YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Cannon-Brookes

lines on the record: 93
first: 2021-02-08
most recent: 2021-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You go You know, you're going to know they're either paper or scissors. And if their hand doesn't move, You go for paper. And so you know you're going to get a draw or not. And so, if you can do that, you can usually statistically well more than 50%.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you do is you have to control the timing So, when you're going scissors, paper, rock, whatever, do it start to slow it down and go really, really slowly, and then just watch their hand. And if their hand stays together or starts moving, as soon as their hand starts moving,”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you need both. I really believe that you make your own luck to some extent. And so you need to work really hard Teach yourself and so forth. But there's been a lot of things that worked out in retrospect were lucky. We live in an era and time when Australians can operate on a world stage. If I were born 50 years earlier, they'd be a lot harder. The internet came around. So there's a lot of things that were the right timing and we just managed to take advantage of them because of who we were and what our skills were. Would say 50% luck, 50% Scott's hard work, smarts and ingenuity.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's not in our DNA because you've got to start out by trying to build a product and solve a problem, not start, people start a business saying, I want to make money. You're like, okay, well, what are you going to do to do that, right? You've got to provide some value to a customer. But secondly, if they were lucky enough to provide some value to a customer, they would have left long ago Once a business, I don't know, five million dollars in revenue or $10 million in revenue, that Mike and Scott would have sold back then. They would have been gone. So they wouldn't be here. So then you're asked your question, well, hang on. If I didn't sell yesterday and I don't want to go and sit on a beach or whatever, why would I sell tomorrow? And the answer is the same reason I've been here every day for the last 20 years.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that with everyone's life, you try and work out how do you have the biggest impact in the world, or at least for Mike and my wife, that's been a big part. And our mission at Atlassian is to unleash the potential of every team. And I keep thinking, okay, well, if I left Atlassian, where would I go or what would I do to have a bigger impact? The teams that use our products put people in space, they create electric cars, they decarbonize the planet. The American Red Cross, like our customers and we get to help them do their work better. And I don't know, I feel if there was something better out there, I'd be tempted, but it just doesn't seem a better opportunity to have a big impact in the world.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're increasingly having meetings. You know, if you're going to fly to meet your team or your group, you're going to do that. But when you do that, don't work, right? Do the work at home when you're remote from each other. And when you're meeting, build the social bonds, go out to dinner, like run exercises, whatever you're going to do, but don't meet to do work.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It suits Australia, I would say. We've always been colloquially on the arse end of the world. And so traveling and moving around and other things have been a part of the Australian existence in business for a long time. And hence, we use a lot of virtual technologies. We're very early technology adopters, I believe, because of that, right? It's a lot easier to get on a Zoom call than fly to San Francisco and back. Trust me, I've done it. I don't know, a thousand times in the last decade and a half, probably more. But we're still going to need to meet each other, right? One of the things we value is human connection. The question is, do we meet each other to work or do we meet each other to connect?”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say we've separated two things in that that are really, really important. First is the ability for people to choose where they work. We're not saying we're going to close our offices. We're saying if you want to come to an office, you can. You don't want to come to an office, you can do that too. We were a long way down that path before COVID hit We had, I don't know, maybe five or six hundred people working from home on a given day and a bunch of remote employees. And then we sent 5,000 people home in one day. And the world's largest telecommunicating experiment has taught us all how to do that, the goods, the bads. But that's really forced us to solve those problems in a really rapid fashion.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think just the fact that we didn't have people, you know, that was the only person telling us the way we couldn't do it allowed us to do things totally differently. And at the right time when the internet's coming out, that's what was needed was totally different thinking. And our tenure is better. Like we've got poison that stick around for a very long time. And it's been totally critical to our success. But we also have one foot in Silicon Valley. If you started a company in Australia in the 70s, you wouldn't be able to tap into the podcasts and the blogs and the email newsletters and all the information that flows around. And so the world is flatter in some ways than it's ever been before. And so I think that combination has made us successful.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, starting Alassian in Australia is the only reason we're successful. We had venture capitalists telling us that we couldn't build a company. We beat a million dollars of revenue. They said, oh, that's really nice. You've built a tiny company. You can never build it to $10 million of revenue. And we went back when $10 million of revenue. And they're like, yeah, well, you never get to $100. And we sort of stopped going back after that.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was thinking, but hang on, is that really worth sort of 15 minutes out of my way to save probably $8 on petrol? And in a different life, I would have done that. And it was really hard, I think, to sort of go actually, no, I value my time at more than the eight dollars it would have saved. And so I think it's just a thousand things like that that change. And, you know, to try and make the right choice, which may be different now than it was growing up in that sort of time money trade-off.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been hard coming from a background where I always view time and money as a sort of almost the same scale. You can generally spend money to save time. And in many cases, you can do many of the same things if you have enough time without the money. And I went for a drive around Tasmania over the weekend. Lucky we've opened up in Australia. And I remember thinking, wow, I really need to fill up the petrol tank before I return the car. They were going to screw me on the petrol.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting married, we got engaged within a year of each other, and so it was a similar view on life, right? I often think if one of us at that stage had been 50 and looking to retire and, you know, the kids were going to college or something. It might have been a different view on the world. But because we kind of had similar views on where we were at, and then as family started to come along, we had kids, you know. It's a super brutal time for sleeping and trying to run a business and everything else. But because we're kind of through that time that you'd give the other person a lot more slack because you're like, oh man, I understand, man, I've been there. That sucks. That's a really hard period.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when you know that that's the end solution, you're like, oh, we better work this out. Because if it gets to that, man, shit, we might just lose. I think it's always helped us as well. Well, been more helpful than less helpful that we're in exactly the same life phases at each stage. Yeah. So, when we started getting paid nothing and drinking the cheapest beer we could find, we were both doing that, so that felt fine and we didn't really know any different. Around that time you're talking 2009, 2010, we were both”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of a tough conversation to have to sort of, you know, even to throw that on the table and say, hey, there's an option here that we should talk about. And that's pretty emotional. And also I feel that, you know, when you're grinding away for eight years, it's tough because your identity is the company. And I remember for a while I talked with my wife about this when you first meet your partner in wife, it's like, well, what's more important? The company or my life partner, you know, and in the early days, it's the company, right? Like, you know, girlfriend's come and go. And at some stage, you go, actually, my wife partner is more important than the company. Yeah. And I think over time you start extracting your emotional state or your kind of identity from the company. But it was a pretty emotional time to sort of even just consider”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, we didn't really intend to get here. What do we want to do? What do we really want to do? What's next? And you sort of had it was almost a look back, look forward kind of moment. I was eight years in, and we sort of realized hey, wow, we could probably sell this thing to someone. We had taken no capital, no investment. We still owned 100% of the company. We could probably sell this thing and be pretty set, right? And it sounds naive now what we actually thought we were going to get for it. And we kind of, you know, we did a lot of really good talking and thinking and realized that we weren't done. You know what I mean? We both believed that the next decade was going to be better than the last decade for the company. And that was really a really powerful moment.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we had such a good story because I think you have those moments where you have to stop and think. And it was around 2009, maybe early 2010. We had spent eight years at the time building the business. You know what I mean? And I often described it as we were heads down. Like we were looking at our feet, just trying to run and not fall over for many, many, many years. And for some reason, maybe it was turning 30, maybe it was getting married, maybe it was whatever. We both had a bit of a life inhalation, a bit of a pause. And the business was probably on its own feet by then. I mean, it sounds ironic. I think we had like 50 million bucks in the bank and probably $50 million in revenue kind of scale and profitable. But we felt like, okay, it's not going to die.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a way better equation for us over a three to five year period. So let's go hire that extra engineer. If you can demonstrate value to someone, you don't need a salesperson. They've already using a product, they already got the value, they get it.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And part of that was we're very patient, people were very long term thinking. We've always had these super long-term goals for the business. The second part of that is Australia. We're a very resourceful sort of survivor nation, right? It's a pretty rough country. It's super hot. It's super dry. You know, we've had to figure out how to farm the land. We've had to figure out how to what products can we make down here and ship to the rest of the world because we're a million miles from anywhere. We had to be patient because we couldn't afford to hire any salespeople and we had to figure out how to sell things online. And once we had done that and saw the effect of that patience, all we did is kind of continue to double down on that model every year, right? We would hire more engineers instead of once we got afford to hire salespeople, we were saying, well, hang on a second, if we make the product better, we're not only going to sell a dollar this year. We know we'll sell $2 next year and $3 a year afterwards.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were very confident in our business model Its ability to deliver growth into the future, yes. Patiently, Ron. I mean, what's really important about the Alassian business journey has been patience. Patience for revenue to come later, but with a more solid model behind it, if you like.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What just happened there? Like, we were having a good meeting, and then the far alarm went off, and it seemed like they just kicked us out. He's like, oh, yeah, they realized that we're bigger than they are. And they were trying to buy us. And in the fire alarm Kopak, they had realized that based on revenue, we were actually larger than they were.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kid you not, the fire alarm goes off, and they're like, all right, we got to get out of here. So we all pile into the fire stairs and go down this Silicon Valley office park, three floors, and we're all standing out in the car park. It's almost like it's, I remember in the car park thinking, wow, I'm literally in office space here. Like I'm looking at this big, boring building. Like we're all in the car park. And we must have shared some numbers and back and forth, and they're kind of confused. And we must have been having two or three different conversations. Fire alarms over. We all go back upstairs in the conference room. Two or three pleasantries meeting over, we all go. We get out of here thinking, I'm like, what happened? I said to our president, what?”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did have one relatively famous, what I now know was an acquisition meeting. I was with our then president and we were in some Silicon Valley office park at this big firm, famous guy running it, I won't say who it was, and everything was going on. And they were kind of a competitor, I guess you might say, but we worked together in some ways and this and that. And then we were just getting through the pleasantries of the meeting, sort of discussing roadmaps and various other bits and pieces. And then a fire alarm went off.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, that's true. And by the time anyone did show up, I think we were even more confident in our own abilities and the business, which made it very easy to say no to any sort of offers along the way, right? We were always looking at it and saying, well, we know how big we're going to be three years from now. We're really confident in that now. Why would we do this? It just never made any sense. So it was always a pretty relatively easy decision for us along the way.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one thing we've always believed is If our business is going to double every two years as individuals and as leaders, we can only justify our positions if we are more than doubling our capabilities everywhere. Because logically, otherwise, you end up with a kind of constraint at the top, right? In us. And that's sort of been our, I guess, mantra for self-development, right? You can't read this stuff in a book. You can go and talk to other people. You can learn however you learn yourself. But we knew that we needed to grow faster than the company. Otherwise, it wasn't going to fulfill its mission.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Compan And Mike and I sat down and said, Obviously, that's not the fault of the people that have done the hiring. We haven't told them what's important. We did an exercise that Jim Collins actually created. Where you effectively do a mission to Mars and you say if we're going to recreate Atlas on Mars. People would you want to transplant and make it feel like the same company And in many cases, they're not the senior leadership. It's that one person that embodies something about the Company that is really important. And what you do is you identify those half dozen people You backsolve and say, Well, what is it about those half dozen people? Makes them at Lass And as a result, we sort of on a bit of butcher paper at an offsite, we wrote up what has become Alassian values. And they haven't changed Sort of 14, 15 years since we created them.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the early days, I remember distinctly when you're a startup, you hire the first People, you know, a few dozen people yourself. And at some stage, you transition hiring from Doing it to people that you've hired, hired the next people. I would say the first 50 we hide ourselves and the next 50 were hired by other people. Looked around one day and realised that second 50 people we'd hired They turned up because we were a cool place to work. We had beer in the fridge. We had A ping pong table back then.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I'd say we probably meet every management mistake in the book. The first five to ten years and probably some more in the last 10 years. But we were honest enough to know when we've made those mistakes.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember After that lunch, coming back to Mike and thinking, Wow, I never want to be or build a company where these incredibly talented, you know, these people many times smarter than me have gone to work. And they don't feel empowered to get job done. And their only way to improve things is to bitch to their friends at lunch.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a strong memory when we were very early on it at last, and our friends had just joined. These big companies. And we used to go and have lunch together. Remember this distinctly we were downstairs at a Yumcha place and one by one people sort of bitched about their jobs. They complained about the people they worked for, weren't smart, they complained that they weren't listened to.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think we had increasing confidence over time that we knew what we were doing. I think one of the most important things is we were always very first principle driven. I mean, you sort of said it in your question. We were both incredibly naive. The good thing is we knew that we didn't know what we were doing. Yeah. We knew that we didn't know anything about business, and so we had to figure it all out from first principles. So, for example, when it came to people, we both knew that we'd had terrible experiences working other places. And so we want to build somewhere that we want to come to work and hopefully other people will want to come to work there too.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They actually work on three or four different teams, on different projects, different things. They work with other teams, etc. So, you know, almost all our applications now are basically free for a team. Why? Because we want one team to download or sign up to an online applications, use it, and get value and think this is brilliant. Then we want them to go to the other team they work on and be like, man, working on this team stinks. We're so inefficient. Can we use the thing that we use on that other team? And so we would find one team, two teams, five teams, ten teams. You know, you go to a big company, there are hundreds of thousands of teams in these big companies.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what's important here is teams. So, our viral effect is not like a Facebook or a Slack or a Cowley. They're all fantastic applications. Our viral effect is teams. Often we talk about the individual gets all the credit, but the team really did the work, right? Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, but there was a massive team of people at NASA that put that thing into the air and got on the moon and everything else, right? And so teams of the people who really do the work. And we believe that it's true. So we would have an early goal. We want to get one team to solve one problem with our application brilliantly. Because most people in companies don't work on one team.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, over time, we've had to remove a lot of that complexity and we've tried to simplify it, but keep the power. But in the early days, we were just, yeah, we were certainly just adding power and complexity in time.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good side about that is the people who got up. The curve of understanding the power of Jura became these huge fans and they became superstars at their company because they could solve all these problems for the company really, really cheaply. Again, hey, we've already spent the 800 bucks. You got another problem? I'll solve that with Jira. So the people who solved the complexity understood it. They saw the matrix, if you like, right? And we ended up hiring a whole bunch of those super fans as well, like people who were like massive Jira fans. We'd say, hey, do you want to come work for us? Like, you know so much about our application. And they would then make it better.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was very unusual. And it's almost like back then, it's like CDs, right? Every person you'd buy your CD and once you bought it, that's the artist had to go out and produce more music. And very early on, we said, well, that's not a great model because that means we're incentivized to hold back all the new features. It's like, you know, if Adele had a great album and she had great songs, she's like, well, actually, I'll keep it half of them in the good album and I'll save half of the good songs for the next album because I only get paid by selling albums. Whereas we thought the model was better if you were aligned by, hey, if you use our software and continue using it and being happy with it, you pay us to go. But that was incredibly unusual back then.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unlimited usage For one year. So we were improving the software every week or two weeks. And so our hope was they would buy a maintenance contract, which was $400 for the second year and the third year and the fourth year, and that maybe they would pass $400 a year, assuming we kept adding value to the software, right?”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the internet for doing nothing And my God, American Airlines, geez, that's a bar. I mean, they just spent $800. That didn't even have to go through anybody. That was just some random person, American Airlines, who authorized it. Because that's nothing. It's not even a rounding error for them. And was that, I mean, that was it. It was like you just buy it and then you own it.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and in the early days, it was very much kind of hand-to-hand combat. Like every customer is someone that you have spent a long time hand holding through to the sale. And a big milestone for us was, I still remember it when the fax came off the fax machine back then and it was American Airlines. And American Airlines had basically faxed us a purchase order or a check for the $800. And I went to Mike and said, Mike, I haven't been dealing with the American Airlines. Like, gee, thanks for doing all the work behind the scenes getting them across the line. And Mike said, I haven't done any work on American Airlines either. And so we looked at each other and went, holy cow, like, American Airlines just sent us money over the internet for doing nothing. And obviously they benefited from our software. But that was sort of the moment when we went from having a almost like a corner store business to having a scalable business.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started with I don't know if that's flying off the shelf. We didn't really have a shelf, but it certainly wasn't flying anywhere.