared passion could make a connection possible. Anyone who has survived a conversation conducted entirely in polite weather forecasts will recognise the value of having something else to talk about.
The employment structure mattered too. Hireup employed its support workers directly, pairing the flexibility of an online platform with an employer’s responsibilities. That choice made the organisation more than an introduction service. There was a business behind the booking, with obligations to the people doing the work. For Laura, the opportunity to choose and the conditions under which someone worked belonged within the same design problem.
How to grow without becoming a different company
Success introduced a question with fewer obvious answers. How do you preserve the habits of a young organisation when thousands of people depend on it? Laura took that question to Harvard Business School’s executive education programme, Leading and Building a Culture of Innovation. She wanted colleagues throughout the business to feel able to try ideas, while the operation became more efficient and effective.
She arrived expecting something like an operational manual. The lessons proved less mechanical. Cross-disciplinary teams and communication across her businesses were part of what she took away. So were journaling and listening to music as ways of investing in her capacity to lead. There is a pleasing detail here: someone running organisations built around individual possibilities discovering that her own working habits deserved attention as well.
Her interest in learning also complicates the usual portrait of the founder who already knows the answer. Laura liked the case discussions and the chance to examine how other businesses worked. The question had changed since the garage years. Starting required initiative; growing required other people to exercise theirs. A company built on giving people choices has a particular reason to consider how much choice its own staff can exercise.
“I want to make sure that the staff in my team feel empowered to innovate at work.”Laura O’Reilly, on studying leadership at Harvard
Recognition, and the work behind it
The public record of Laura’s career includes service beyond the organisations she founded. She sat on the NSW Disability Council from 2012 to 2015. In 2021, she received a Medal of the Order of Australia for service to people with disability. The honour followed earlier recognition as Australian Women’s Weekly Woman of the Future in 2014. The titles mark a career becoming visible well beyond its original family circle.
That same year, Laura and Jordan received the NSW Pearcey Entrepreneur of the Year award. Recognition from the technology community put their work in another frame: the systems, business decisions and execution involved in building Hireup. Their story belongs alongside other accounts of company formation, with all the questions of organisation and growth that entails. The purpose explains why they started; it does not perform the daily work for them.
In November 2023, Laura became the inaugural recipient of the Helen Lynch AM Leadership Award from Westpac Scholars. By then Fighting Chance operated across five states and territories. Her response to the organisations’ scale was one of surprise at how far they had travelled since 2011. The distance from the garage had become difficult to picture even for the person who had been there.
Passing the keys, keeping the purpose
By its tenth-anniversary account, Hireup had delivered 21 million hours of support since 2015. The figure captures accumulated work rather than a promise about what might happen next. There are bookings inside that number, and working relationships, and ordinary days made possible by someone arriving when expected. Laura rejoined Hireup in 2021 and led it for more than four years before the next change in responsibility.
On January 28, 2026, Hireup announced that Peter Willis would become CEO. He had spent almost six years with the company. Laura would move into a new role and continue helping shape its direction. “Now is the right moment for a new leader,” she said. It was a handover within an organisation she had helped build, with the founder remaining involved in what came next.
Her work had also begun to extend towards supporting other founders. In 2024 she joined the board of 10x10 Philanthropy, which had backed Fighting Chance a decade earlier. She wanted to help the next generation of social innovators. The connection gives the appointment a particular symmetry: an organisation that once helped her venture develop could now draw on her experience of making that help count.
In March 2026, she appeared on Radio National Breakfast to discuss building a more inclusive society. The organisations and responsibilities had changed; the question remained recognisable. Laura’s career began with an expectation established at home, then tested against what people could actually access. Work, study, a say in who enters your day: these are ordinary ambitions. She has spent years doing the considerable administrative work required to make ordinary ambitions possible.