With over 11,000 commercial customers in 100+ countries, Atlassian is one of the world’s fastest growing companies. But in 2002, fresh out of university, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes could not have obtained funding to start a company if they had wanted. No one would have funded two idealistic but untested 22 year olds to build a different kind of software company. These days, ironically enough, they are approached by the best in the venture capital community on a regular basis; but their highly profitable company has no need for external funding.
Five years ago, dissatisfied with the current state of enterprise software, which was difficult to install, expensive and hard to use, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes decided to go into business — to offer customers an alternative. Using only a $1,000 credit card loan, Scott and Mike formed Atlassian. Ignoring all advice that they could never sell enough to make a profit, they decided to apply a consumer model to selling enterprise software.
Atlassian:
Their mission was to build a different kind of software company — one that listens to client needs, values innovation in development and solves customer problems with brilliant simplicity.
Scott Farquar and partner Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian were the Overall Winners and 2006 Entrepreneurs Of The Year and winners in the Young Entrepreneur category.
At just 29 years of age each, university friends Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes have created an international technology house serving 12,000 clients in 104 countries. With two main products: JIRA – an issue tracking, workflow and project management tool; and Confluence – a knowledge sharing tool for teams in large organisations, their expertise touches hundreds of thousands of people globally in many well-known organisations including Cisco, Citigroup, NASA, and the BBC.
Working on a policy of transparency, Atlassian shares its software pricing and development processes and develops products based on their ease of use and affordable pricing. They work in close collaboration with the ‘open source’ community using open source components in their products, many of which were earlier developed by Atlassian and donated to the open source community. It is an approach that enables a more rapid development of widely-usable and affordable software.
and Mike’s professional standing was recognised in 2004 when they were named IT Professionals of the Year by Consensus and in 2005, Atlassian was named by BRW magazine as Australia’ fastest growing Australian software company.
Scott and Mike are also active in their community and recently launched the Atlassian Foundation, formalising the company’s commitment to ethical business, employee empowerment and charitable works.
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