YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Farquhar

lines on the record: 79
first: 2021-03-16
most recent: 2021-03-16
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 it's still possible to do that. I think it's still possible to build a global company from anywhere in the world. And that's great for everyone. It's why you see huge amounts of venture capital plowed into really early companies because basically the size of the market now is way, way, way bigger than we ever perceived it to be because there's billions of people on the internet and all of them could potentially use your product. So I think that is still very possible. I want to just keep the balloon up as a big warning that we shouldn't take that for granted. And it didn't exist 30 or 40 years ago. Like there was multinationals, but they really got there over. It took them 50 years to become a multinational. Whereas these days, you can be multinational from day one. I don't want to take that for granted because it could go away really, really quickly. And I think we would all lose out in that scenario as consumers.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me wrap up by asking just a big step back question. You and Mike, your two kids, you went through a workshop program, you start shipping a product, you realize your support product is more interesting than the thing that you were trying to do. This is like a classic founder story, right? You're two people, you start a business, you pivot into the tool you made to solve your own problem that grows into Atlassian. Atlassian is a gigantic global company. Now you are more aware of California privacy law than even I am like that's a great journey, but it all depended on you being able to address a global market from the beginning without in 2001, 2002, the pressure of multiple regulatory regimes and privacy regimes and all that happening. Is that still possible for two founders in Australia now or two founders somewhere else?”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when I look at global growth markets, I don't put China as something that's going to be 20% or 30% of license revenue, even though there's a lot of stuff that we do that would hugely benefit from the way we work. I think even some of the cultural aspects around collaboration and being open and transparent would make business work better there. It's not a big area of investment compared to, say, India, which has, you know, largely English-speaking population and also a much more solid rule of law. I think those types of economies have bigger growth prospects for technology companies like ours.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And from a China perspective, it's interesting to see, like there are rising superpower, right? Like the US was a rising superpower after the Second World War, where they've, you know, prior to that, they didn't really have global dominance in China. Almost every CEO says, oh, I'll make China work. I'll be the first CEO to ever make China work. And I think there's enough data points now to show that it is near on impossible for someone outside of China to go in and make it work, whether it's intellectual property theft or it's just the rule of war over there or just other things that you don't understand culturally about it. And so I feel”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know your perspective, but mine is that, well, first of all, we don't have engineering in China and we don't have, I think, some partners in China, but not employees there. By the way,”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I think about the splinternet and the fracturing in the global internet, obviously the difference between the Chinese internet and the rest of the global internet is vast. Again, Australia isn't a unique position. You have a different perspective than I do. How should we think about that market, which a lot of companies want to go into and grow versus how that government treats some of its citizens, how that government treats the flow of information on the internet there, how the government exports technology? I'm just imagining you have a much different perspective on it than I do.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do a small amount of business in China. It is a small amount of business. It's not zero, but it's not a huge amount compared to, I guess, the population that is there.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting, all of the antitrust action in the United States began with that media collective bargaining activity, which is really, it has grown from that to something much bigger. Also, I have to compliment you. You said today, but it is tomorrow for you, so well done. I would have not gotten that time zone right. I want to end by asking about something that is much harder to see, right? I can go read Australian news coverage. You can come read American news coverage. It is very hard for us to see what is happening in China. You said China is Australia's biggest trading partner. I'm assuming Atlassian does business in China.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better solution than what we have in Australia because then if all the media companies collectively bargain and say, well, our news is worth X and Google says, no, it's not. They shut them off. Well, then that sounds like it's actually pretty fair because they've equally bargained on both sides. But I think that would not have come to the fore if it wasn't for Australia's legislation sort of paving the way. So I think people globally should be kind of looking to Australia and other countries that are enacting legislation as really a stepping stone to what might happen locally.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, how do you know? I was like, well, I read the same news articles you read. It's not like you're in the Twitter boardroom. Like I understood it firsthand. You found out about it from the same communication channels. And so I don't think there is a difficulty these days being the expert on any local area because all that information is available online. And so we can be just as informed about what's happening in the US from Australia. And the same thing, I think I'd advise people in the US to be up to date with what's happening in Australia given how it's sort of a testbed for legislation that may come down the line. And I think we've already seen this just today. We saw, I think it was Congress basically talk about a bill where they would allow media companies to collectively bargain and against big technology. And in some ways that would be.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is funny. When I got my first investment from Excel, so this is sort of 2009, 2010, and I would fly over there and I'd go into the offices. And I remember one day, I think this is very early on, there was a revolving door of CEOs at Twitter. I can't remember who was in or who was out right then. And I was in a meeting and I just brought that up. And they were sort of amazed. How did you find that out in Australia?”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple of aspects on that. One is employees. And I will say that not just legislation, but it's been a very tumultuous time in the US over the last 12 months. And we have about half of our staff globally there. And a lot of them have had to go through a pandemic, you know, very difficult racial tensions that have happened, very tumultuous election that has happened. And so I'm just really feeling for everyone in the US at the moment in terms of what they've had to go through over the last 12 months. And as a CEO, I'm responsible in trying to do our best to help that. And then the United States is beyond that has a big influence on the world and a very large customer base of ours, sort of about just under half our customers are in the US. And so that, you know, I'm very acutely aware of what happens at a sort of politics level and at.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Internationally, because An Australian CEO, you're obviously raising your children in Australia. It's remarkable that you know about the law change in California at a state by state level. How distracting is the United States to you as an Australian CEO running a global company?”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“California's footsteps. And so if we can harmonize those things, the Cloud Act between Australia and the US is a good one. Privacy Shield between US and EU where we try and harmonize laws. So I'm optimistic that there are big things we can do there.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think if we can, you know, there's a lot of things we do harmonize on. We've got the Paris Accord for climate change. And you could argue whether it's perfect or not, but we got 200 countries around the world to come together all effectively to have a standardized measurement system and a standardized targets. And we can have a whole different discussion about how Australia is doing that. And I think we've bent the rules slightly in terms of how we've interpreted them. But I think if we can do that on climate change, really complicated things, then there are other areas where we can put together international bodies to work out what is the union or of all the different wars and things people are considering. Data privacy is a good example. I would settle for one data privacy act across all of the United States, let alone internationally, because you've got one in Europe. You don't have one US-wide, and California is looking to do one. And then, of course, there'll be other states that are following California.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I obviously have a very US centric view. I grew up here. I passed the bar exam here. So my entire worldview is from the United States. You're describing something the United States would never do, right? Like the United States would just never be like, we're just going to do what Australia does. It is impossible. Do you see that beyond New Zealand? Do you see that happening in other places?”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a company, we sell from 10 person teams to 100,000 person teams. And so you're right, we run the full gamut of that. At the top end, it's not a matter of saying, no, I can't serve you because of these laws. It is a matter of how do we actually comply with these laws? And there's a company in Australia that are looking to use our cloud product. And because of the regulation, they're saying, well, we ourselves operate in 13 different countries. And before we can sign off on your cloud product, we need to get sign off from our regulatory authorities in 13 different countries to do that. And again, if they all, I imagine the laws governing this are pretty similar across the board, but the fact that they're different in 13, even if they're 1% different means they need to get sign off in all those different locations. And again, I think as a technology industry, we could do a better job of, you know, sort of helping these governments.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jira is used everywhere. It's used by the biggest companies in the world. My understanding of big companies is customers and clients is that they are themselves very demanding, especially when they are themselves global. How do you balance, okay, the Fortune 50 all uses Jira? Those are big contracts. Here's what they want from us. We might have to tell them no because of the GDPR.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what we need to put in data centers, what data needs to reside in different locations. There's things like identity, which kind of need to reside everywhere because you don't sort of say I need to log into Australia, you say I want to log in, and then we'd redirect you to Australia. So all those sort of wars about how data is protected in each country and how it can be shared between countries really affect concrete product decisions and the efforts that we put in.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“GDPR is probably a great example of where we have done that as sort of the broadest reaching sort of legislation. We are now looking at data residency is an interesting one and companies and wars are such that data needs to physically reside in a data center on that country's land in order for it to be applicable to certain rules. It's a little bit backward looking because where the bits physically live on disk is kind of a weird way to think about the cloud, which most people don't think when they open their browser. They don't really think about the physical location of the bits. But from a policy perspective, that's the way the world has ended up. However, things like Privacy Shield in Australia, there's the Cloud Act between US and Australia that allows certain things to happen under those data residency regimes. And again, the ability”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the way we'd like it to go. But practically, we've all done, both of us have done every job in the business from cleaning the bins out when we first started at Lassian to running every department. And today, and we sort of mix it up every other year or so. Today, I run the go-to-market functions and the GNA functions. So Ugo AHR and finance. And Mike runs all the product functions. So all the product management, the design, the engineering, and so forth. And so that's how we split it up, but we've done everything at various stages.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Statement or at least a voice in these discussions to make sure that these laws are implemented in the right way that achieves the policy outcomes, like kind of achieves the way that politicians and, again, politicians are elected by people. So ultimately it's the will of the people what gets done. And so how do we do that in a way that actually makes it the best way for a technology firms to do this? That's, I guess, why I spend time on the public policy is I don't pretend to know better than politicians what the world wants, you know, kind of what voters want. That's their job. But in terms of translating that into laws that can be implemented to achieve the outcomes, I think that's where we in technology can help.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a CEO, I always wish I could spend more time on products. That's my love and my passion is building stuff for our customers. And our customers don't buy our policy. Our customers don't buy our packaging or our pricing. Our customers buy and use our products. And so that's where I want to spend most of my time. Our senior executive team, I would say that I'd say GDPR, for example, for example, was named internally something around the sort of generalized destruction of product roadmaps because that war came into place and every person in product had to stop whatever they were doing that they had on their roadmap to provide for customers globally and instead had to pivot and we had hundreds of people building these data protection regimes. And I love for privacy, I think it's a great thing, but it wasn't top of the list our customers were asking for. And so sort of having a state.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether it is a social safety net, whether it's free healthcare, there's plenty of different ways in which governments can redistribute money from wealthy to less wealthy. But I don't think creating jobs for job's sake, the old depression era, let's dig a hole and then fill it in to create jobs is the right way to think about it. We've got to think about what's the best experience we want and then great, how do we redistribute that or create new jobs in this new economy.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think every government wants more jobs in their jurisdiction. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's good overall as a maximum. I think if you go back and say, well, we used to deliver a lot of CDs to music shops. And there are a lot of jobs in people that would press the CD, pack the CD, put them in cars, drive them around. A lot of people in retail that was involved in selling CDs. And yet we buy all our music online. You know, should we go back to having people doing all that just to create jobs? Like, no, actually it's way more convenient. And we actually saw way more music and we've got more musicians producing music than ever before. And so it's sort of what jobs do we want? And I think there's a big discussion to have around how the URS is divided in the world. So, you know, taxation policies and redistribution policies, whether that is universal basic income, whether that is taxation.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a real and growing danger. I don't think we have seen it being implemented in companies just yet, but also by the time it happens, it will be very difficult to undo because the reason it will happen is because the different governments will have entrenched their particular viewpoint. So when the Australian government's won this, you know, in their mind won a battle over Facebook and Google, and then Europe does it a different way. There's no incentive for them to go back and then harmonize the two different approaches. And so then suddenly Google, instead of having a lot of employees in one place that can build stuff globally, are just going to have to start building it two different ways. So you won't notice that to start with, it'll just be the number of employees dedicated to a country or a particular jurisdiction goes up. And that's sort of a deadweight loss for society. And probably the biggest worry is that further entrenches incumbents.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is China. Well, I just think sort of cultural partner would be the United States. And as a company at WASIN, we sell to almost every single country in the world. So we get to see a unique perspective of how that all plays out. And I would say from our vantage point or my personal vantage point, the increasing parochialization of the web or splintering it into a Chinese web, a European web, a United States web, an Australian web is not good for the world because these economies of scale that we used to get where effectively 2,000 engineers could build a product that scales to the whole world. Now we're going to need 20,000 engineers to build that same product 10 different times. And that's not a really good use of kind of resources. And so that worries me. And if governments lose trust in each other's regulatory functions because they have different approaches to data security.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's only maybe, I think in the last 10 years, we've shut down all the local car manufacturers in Australia because it didn't make sense for us to build cars here and then ship them on ships around the world to these geographically disparate and remote locations. And so what is really exciting for us as a country is now with these digital goods that we can build software or cochleara, which is an ear implant company, even though they don't ship something virtually. They ship something very wide and very easy to do. They can build and ship something around the world. And that's how Lassian came to be is that, you know, if we were trying to build physical goods from Australia, we wouldn't have survived. So that's actually building the Australian psyche from very early on. Now, to get back to your question about how do we see geopolitics as a result of this, I think Australia is unique because our largest trading partner.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A couple of things on that. One is that there's actually a book called The Tyranny of Distance that was written about Australia. And if you go way back, like Australia was a colonized country and they've got to work out what to trade. Unlike India, we didn't really have a spice trade where we were trading stuff back. We couldn't sell lumber back. Didn't make any sense. And there was really nothing to sell back to the UK until we created, we imported sheep. And effectively, there's a saying that Australia was built on the sheep's back. And why is that? It's, well, wool was the first thing that was light enough and valuable enough to be worthwhile shipping all the way back to England in order to pay for the spades and shovels and other things that the Australia economy needed to keep growing. And so with our sort of our geography has actually shaped the Australian psyche and the Australian economy over a very long period of time.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Australia in the world is in a physically interesting position, right? You were close to China, you have these deep cultural connections to the UK, to America. Do you think you perceive that geopolitical fight that is brewing between all the big countries in the world differently than sort of your average American tech company CO?”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you see why Brad Smith is at the seat of the table at Microsoft? He's on the executive team, our head of policy, Erica Fisher, who runs all of our legal and HR and compliance and policy. She sits on the executive team because what you're starting to see is that public policy is becoming a strategic business consideration. And of course, as Alassian is the largest Australian technology company, our job is to help that local ecosystem. But it is something that is as strategic an asset as your products or your go-to-market these days.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Please make it as onerous as possible to make Google leave so that we can come in and save the day and be the White Knight as the only search engine in Australia. And, you know,”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting, in fact, that's almost what happened, except Microsoft stepped into that praise. It's actually interesting. Ben Thompson from Stratecory, and I'm sure he stole it from somewhere else previously, talks about strategy credits. You know, there's areas where because of your strategy, there's a strategy tax, which impacts your business on where you sort of local maximas aren't reached because you're trying for a global maxima and the strategy credit. And in this case, Microsoft's Bing was a bit player like sub 10% market share in Australia. I don't know a single person that was using it. I'm sure it could be an amazing search engine just not quite as amazing as Google. And when Microsoft heard that Google was threatening to leave Australia, they called our Prime Minister and said we would happily leave under any regulatory framework you want to come up with.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Engage like we haven't sat down and looked at the competition framework for Australia, but when something happens where you spend a lot of time educating people. And so that all fits through that lens of how we as a company can make an impact in the world.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't unleash the potential of every team. One of the things we need to do is have firstly great staff who are going to come and work for us at Atlasian. And we need to operate in a world where we have laws that allow us to do that. And so for us, like we've got a, you know, sort of the derivation of that is that policy framework about how and where we engage. And there are certain areas where we as a company engage proactively. You know, we have these principles that sort of say, right, we're going to proactively engage in things. There's certain things we'll engage in reactively. So we really put it through a lens of how do we help the world? And so we've engaged proactively on debates such as same-sex marriage in Australia. Actually, Australia was behind the US in legislating that. And Atlasian was a big proponent of helping us get there because we believe those sorts of things really matter to our employees. And we've had other areas where we don't proactively.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are two things that I consider when making decisions. One is our mission as a company and our mission is to unleash the potential of every team. And that factors into how we think about things long term, the areas we need to build for. And the other area that we take into account is our values as a company. And we have five distinct values that every one of our employees knows and we have every single day, including open company no bullshit, which is one of our values to talk about transparency and working together. Another one is be the change you seek. We expect our employees to take an active role in shaping Atlasian. And so between the mission that drives where we're going and our values that kind of drive how we're going to get there, that sort of factors through every single decision.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's an interesting part is that because they could only use your phone network, it was the only thing available to them. If they'd used your Facebook friends or your Twitter network, they would have ended up with a much more high quality network and you would have had a better customer experience. But because the Wars or even those companies prohibited that and how do those companies prohibited it because of the wars that happened, you know, Facebook with Cambridge Analytica used to actually share your network with everyone. And people thought that was a great thing until someone stole those data and used it in a nefarious way. And now they don't share it with anyone. And so we asked just sort of seeing the impact that the regulatory environment that everyone operates in, now we're seeing that in actually how products get built.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Telephone address Yeah, it's funny I was saying that we planned our wedding in Trello Clubhouse. I wouldn't have been so unhappy if they had been kept away from my phone book because I got it. They sent me a notification that our wedding planner was talking about sending in Clubhouse. I was like, I haven't talked to her in a decade. Like, why would I? And there's a push and a pull there, right?”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't use Twitter's network, it can't use Facebook's network because those are closed, so it used your phone books network. But that means Cybhouse could never have been created in Europe. And I think that's just an interesting state of the world we end up in where the wars are so conflicting across different jurisdictions. And what potentially walking down which startups can exist.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“different jurisdictions where everyone wants to make their wars and in many cases they are conflicting. In Europe's GDPR would basically say I must do end-to-end encryption because I can't share private data and Australia's law says I must share private data with the government under certain conditions. It makes it very difficult to build one product globally. And like all regulation that provides a sort of a tax on everything, it really benefits incumbents and large companies. So ASEAN's getting to that stage now where we're larger and we probably benefit because it would hurt some of our upstart challenges to come have to have all this overhead that we can amortize over a large prite form and a large number of products. But I just worry about what that means for innovation globally. As an example, Clubhouse, which has come to the fore in the US, violates GDPR because it leverages your telephone address book to share things.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a global company, it's not just Australia's laws that affect us, it is the laws in every country that we operate. Europe input introduced GDPR, which is the general data protection regime and regulations. And that has been around privacy. But the laws in the US and Australia don't correspond with GDPR. And so we've had to do specific things just for Europe. And in many cases, there are areas of conflict between those two jurisdictions. So there used to be a privacy shield which would go between the US and Europe to effectively say that one states are wars or one nation's wars will apply in certain ways to the other nation, which allows companies to operate and work across both areas. But those laws, I think Privacy Shield was recently struck down by the Supreme Court. And so now as a company, we really operate in an uncertain environment. And so that's the thing that is probably the hardest overhead on companies is that the uncertain environment across”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does that affect how you think about building products? There's a regulatory apparatus that's doing things. They might pass laws. It might be a while before those laws are enacted or improved or even enforced. But Atlasin is still building products in Australia. You're shipping products in Australia. Does that feel like an unstable relationship? Does that feel like something you can count on? How does that affect what you actually make?”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Parliamentary inquiries to go look at how to fix it up. Politicians, once they've sort of fixed the thing the first time, there's not as much energy in politics to go back and revisit something and make it right. There just really isn't sort of much benefit to politicians to make those laws be great as opposed to just get them across the line. And so we're still waiting on that law to be adjusted and improved. And even things like having an independent judicial review, build a strong recommendations haven't come through yet. And so I think we've seen in the US potentially, like with Pfizer warrants and other things out there that independent IS and independent review make a great difference to the public's ability to have confidence in these areas. And so even though it was passed in 2018, it hasn't been changed yet.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Privacy to make sure the government can't listen in on their messages, or even if those messages can't be seen at a later date by a third party. And there's a fundamental trade-off between those two. And Australia passed effectively an anti-encryption bill that said the government can legislate, can designate any company, and they have to put in backdoors for the government in order for the government to be able to listen in. Things in the bill that says, well, that should not introduce a systemic weakness into that particular platform, but it's not defined what systemic weakness means. And so that's up to the eye of a holder. And again, most people would say encryption is either not. There's not sort of a halfway point where it's half encrypted or it's encrypted with a backdoor or some keys there. And so though that bill has had subsequently to the building pass or it's currently law, it's”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that I do love the speed of which we can do things and engage, but it has to be in engagement with industry. And so when things are rushed through in a week, there's clearly not any engagement happens. A good example was the encryption bill. There is a trade-off, as everyone in technology understands between privacy and security. If you use the telephone in Australia, your telephone line can be tapped according to a communications act that happened in 1970 that bound telecommunication providers to allow governments to listen in on phone calls if they have a warrant in those types of things. Now people using end-to-end encrypted devices, like if you're using Signal or WhatsApp, the government can't listen in on those and so government can't prevent any terrorist attacks that might be coordinated using those tools. On the other side, consumers want encryption.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is one of the balances that doesn't exist in the United States, for example. Our government is very slow and often deadlocked. The Australian government, it seems very fast and often maybe too fast. But isn't that better? Like, isn't it better to have a government response and say, here's how we think the tech industry should work? I mean, that law eventually was changed. I know there was a law about encryption that was eventually changed in Australia. Isn't that a better cadence, to be on? Like speaking as from product language, that seems like an iterative cadence where you're trying to find the fit as opposed to doing nothing forever.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Agreed we should do something, but it feels like this war was rushed in. And I don't know actually it's going to prevent anything happening in the future because actually complying with it is near impossible.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies operate within. And I'll give an example of the second, we had a different bill, which was in Christchurch, we had a terrorist attack maybe one or two years ago. And it was really bad because one of the terrorist live streamed the terrorist attack whilst it was happening on Facebook and horrible. No one should have to ever turn on Facebook and see something of that being live streamed. But the way the war was written meant that effectively you had to prevent a live stream of a terrorist attack if it was being filmed by the terrorist. Of course, if it's being filmed by someone else, it was actually fine according to the law. And if you're a sort of a person trying to determine with machine learning algorithms, like how to do this, like it's really difficult. I don't know how Facebook would do it apart from banning all live streams. And this war was effectively conceived and passed within a week of this tragedy. And so you're like.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's what's happening is all these jobs are becoming digital. Software is disrupting every industry. So our job as a company is to help educate our politicians on this. And so we're trying to find people that can speak both languages. So we've got a head of policy, David Masters, who came from Microsoft. And he can speak both technology and politics. We've defined our principles. We're effectively how do we engage with policymakers and some of those principles are things like treat the ailment, don't kill the patient, consult early, consult often. Those types of things to make sure that we kind of have a principles for how we think laws should be made. And if I could ask for one thing, it's that both technology invest the time to understand the political landscape that politicians operate in. And politicians spend time to understand the technical landscape, the technology.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a couple things. One is as a global company based in Australia, like our Australian reputation matters to our business. And we want to bring more people here. So we spent a lot of time thinking about how do we have good wars that get made. And what we found is that politicians until maybe five years ago, they didn't really understand what technology was or that there's a vibrant industry there. It's amazing when you look through the newspapers how many photo ops there are with politicians in a high visibility vest visiting some factory. And kind of that's their view of where jobs come from. And we're like, well, the jobs of the future aren't necessarily, they're still building things, creating things, but those things are software or they're digital goods. And there's less opportunity for photo ops kind of in the high visibility jacket, but that's where the jobs are going to come from because all those.”
2021-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Australia vs Facebook — and how regulation is splintering the internet, with Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT