Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar

**Guy Raz** (0:00)
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**Guy Raz** (0:43)
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And one more quick thing, just a quick note. There is a little bit of salty language in this episode. So if you are listening with kids, just be aware. And thanks.

**Scott Farquhar** (2:54)
I would have my computer running 24 hours a day under my bed. Both our mobile phones were turned to the loudest ringtone they possibly could.
We'd alternate which nights we were on call and get up at two in the morning and try and answer the phone call. It's like, ahem, Atlassian, that's, yep, we're trying to sound like you're cogent at that time in the morning. And then we realized that actually it was just such a terrible business that almost anything would be better.

**Guy Raz** (3:27)
From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how two friends from college started a business named for a Greek titan and built a modern day empire, Atlassian, a software company that's been valued at over $50 billion.
Back in 2018, there was an article in a major Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald. The headline read, Atlassian, the $30 billion tech giant nobody understands. Today, you'd modify that headline slightly to read, the $50 billion tech giant nobody understands. So let me try and explain as best I can. Atlassian is a software company. It makes collaboration tools mainly used by software engineers and project managers. Their applications have been used by teams who sent the Curiosity Rover to Mars, by Domino's every time you order a pizza, and by Audi's designers who rely on Atlassian's project management tool called Jira. By market cap, Atlassian is one of the 20 or so biggest software companies on the planet. And those other companies? You probably know some of them. Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe Autodesk, Salesforce, Intuit, et cetera.
Anyway, if you look at the top 30 or so biggest software companies on Earth, you'll start to notice a pattern. Most of them are based in Northern California, in Silicon Valley, which makes Atlassian, an Australian tech company, an outlier. Back in 2015, when the company went public, it turned its founders, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, into Australia's first tech billionaires.
But the thing is, Atlassian's success may have a lot to do with where it started, far away from the tech hubs of Northern California and Seattle. And while that may sound counterintuitive, launching a tech company in Australia in 2001 meant, for starters, less competition, less noise, and fewer distractions. And for Mike and Scott, it also meant not a whole lot of access to startup capital. In fact, in the early days, there was none. And so the two founders didn't really have any investors breathing down their necks trying to micromanage the business. And it gave them room to experiment and to make mistakes and to grow.