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they had a session where they were going to At three o'clock in the afternoon in front of. Them, if we could provide beer for their For the sort of 500, 600 people that are watching them, you know, the three of them on this panel podcast. And of course, they said, sure, yeah, whatever. That sounds great. We didn't ask the conference organizers, of course, because we would have gotten in trouble and it wouldn't have worked. So instead, we took our little rental car. Local bottle shop and bought as many cases of really good Belgian beer as we could. And then we stood at the front as people were going And every time someone walked in, we would put a sticker that said Atlassian on the front of the beer as if it was kind of our beer. And then give it to the attendees, right? And they thought this was fantast This was like”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and would Leave 20 Bar top table that was, you know, and kind of walk around the conference and just keep leaving flyers around for hopefully someone to pick them up”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there's a couple of things that worked well for us. We were the very early days of internet marketing, and so we could buy Google AdWords, which were just new back then, and things that would now cost you $10 or $20 for a click would cost us $10 or $20. And I always wish we had more money to spend on that. Our marketing budget might have been $100 a month or $100 a week. It was very small dollars back, then we would turn up to software events. And obviously that's where the bulk of our customers would be. But we couldn't afford a booth at these software events. And so we would turn up as attendees and try and hand out business cards or try and corner people in the hallway to give them a demo. We did plenty of guerrillas.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, we just did every job that there was to do, and sometimes we put different hats on when we did them. And different voices”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“800 bucks and in the early days our website would always make it seem like we were bigger than we were. You know, we'd say Alassian has a number of international offices. That number just happened to be one. We'd have sales at Atlassian and accounts at Atlassian and supported Atlassian, and they would all go to Mike and myself both equally. And if people called up, it'd be like, oh, cool, can I speak to two accounts? Be like, sure, I'll get accounts on the line. Mike, your accounts now, okay? And so you hand the phone over to Mike from accounts and pretend to be accounts. How can I help you?”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything this week. We need to sell one thing. Go home To the office Every customer service email as quickly as you could, or you'd get back to someone, or you'd get on the phone and try to ring them. Can we help you? Like, what?”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jiri used to sell for $800 again. It was a terrible pricing scheme. It was $800 for everything. All you could, like, that was it. And we needed to sell one copy a week. And if we sold one copy, we would eat, pay rent, do all the things. That was $800, split two ways, and everything else, right? If we didn't sell one copy, we were going to go bust. If we didn't sell one copy for too many weeks, some weeks we'd sell two copies. That was amazing, right? But then some weeks you'd sell zero. The motivation of such a simple goal I remember like there's a reason you went back to work after the pub. It's like, it's Wednesday and we haven't sold.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My girlfriend at the time, my now wife, she is an investment banker and was back then. And all her investment banking friends would tell her, like, why are you dating Scott? He doesn't really even have a job. And so it was just such so unusual. And I think you have something to prove. And I think you had simple, I was going to say simple existential goals. I mean, if we didn't make money, we were going to die. There was no big well of money behind this business. It was just us. So the fear of death was pretty clear.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel different to our peers on a couple different fronts. One is, you know, they've all taken safe jobs and there's a high pressure of, man, if we fuck this up, we're going to look like the idiots, right? We're the ones that kind of are going to be working for these people when we kind of crawl back to corporate world and they'll be our bosses in a couple years. And so I think there's a high level of kind of anxiety around proving that you've done something, especially when your peers have all taken a very different path. But also, I think in Australia, the idea of an entrepreneur just didn't really exist. And so there wasn't even really a category for, you know, even to be called that. Whereas today, I think people are, okay, you start your own company. That's a valid career path. Yeah.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you look at our costs, we didn't pay ourselves for a long time, and even after that, I think we paid ourselves $300 a week for the first two years. So we were relatively inexpensive. And then it was the cost of broadband internet back then, cost of a website and bandwidth costs, which you had to pay for separately. So it was relatively cheap. We say that we put it on a credit card. What I really mean by that is we put it on Mike's credit card because I think I had about a $1,000 limit on my university credit card. I think Mike had 10 or 20 grand. And so we could afford to build our business on that. And it consumed our time too. We didn't have anything else to do but work. And so when you have your own business, especially one that's 24-7, you know, we didn't have a cafe that we had to open and close a certain hours, right? And so, you know, if there was something else on, we'd go do it. If friends were going to the pub, you know, we'd go at six o'clock and we'd go have a couple of beers. And at 10 o'clock, we would go back to the office if we didn't want to go to sleep and keep working.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT