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

“I think that the first version probably took us three months or so, I think, before we put something on the website that was, I'm surprised anyone would have downloaded it. And I think it probably took us six months till we got to what we would say is a 1.0 version, so something that we felt was good enough for people to use.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Yeah. Yeah, definitely started with software developers. Right. Software developers were a great audience because they went and found tools to solve their problems and they worked with a lot of other groups inside those companies. So we would watch people using our software and say, hey, why is your marketing department using this? And they would say, well, because we brought it in and they work with us and they like it. So they started using it. We were like, great. And it turns out there's way more non-software developers in a company to sell to than there are software developers. But this is still a great sort of entry into the company, if you like.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is actually almost less important than the fact that we changed the business model of how people adopted software to be much more consumer-like. To Scott's point, I think we built three applications in the early days. That we needed, and we put them out to say, did anyone else need this? And we'd sort of do a little online promotion and this and that. And that Atlassian support system kind of became the guts of what is now JIRA, which is still our biggest application.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that sounds like great. But for us, it was building stuff that we needed ourselves and realizing that there's going to be a lot of other people out there that are going to need the same thing. And it really was a process of constraints. I really think if we had grown up in Silicon Valley and had venture capital around us, that we would have built a very different company that wouldn't have been as disruptive as ours has been because we didn't have venture capital. We didn't have people that had done it before to sort of drag us back to the mean. And we just grew up without anyone telling us the way it couldn't be done. And our experience of computers was downloading and using computer games. And that was a very different world to the way that enterprise software was sold back then. But not today. Like, you know, these days you download enterprise software in the same way you would download a computer game. And I just think we were at the forefront of how that happened. And almost the thing we built in that model.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had done the evening thing that wasn't any fun working overnight all night. We also didn't have any money, so we couldn't hire anybody. So the Atlassian business model came because we knew we needed to sell software somehow online because we didn't have any salespeople. We couldn't afford to hire them. We didn't have any money. So it kind of had to sell itself. And that required us to do a lot of this tracking and modern things a long time ago.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back then, all the scaffolding to build an internet business didn't exist. Right. There was no Eloqua, there was no front, there was no HubSpot survey monkey, you know, kind of all these things that people take for granted just didn't exist. And so we built almost all of them from scratch in-house. And so, yeah, we built an email archiving tool that would be probably equivalent to something like Front or other email group tools today. We built a way to track our visitors across our website. We built a content management system, you know, sort of everyone uses WordPress today, but we built our own version of that. To remember, we're on the far side of the planet”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that riding of software convinced us that that was a much fun thing to do. And obviously in the application we were supporting, we saw that they were making a lot more money in selling the software thousands of times and writing it once than we were every single time to make a dollar. We had to provide this support. It was a very non-scalable business, right? If we'd read enough business books, we would have probably realized that a lot earlier than we did. So we sort of pivoted to try to sell some of the applications that we had made for ourselves, thinking maybe other people wanted to use these software applications.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally, nobody realized this for years. I got to be honest. And then suddenly someone said, hey, do you realize? And we're like, oh no. So that was an application to provide that support, right? So people could file a ticket and there was comments and all that sort of stuff.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think what we started to do is we started to write software to try to make our own business better. So we wrote an application to put a lot of that content, the documentation online. We had kind of like a knowledge-based type thing. We wrote an email archiving tool because a lot of it was done via email and you had no archives of these shared inboxes sort of thing. So we wrote one of those. And then we wrote a support system, which actually we called the Atlassian support system, which has since gotten us in a lot of trouble because it was known by its acronym and it was not particularly well branded”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was less than a year that we were in the service business. I would have my computer running 24 hours a day under my bed, you know, so had the sort of fan spinning up and down where you're trying to sleep. Both our mobile phones were turned on to the loudest ringtone they possibly could. We'd alternate which nights we were on call. And you get up at 2 in the morning and try and answer the phone call. It's like, Alassian, yep. We're trying to sound like you're cogent at that time in the morning and then trying to sound like you're a big company. We realized that actually it was just such a terrible business that almost anything would be better. And our true passion was not supporting software. It was building it. And from that, we then started exploring where we wanted to build software.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into our shareholders agreement. And so it's changed now a public company. We can't solve problems like that anymore. But for the first few years, if we disagreed, it would have ended up at rock, paper, scissors. And I was highly incentivized to never let that happen because I think I lose every single game of that, whether I've ever played with Mike.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember going into the bank and thinking, shit, I hope no one notices that I have no idea what I'm doing. And like, are we a legitimate business? Like, are you allowed to open a business account? Do we need to have done something businessy before we could open this account? And then, you know, later on in life, we got a lawyer to kind of look at, we started having employees and wanted to make sure it was more solidified, I guess, you know, a shareholders agreement. And the lawyer, you know, sort of says, great, was 50-50 if you were going to settle a dispute, how do you settle it? And I think there was some escalation processes. But at the very end, it's like, well, what's the final way of doing it? And we put in Rochambeau or rock, paper, scissors.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we did the incorporation thing. We went and bought a business name. In Australia, it was $110 or so you'd get into a local agency. And somewhere we still have as a laminated piece of paper with the Alassian business name somewhere. And then there was two of us. So there's 100 shares. I think you got 50 shares each. And I remember actually going into a bank because we wanted to set up a business account.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you started this tech support company, you were both so young, you were your kids, you had some experience starting up a business mic and selling it. But did you guys go through the whole formal in the US you would incorporate into an LLC? I mean, sometimes depends. I mean, you would have a conversation about equity and who got what. Did you do that? Any of that in those days?”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would have fallen down theoretically. And so we sort of turned it into an adjective because Atlas.com was taken. So Atlasian was an Atlassian effort, you know, was a legendary service effort”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So my mom is a Latin and ancient Greek major, I suppose you would say in America. And because We were initially going to provide customer service. That's what we were doing. We were providing tech support. Atlas was a Greek titan. He was actually a bit of a bad guy and his punishment was to theoretically hold up the sky. And so we thought this was kind of what we used to, we had this branded term legendary service. We were going to go above and beyond just a little bit of this amazing legendary service, right? And he was a legend that was providing service to the world.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the documentation we wrote was pretty good that they would only call us with the hardest possible problems. And then the 360 was totally not a worthwhile business model to solve what were the 1% of really, really hard problems. One of our first support calls was at a party and I remember disappearing upstairs in the middle of this party. It was actually at Mike's house and I had to get him to give me his password for his computer and I had to sound very official like hello at Lassian. Of course there's party going on music, people screaming like people downing alcohol and I think I spent the next five hours trying to debug this person's support call. And not surprising I didn't end up solving that customer support. Or computer associates or someone like that. They faxed us. I remember their check, $360. Wow. On a fax”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were renowned as having amazing software and terrible documentation support, everything. So we thought, well, if we write their documentation, sort of, people will come and read it. And then when they have a problem, they'll call us and maybe they'll pay us some money to do that. Now, the problem is the document.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The initial business was, it's actually a pretty bad business idea, and I say grateful that it was so bad that it failed. But the original business idea was to provide support for someone else's software. It was a company out of Sweden that produced software, and we'd been using it previously, and we thought it was a great bit of software, but they had terrible support, you know, great software, terrible support. Like, wow, we can provide that amazing support. I can have a matchmade in heaven. So we got an email address, got a web server, put up some content so that people would find us. Our pricing model was horrifically broken. We would have it such that you would only pay us if we were successful in solving your case, which meant that...”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a smart guy, he's totally trustworthy, and the decision to start with Mike didn't seem really risky because the graduate salary I remember was $48,500 if you went to work at PWC. And the thesis was if we can earn $48,500 and not have to wear a suit to work and a tie to work and work with average people, then we've won”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sounds trite, but it didn't feel like a big risk to give up a corporate job, maybe we're young and naive, but I always felt that I landed on my feet with whatever I'd done. You know, as a smart kid, there will always be jobs for smart kids out there. And if I didn't get a job with this particular graduate year, I'll get a job in the next graduate year. And I just felt like, wow, I've got better things to do in my life than kind of be downstream of a whole bunch of poor choices. I remember that local Thai place and three sate chicken skewers and rice was $4.50 at the local Thai place. And if I could get dinner for $4.50 and you don't match money to live. And Mike was a really smart guy.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think it was obvious it was going to be some sort of a digital business, right? We were in technology, we were all. Into using technology and building technology things. I should probably formally at some stage thank IBM, PWC, and the ASX for putting Scott off the corporate career, because that was probably one of the reasons he said, yeah, let's try something else because he'd also had a pretty negative journey there. And then we kind of hung out a lot and tried things, tried various ways to make money.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I sent an email to a bunch of folks saying before you all take grad jobs kind of things, do you want, does anyone want to do something crazy and try our own thing? And the thinking was to not get a real job Even if we built a really crappy company and we'd been able to kind of survive and go through, that would have been more exciting to me than going to work in a very large company with a suit and tie as all our friends were sort of heading to do. It just wasn't my thing, you know. And so I wondered if other people wanted to have that fun experience too.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I guess what around 2001, Mike, you send out an email to some of the people in your class or your cohort of friends seeing if anyone wanted to do another startup with you? What was the email that you sent out? What was the pitch?”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I work for three companies during my scholarship. It was IBM, then PWC, then ASX, the Australian Stock Exchange. All three were to acronym companies. And my experience with that was working in a large organization was just full of people that were trying their best but didn't seem to be really on the path to success. And I remember during my IBM process, it was the middle of the year 2000 Y2K problem. And my job was not to go into the code and fix the Y2K problem. If it existed, it was really to go and make sure that all the contracts that they had with their customers excluded that so that they wouldn't be legally liable if they had any problems. And roughly similar experiences that the other companies that we worked at. And so after that, it was definitely not a encouraging sign in terms of working for corporate Australia.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, my mom was not. This was not an okay thing. I remember her saying to me that the only thing she made me promise is that I would get my degree.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've got a couple of million bookmarks, and we got, I think we had a couple hundred thousand users. Do you want to buy this thing of us? And one of them said yes. So I flew to New York and did a bit of... Negotiating with Blink, and we sold it to them for a couple of hundred grand or something and paid the investors back their money. Ironically, the funniest part about that story, my dad would hate me saying this is he, I think my dad put in five or ten grand and barely got his money back kind of thing and decided that maybe I wasn't worth backing. And so he never invested in Atlassian. And he's always kind of said, Hey, man, I back the wrong one there, basically, right? Yeah. And I was like, well, sorry.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We ran for about 12 months. We raised a little bit of money from what would now be called friends and family, parents and uncles and stuff who felt sorry for us and gave us five grand or ten grand. And we had two competitors. One was called Blink.com and one was called something else. The other one was called. Anyway, Blink raised $35 million. And we were sitting in Sydney and we were just like, holy shit, we're going to get smoked. There's no way. So we called up the two or three guys that had raised a bunch of money and said, look, we got.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've always said it was a one year amazing experience, right? The two of us, I can viscerally remember the formative moment we got an office in a local kind of what would now be an accelerator or incubator at the Australian Technology Park. And the office was a room about the size of this podcast studio, and we got our own whiteboard, and we had a table and we walked in and the two of us were like, right, now we better do something. You know what I mean? The staring at a blank whiteboard in your first office with no windows was.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was called the bookmark box. So Hotmail had just kind of appeared, and we were going back and forth from home to this IT placement to student computers at school. You know, you had to log in on the student network and everything. And we synced people's bookmarks across their browsers and different things through a kind of a web app.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was in the sort of late 90s where networking equipment, Cisco, you know, this was a real hot, hot area. I spent six months just plugging in machinery. It was the most boring six month assignment. I could say that now Nortel's out of business. So it was not a finer, exciting six months. And I think that was one of those signs that maybe the big corporate thing wasn't so much for me. I was like, man, if this is what work life's going to be like, this sucks. Yeah. So I actually left the scholarship program after that. A lot of that six months were spent working on my first startup with another scholarship kid. Called Nikki, who now runs Australia's best venture capital firm. And we actually dropped out of the scholarship course to pursue that startup after that first of three six-month stints, so about two years into our four-year degree.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're supposed to do three six months assignments. And I got my first assignment, which was at Bay Networks, which is a networking vendor that became Nortel Networks before I joined because I got bought by Nortel.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I remember my early impressions, he was clearly a leader. Like, hey, I'm going to take charge of the situation. I'm going to sort it out, whatever it was, whether we were organizing. Which pub to go to, or how we should all plan for studying, or where we should meet or whatever. There were certain kids that just took charge and he was very much a. Take judge kind of leader, which was really good. And he was clearly into the same things I was, you know, computers and was always a good match.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think both of us gravitated towards group assignments where other people, much smarter than us, did all the work. So I think we found ourselves the same group assignments early on. We go to the same parties together, but I don't think we'd be hanging out on a Tuesday night at each other's houses.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and there's quite a lot of luck involved in where Mike and I have ended up. And one of the lucky things was that the programming languages that we got taught and the skills we got taught were actually pretty in line with what we needed to build a software company. We weren't being taught esoteric programming languages that you couldn't use or compile details where you were sort of down in the bowels of a computer trying to get it to work. We're actually building languages, programming languages that could be used to build applications and build, specifically build web applications, which of course is where most software is these days.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's called a co-op scholarship. So, the whole idea is the triangle between industry, academia, and the students. Right.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I used to play lots of really bad video games that seemed like the best thing in the world at the time. And the internet took off, so I was on the internet pretty early, luckily. My sister, one of my sisters went to university in Edinburgh, in Scotland, and I managed to convince my parents that we could email her and that this would be a lot cheaper than sending letters paying for those 45 cents stamps would be expensive. So instead, we joined an ISP in Sydney called Dialects, which I can still remember. It was one cent per minute and it was all, you know, text-based and had the old modem making those funny noises as you logged in and all that sort of thing. But that got the internet into our house. Yep. That was definitely a revelation for me.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Six years, yeah, which is kind of odd, it's how I got started in computers because they started the frequent flyer program. So I was flying from Sydney to London four times a year back and forth and racking up lots of frequent fly points as a seven-year-old, eight-year-old, nine-year-old. And my parents gave me the catalog one, you know, Christmas or end a year and said, hey, you've earned all these points. What do you want to get? And you kind of look, and it's like bottles of wine and holidays. And there's an eight-year-old kid. None of this is really good for me. And the back was this computer and Amstrad PC20 for color masterful device. And so I was like, I guess I'll get that. And it was how I got my first computer of myself, my own at eight and a half through Freak and Flypoints.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was five when we moved to Australia and I went to boarding school in England from the age of seven to 12 and then came back to Australia for high school at the age of 13.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a month or later some old computers that I guess had been extended their useful life at his work, became available and he bought them and brought them home, thinking he'd done an amazing thing and helped his son. But it turned out those computers were not compatible with any of the games that I wanted to play. And I think my foray into programming or even using computers was hours, weeks, months of time.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't really notice the difference in our economic status, I guess, when you're growing up, you go to a school and everyone in Australia wears a school uniform, so there's no real difference in fashion. I remember in high school I ended up dating a girl who was from one of the private schools in Sydney. And we would go to lots of different people's houses. And I do remember quite a few of those houses looked very, very different to the house we grew up in, you know, the house, and particularly my parents got divorced. We ended up moving into much small houses. And when your entire house could fit in someone else's living room, you sort of realized that there's a very different way of people living out there. But I never felt that we missed out on anything. I think maybe with one notable exception, which I remember clearly is that I remember my friends had computers. And I remember kind of asking my parents, why couldn't we have a computer? And I do remember crying as I went to sleep one night of like, dad, why can't I get a computer?”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad originally did some computing early in his career, but he had sleep disorder and that affected his ability to do work as a computer programmer. And so he ended up doing odd jobs. So he worked at a service station at night. He did some manual labor. My mum was a housewife growing up for most of her life and interspersed that with different jobs. One of the early ones I remember is she was queen someone else's house once a week. Then she worked at Target or Tag, as we like to call it in Australia and McDonald's at different stages. And so I would say it's a middle class upbringing. We didn't want for anything, but we had one holiday a year to the same place every year type of thing.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 2 in the morning and try and answer the phone calls like Algassian. 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.”
2021-02-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT