Taking on the world

HELEN McCOMBIE: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar are typical Aussie blokes. They like a beer and a bit of pool after work. And they don't mind a game of fast poker at lunch time. But the relaxed office atmosphere hides a fierce desire to succeed, and they want to do it on the world stage. Mike and Scott have developed a global business and they are taking on the big guns.

SCOTT FARQUHAR, co-CEO, Atlassian Software : We have companies like Microsoft, who ostensibly compete with us, have purchased our product.

McCOMBIE: Both 26, they met at university. When they finished they set up their own software company.

MIKE CANNON-BROOKES, co-CEO, Atlassian Software: The youthful naiveté, I suppose, to think that we could do something better and both of us probably aren't very good at working for anyone else.

FARQUHAR: Our original grand plan was to earn enough money that we would be the same as a graduate position that our friends had taken.

McCOMBIE: Four years later they have done much more than that. The software entrepreneurs have staff of 50, offices in Sydney and San Francisco and turnover of 15 million dollars.

CANNON-BROOKES: Both of us are in charge, we are co-founders you would say co–CEOs, we travel around the world so much, we are both spending about a third of our time in San Francisco at the moment, so having two people with fairly equal management responsibility is very, very useful from the business point of view.

FARQUHAR: If I can't convince him that something is a good idea then it usually isn't and vice versa, so we are sort of governed by unanimous consent.

McCOMBIE: The company name, Atlassian, is indicative of what they are trying to achieve with their business.

CANNON-BROOKES: Atlassian came from my mother putting me through so many years of classics I suppose, Atlas was a Greek titan whose job was to hold up the sky, so we thought this was one of the original legendary service efforts if you like, and so it is sort of the bastardised, adjectival form of Atlas, an Atlassian effort if you like.

McCOMBIE: So what is it that their software products provide?

CANNON-BROOKES: They broadly help small teams of people operate more efficiently in very large companies so it helps them to manage projects, to exchange documents and discussion and collaborate over whatever project they happen to be working on, as well as managing the tasks and workflows and things like that that go on in day to day business project, any sort of organisation.

VICTOR RODRIGUES¸ design and development software manager, Cochlear : It is a fantastic product, it really, really has changed the way that we do things around here. What we want to do is....

McCOMBIE: Victor Rodrigues is Design and Development Software manager at Cochlear, the Australian company that makes the bionic ear. He is a big fan

RODRIGUES: The product did exactly what I wanted it to do, it actually introduced certain things that I started doing, that just made a lot of sense and adapted and changed the way that I was managing the projects at the time and then over time, just the entire company decided that it was a great product to use and we actually use it extensively for many things. We use it for managing issues, we use it for project management, we use it fore eliciting requirements from users, we use it for comments.

McCOMBIE: Atlassian has done remarkably well given its’ products mainly sell by word of mouth. It took a year to get a hundred customers, two years to get a thousand, and having just celebrated its fourth birthday now boasts four thousand customers — they include the major investment banks, Telstra, the Reserve Bank, NASA, and global giant Microsoft.

FARQUHAR: Initially we thought that they were downloading it just to copy it and that they were really just going to investigate what it did and how they could do it themselves but what we have found is that one department, a rogue department inside Microsoft, has decided to use our product and it is quite satisfying.

McCOMBIE: At the moment the major problem for the business is one that is common to many Australian industries, there's a shortage of skilled labour.

FARQUHAR: In Australia there is a bit more of an IT shortage now and because there's not as many people graduating from university, so it is very hard to find qualified, talented graduates. I can't say we have had too many huge hurdles doing business, it is a very straight forward business, it is geared towards having a lot of customers, so we don't have problems where if one customer leaves us, that’s half our revenue, it's much more of a portfolio business that way.

McCOMBIE: While the pair appear to have a fairly relaxed approach to life, they are very focused on continuing to build their sales, and the standard annual business plan doesn't work for them.

CANNON-BROOKES: We don't really have a plan per se, we have a number of ideas of things that we would like to do in the next year and we hope to get to those, we sit down once a quarter with the management team to work out exactly what we are going to do in the next quarter, but it is a very short term approach if you like from that perspective, it is a very fast moving industry so any plans we set for three years time is probably going to be out of date in a quarter.

McCOMBIE: As their business has grown, so have their goals — Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon Brookes have a very big number in their sights.

FARQUHAR: One of our large goals is to get to 50 thousand customers, and we think we can do that with some of our current products and by introducing new products, but essentially to keep to the same business plan we have at the moment which is producing great software that people love to use and selling it in a manner that people love to buy it.