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

“Atlassian basically said this bill is not a great idea. You have a statement of principles up on your website about how you think regulation should work. How do you balance you're in Australia, Facebook and Google are gigantic US companies? They do own basically the entire digital advertising market. How do you square all of this as you think about, well, the next generation of companies are inherently global?”
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, even though Facebook and Google have done all these deals, they've really done those deals to prevent being named by the effectively the Minister for Communications. The problem we've ended up with is that at any stage that Minister for Communications could threaten to name them and bring them back to the bargaining table again and again and again.”
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
“On the flip side, Facebook and Google have said actually that news itself is one of many things on our platform. And even if news disappeared, it wouldn't make a huge difference to the engagement we have with our platforms. And so that was where the stalemate ended up. And what happened is Google realized that pulling out of the country, which is what they would have to do, the way this code is written is that you can't just turn off news. You actually have to turn off news globally to every person, which is very difficult for Google to do. For Facebook, it was a little bit easier because people actually post news in Facebook. Like Facebook doesn't scrape the web in any way. And so we got to see two different reactions to the government as to how that happened. And so at the end of the day, what's ended up is the compromise is that this war has gone through, which basically mandates named companies to have to.”
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
“To it in terms of digital advertising. And so it would be unfair for any individual news company to try and negotiate with a monopoly, which I think is totally fair, right? Like the sort of mum and pop news company with 50 people that produces news isn't the sort of person that's going to be able to negotiate with Google.”
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
“The newspaper to buy a car anymore. Now you buy that from a, you know, we have car sales in Australia.com.au, we have realestate.com.au. So those places have pulled a lot of the media dollars, but also Google and Facebook are now benefiting, I guess, in terms of just advertising dollars, not necessarily from news, but from advertising dollars. And so the government has said, how do we have a vibrant and media ecosystem that is free and fair, that we all benefit from? And how do we fund that as a country? Now, what they looked around and said, well, Google and Facebook are making a lot of money. They're also happening to be using news links in their products. And so in somewhat, I think, conflating two different issues, they say, well, they must be benefiting from the news and they should have to pay a lot for that benefit. And so that would happen is the media bargaining code said, well, Google and Facebook are large. They're, you know, maybe not monopolies, but pretty close.”
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
“Been fascinating here in Australia, and Alassian doesn't have really anything to gain or lose in this particular instance directly, but we are involved because we want to make sure that we live in a country where the rules make sense, in a country where we can attract great people to come work in the technology industry and where the wars don't adversely impact kind of the way the technology gets developed in Australia and adversely maybe gets those jobs go elsewhere. And so that's where we come at it from, not because we're directly benefit or hurt by this. And to sort of further do what you said, in Australia and probably globally, we all recognize the need for a free press, like, you know, free media that is vibrant, but globally, media is, you know, traditional method of funding being advertising has been eroded by classifieds. You don't go into...”
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's talk about the news media bargaining code. This is kind of an inflection point, I think, in regulation around the world, particularly as it relates to Facebook and Google. You're sitting there as one of the co-CEOs of Australia's biggest tech company. How are you watching this battle between the country you're in and the American tech giants?”
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
“Well, I think it's interesting for your audience to know that a lot of the things that are happening in Australia are a bit of a testbed for how things may end up in the world. And because of our regulatory regime, like we are a parliamentary democracy, so we don't really have a sort of third system of government and executive branch like the legislature does both run the company country and enact their laws. And so that means a lot of wars can happen faster and can be enacted a lot faster than they can in other jurisdictions. We're also a relatively small company country. So, you know, 25 million people is more than many other countries. And so we can, I guess, move a little bit faster. And so what you've seen in Australia is a bit of a testbed of legislation on a whole bunch of different areas, whether that is in encryption and privacy sort of antitrust involving media with big technology, whether that is skilled migration is a big issue for us.”
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 little bit of attention there, right? The new breed of companies like Atlassian, like Facebook, like Google, you name it, are inherently global companies. They are conceived of that way. They begin that way. Atlassian began that way. And now we are seeing some of this nationalistic spirit. Hey, our country has to do well. In the United States, one of the reasons I want to talk to you is my frame is the United States, which is a very complicated place to live most days lately. The clash between Facebook and Google and the Australian government seemed asymmetric because those companies are really big. But even in just talking to you for 15 minutes, you're saying, I want Australia to succeed. What is the dynamic there? What is the balance there? How should I think about that?”
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
“Before we came on, you know, it was doing the research. I watched some of your other interviews. I noticed that when you are on the Australian media, they glow. They're very proud of Atlassian as a big Australian tech success story. Do you think of Atlassian as a Australian company? You just described it as a global company, but in the local coverage, there is a national pride around your company. Is that how you 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
“Local thing and then open up supply chains and other areas and sort of disconnected that link between a company and a physical location. And I think as Atlassian, we've got staff in dozens of countries around the world. We're headquartered in the UK. Our biggest, you know, we sort of feel like we're Australian-backed. Most of our customers are in the US. So we're a global company by default. And we benefit from that. We get to employ people in all those places and sell people in all those places. But we're also governed by laws in all these countries, both employment laws and how we sell in those countries. And so I think that's just fascinating to see how the world evolves.”
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
“Totally. I think our first sales in the UK, we did a few more in Europe and particularly Ben Oix and Nordic countries. And then I think we had some sales in the US. And I don't think we've got an Australian company in our first 10 sales. And so you're global from day one. And I think it's interesting to see how that changes because I think we're seeing a new breed of companies. If you go back maybe 50 or 70 years, companies employed people locally. Effectively, they sold their goods locally. They were governed by a government that was elected by people locally. If they polluted, they polluted locally. And of course, that was the place that their employees would be working in or then put an environment that they kind of existed in. And if you go back to the 70s, we moved to the sort of megacorporation or the global corporation that sort of disconnected all of that.”
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
“To the So that kind of brings me to the larger set of questions I want to ask, which is as tech companies get bigger, their relationships to the countries they're in and the countries they operate in get more complicated. All this discussion of regulation. But American Airlines is an American company. You or in Australia, they just faxed you in order and something that a customer in America. How quickly did you go global? Because the promise of the internet for a software company is that you have a global market from the first day, 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
“Sticker on the beer can and gave it to every person in the audience. And so that was sort of the gorilla marketing that we did in the early days. And then over time, we sort of built the flywheel up. Obviously hustling customers. And then one day we got a fax from American Airlines. I asked Mike, had he been working with American Airlines? And he said, no, and neither had I. And so we're like, wow, this really works. They'd faxed their credit card number and we'd never heard from them. And we're like, this software business works when people send you money for effectively doing nothing. Obviously, we better order time on the products, but we hadn't had to hustle every individual customer. And that was probably a turning point for us.”
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 the product we ended up on Jiro has been pretty successful from the start. And in the early days, you're doing lots of hustle. And we didn't have any venture capital behind us. It was just two of us bootstrapping. And coming out of university, we didn't have really money behind us that we'd saved to bootstrap. It was really put on credit cards at that stage. And so we would do the usual hustle. We would go to conferences around the world. We couldn't afford to sponsor a booth. So we would turn up at a conference with business cards and use those little beer tables that were usually set up around the place to open our laptop and do demos to people just in the hallway. In fact, one of those conferences, we realized there was a podcast much like this that was live streaming from one of the sessions. And so we stood at the entrance and we pasted or got stickers and put them on the beer. So we went to the local beer shop, got cases of beer, then as people walked in, we put a lassie.”
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
“What was the path to go from to people, okay, we've got a software product we like, now we have some customers to where you are now, which is Australia's biggest tech company. Was that a linear progression or is it fit and starts?”
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 we thought, wow, okay, well, we can provide the great support from Australia, which was a terrible business because we were providing support to people in Europe and people in the United States. And so you were up at three in the morning. I remember my phone was set to the loudest ringtone to wake me up and you'd sort of stumble out of bed trying to sound lucid at that stage. And that product, or I guess that service we provided was so bad that we decided we wanted to build something else. And at the turn of the century, there was just so much, I guess, blue ocean in software. And we tried building, you know, we built a ticketing system for managing those software customers. We built a website tracking system for tracking people moving across our website. And the thing that we were really excited about was that ticketing system and turning it into a ticketing system that everyone could use because we felt that back then there was software that cost $100,000 to install. And there was free software, open source.”
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
“Mike and I both did a scholarship co op program, and in that part of that you work for companies as well as do your university course like a sandwich program. And in working for these large companies in Australia, both of us realized that we didn't want to go work for a big corporation. We wanted to build something for ourselves and build something new. And so we were more like we wanted to do a startup, but we weren't really sure what it would be. And the first incarnation was that we built, we provided support for third-party companies. So there's a company in Sweden, provided an application server, and they were great products, but terrible support.”
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
“20 years ago, one assumes you were a much younger person, why enterprise software for a couple 20 year olds in Australia? It doesn't seem like that's not in early 2000 enterprise software was not the thing, right? It was photo sharing apps or whatever. Why enterprise software?”
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
“Yeah, it was a couple years ago when Tro has, I think it was 50 million accounts or more that we disclose and millions of users using it. And it's incredible CSAT and people of all walks of life use it from people using it on their personal life to manage information all the way through to large companies. We've got hundreds of thousands of users in large companies using Troy to manage their work. So we've got products like Tro, Jira, confluences that are knowledge management product. We've got a whole range of products that help our collaboration.”
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
“Which was get a salesperson and sell to the CIO. Our experience was more consuming shareware games where you try before you buy. And so we took that approach.”
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 Lassian's mission is to unleash the potential of every team. And we do that by largely turning work into teamwork, getting your teams to collaborate better. And the teams we work most on are the teams involved in digital transformation. They're the makers, the developers, those people that are working with software and beyond. We help them to be more productive and collaborative. And it started about 20 years ago in Australia with myself and my co-founder, Mike Cannon Brooks, who we still work together as co-CEOs almost 20 years later. And we started off really building one product in Sydney called JIRA, which is still our largest product that started off as a bug tracker for software developers. And there was a couple of unique things about that. One was we were in Australia, which is sort of an unusual place to start a company in 2001. And I think as a result of that, our go-to market was very, very different. We didn't sell enterprise software in the traditional 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
“I feel like I could ask you future of remote work questions for the entire hour, just because it is distributed company. You are in Australia, but let's start at the start. Tell me about Atlassian. You are one of Australia's biggest companies or Australia's biggest tech company. Give me the story of Atlassian.”
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 the world will move from where do you work in your office to which time zone you work in. And that's something we've been living with. We've had offices in a dozen countries or more. So we've had that for a very long time. And so the transition hasn't been that difficult for us.”
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 been great on a personal level, not taking away that COVID has had many bad stories across a whole bunch of people and companies and individual lives disrupted. But from a personal perspective, I haven't had to be on a plane every week or every month to go see people in the United States or travel around the world and see our staff. And we had an executive team that was pretty distributed previously. And some people would be in an office where they'd want to grab their colleagues and be in an office on a meeting. And that was great, but it meant we sort of had three or four meeting rooms dialed in, which is way less immersive than everyone dialed in Brady Bunch style onto Zoom. And so that's been really good as well to have that sort of increased connection with staff around 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
“I have a number of questions about Atlassian, how you are running the company. I want to talk about the Australian tech industry, but really basic question. You used to be a guy who managed a company from a plane, right? You used to fly to San Francisco, fly around the world. How are you handling that in the pandemic?”
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
“Conversation is mostly about policy, and I want to call it one of Scott's comments in particular. He said that having a great public policy team and being engaged with regulators is now a key business advantage. That is not how tech companies were thinking about anything, even five years ago. Keep that in mind as you listen to this conversation, and as you hear about efforts to regulate tech around the world. This is just part of the business now. Okay, Scott Farquir, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian. Here we go. Scott Farquhar. You're the co-founder and co-CO of Atlassian. Welcome to Decoder.”
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
“Scott and I talked about why Australia is the testbed for tech regulation around the world due to its size, location, and how its government is structured. We talked about what happened with the media bargaining code and how it will work in Australia now that it's passed. And we talked a lot about how to run a global company in an increasingly fractured world and whether new regulations help level the playing field and increase competition or just cement the 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
“What struck me about all this as we went through it is that we heard a lot from Google and from Facebook. We heard a lot from Australian government officials, but we hadn't really heard from anyone in the Australian tech industry. So I called up Scott Farquhar, the co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, Australia's biggest tech company. And one of Australia's biggest companies, period. Atlassian is a big deal. The companies are around 20 years old, and it makes JIRA, which software development teams around the world all use to manage their projects. It also makes Trello, which is a super popular project management tool that you can use for all kinds of things. Notably, Atlassian has always been a global company, even when I was just Scott and his co-founder, Mike Cannon Brooks. Their first sales were outside of Australia. That's the power of the internet.”
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