Scott Farquhar's presentation to Last Thursday club on the 25th September, 2008.

1. Scaling Atlassian
From garage to $50 million in 6 years
Scott Farquhar
scott@atlassian.com

2. Atlassian
• Enterprise software company
• Organically grown - no VC
• Australia’s
Fastest
Growing
(2002-2007)

3. Atlassian

4. Enterprise Software Atlassian Model

5. Model Evolution
• No $ for sales team? Must sell itself
• Sell itself? Must be low price
• Low $? Must sell 000s of copies
• 000s of copies? Must sell globally
• Customer must buy, we can’t sell

6. Brief
History
Lesson

7. 2001 - Big Ideas
• Scott & Mike - both 21
• $10k ‘startup capital’
• Tried multiple ideas

8. The Netherlands

9. Software
... how hard can it be?

10. The Mission
“Our mission is to build a different kind of software company.
A company that listens to client needs, values innovation in development
and solves customer problems with brilliant simplicity.
Our commitment to legendary service provides consistent, high quality
support for all our customers.”

11. The Mission
“To be the best in the world, sir!” - Maverick, Top Gun

12. 50,000
customers

13. 2002 - JIRA
Needed it. Couldn’t find it. Built it.

14. 2004 - Confluence
Needed it. Couldn’t find it. Built it.

15. Wiki:
Web site that
allows
collaborative
editing of its
content and
structure by its
users.

17. Development Tools

18. How are we
going?

19. 187
98
50
20
4 7
2
June 02 June 03 June 04 Jun 05 Jun 06 Jun 07 August 08
Staff

20. 12,934
7,468
4,340
2,219
1,039
319
18
Jun 02 June 03 June 04 Jun 05 Jun 06 Jun 07 August 08
Customers

21. Who Are They?
12,000+ customers in 100+ countries
across Fortune 1000, public enterprise and technology sectors
Technology & Finance & Banking Science & Telecom & Corporate &
Biotech Engineering Networking Government
Cisco Citigroup NASA Vodafone US Supreme
Oracle JP Morgan Boeing Nokia Court
Novell Deutsche Bank CERN AT&T GE
Siemens BNP Paribas Raytheon Bell Canada BP
Fujitsu CIBC Northrop Verizon Sony
Borland Merrill Lynch Grumman KPN 3M
HSBC European Space Newbury BMW
Pfizer
World Bank Agency Networks BMG
Imclone Stanford Linear Booz Allen
Roche Accelerator Hamilton
Accenture
Australia: Telstra, Macquarie Bank, The Reserve Bank, Cochlear, Caterpillar…

22. 35
21
USD
Mil
11
5
1
0
Jun 02 Jun 03 Jun 04 Jun 05 Jun 06 Jun 07 Jun 08
Sales

23. 2006 Aussie EoY

24. Mistakes

25. Ownership Structure

26. Intellectual
Property

27. 2005 - The USA

28. Kick-ass

29. “It is promising that
Atlassian received such
high calibre
applications for mine
to be discontinued”

30. Atlassian’s Values
'$(')&%
E?+1:+-57+B56-*?/=5.:7-*+/*6+-657:-1B:+?
!quot;#$%&
)*+,-./0*1,23-,/-4566789:;
<596=->9:8-8+1?:-1,=-4161,.+;
@/,A:-B5.C-:8+-.57:/0+?;
'612-17-1-:+10;
<+-:8+-.81,D+-2/5-7++C;

31. First impressions

32. 360 degree feedback

33. Events

34. Mission Atlassian

35. Mission Atlassian

36. Open Company

37. Stand Up Meetings

38. Blogs

39. Measure Everything
JIRA Sales Cycle (Days) Bamboo Sales Cycle (Days) 200+200+
101-200
101-200
51-100
51-100
5% 4% 0-50 0-50
13% 17%
57% 59%
25% 21%
82% under 100 days 80% under 100 days
Crowd Sales Cycle (Days) Confluence Sales Cycle (Days)
3% 6%
16% 14%
60% 20%
81%
97% under 100 days 80% under 100 days

40. tlassian Dashboard - Extranet http://extranet.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?spaceKey=Admin&title=Atlassian+Dashboard&.
Admin Space
Metrics
Atlassian Dashboard
Added by Scott Farquhar, last edited by Scott Farquhar on Feb 18, 2008 (view change)
Labels: sales-reporting
Weekly Sales
Target = US$34m
Measure: Sales
To reach Last 12 Week
target Week Av
$755k $753k $676k
Marketing: Installs
Measure: Installations of 1st
Product
Q1 Last 12 Week
Target Week Avg
825 781 680
Support: Confluence
and JIRA SLA
Measure: JIRA and Confluence
issues not answered within SLA
Target Last 12 Week

41. Listen to
customers

42. Dialogue with customers

43. Innovation
• Customer’s buy for innovation
... but push towards normal?!
• Fight it!
• Google’s 20% > Fedex Day

44. Scaling
Atlassian

45. The Model Itself
• Do software companies scale?
• Know what doesn’t scale in your model
• Software = support / sales!
• Invest in simple, installable, supportable,
documented, quality product

46. Quality First
Raised Fixed
808 338
1622 786
2564 2509

47. Marketing
• First - word of mouth scales
... so make a damn good product to start
... and make it attractive!
• Google AdWords
• Trust is hard to scale
customer lists, testimonials etc.
• Beware low touch - ship a t-shirt!

48. T-shirts
• 1000s of shirts shipped
... by hand!
• Fulfillment now
outsourced - scale
• Make them wearable!

49. Learn

50. Foundation

51. Questions? Scott Farquhar
scott@atlassian.com