The Exchanges

Q I do want to dive in, though, and it's on something that you said to me before, which I thought was particularly personal and would be a great starting point, which is the best companies build economies around themselves. So what did you mean by this, and what are those different components?

A Well, I think this is true for any company, consumer companies, you know, as well as enterprise companies. I'll focus on enterprise companies with the one I know best, you know, Atlassian as an example. We were very intentional at Atlassian in thinking about the economies that we could help build around us. A partner economy of resellers and service providers. A marketplace economy of developers and independent software companies building add-ons and extensions to our products that filled a need for our customers that we weren't filling. A job economy. Where the credentials and expertise people could build around our products was something that they'd get hired for. They'd get their next job because of that, and on and on. Eventually, your alumni network is an economy. The culture and the people that you grow up through your company that move on to other companies are part of the company or the economy that can thrive around you. You know, I think the word economy is really important here because there's livelihood, incentives, motivations, values, the need for management and investment. Each of those that I mentioned have their own unique built-in network effects. And transitive properties back to the business around both growth and defensive notes. So I think the components vary company to company, but generally they're probably drawn along that triangle of customers, partner…

AI assessment note: “A partner economy of resellers and service providers. A marketplace economy of developers”

Q When's the right time, if we think about kind of many founders listening, when's the right time for founders to think about building out that economy beyond just building product and getting initial users to love it? When should they think about economy building?

A I think in the earliest days of the company, in the formation of the company, you know, as you're building the product, I think you should be thinking, What are the economies, the extensions of our business that we can invest in that will have transitive properties back to our own company? And, you know, when we thought about it, even sort of one of the examples that I mentioned, a partner economy of resellers and solution providers, we, I think Atlassian now probably has over 500 of those. And these are individual companies that are hiring and creating culture and exploring dimensions of Atlassian's market that Atlassian doesn't have the time or capacity to really think through. You know, I think if you're a company that thinks about that and you architect it right, you're creating kind of these independent businesses that think exclusively about your business. So your growth is their growth and vice versa. And they're cheering fanatically for you and they hustle like on your behalf. So, you know, whether it's a partner that's doing some value added service that I mentioned, or developer building something on top of your platform or a customer champion that believes that their next pay increase is going to come from the expertise that you've helped them develop. They're all hustling on your side of the field, and that hustle and the growth that's related to it compounds like a…

AI assessment note: “I think in the earliest days of the company, in the formation of the company”

Q strange almost, but I listened to your discussion with Alex now at Excel, and in that discussion, you mentioned actually being in Asia, and being a musician in Asia. When you were very young, it just struck me as quite a Transformative moment of someone's life being in Asia at such a young age on your own. How do you think it impacted your mindset and who you are today?

A Yeah, I was a young kid from a small town on the coast of Washington State, and I'd gone to college in Seattle, but Seattle at the time was a pretty small and provincial place, so to suddenly land in Seoul, Korea, and Tokyo, and Burma was incredibly eye-opening, and just an incredible experience. Opened my perspective a lot. Taught me, you know, I think, to look for and appreciate differences. Helped me to listen more carefully. I mean, when you're in places where they're not speaking your language, and they can speak part of your language way better than you can speak part of theirs, you really have to tune your ears, and you have to slow down and kind of connect with human beings on a different level. So that taught me a lot, I think, and helped shape me. I was in my twenties for a period of time, kind of all over Asia. Playing piano, and so sort of the other superpower that I kind of took out of that experience was I learned how to play my way the Frank Sinatra song in every key, so whoever wanted to sing it could on demand.

AI assessment note: “Opened my perspective a lot. Taught me, you know, I think, to look for”

Q I do want to dive in, though, and it's on something that you said to me before, which I thought was particularly personal and would be a great starting point, which is the best companies build economies around themselves. So what did you mean by this, and what are those different components?

A Well, I think this is true for any company, consumer companies, you know, as well as enterprise companies. I'll focus on enterprise companies with the one I know best, you know, Atlassian as an example. We were very intentional at Atlassian in thinking about the economies that we could help build around us. A partner economy of resellers and service providers. A marketplace economy of developers and independent software companies building add-ons and extensions to our products that filled a need for our customers that we weren't filling. A job economy. Where the credentials and expertise people could build around our products was something that they'd get hired for. They'd get their next job because of that, and on and on. Eventually, your alumni network is an economy. The culture and the people that you grow up through your company that move on to other companies are part of the company or the economy that can thrive around you. You know, I think the word economy is really important here because there's livelihood, incentives, motivations, values, the need for management and investment. Each of those that I mentioned have their own unique built-in network effects. And transitive properties back to the business around both growth and defensive notes. So I think the components vary company to company, but generally they're probably drawn along that triangle of customers, partner…

AI assessment note: “A partner economy of resellers and service providers. A marketplace economy of developers”

Q Best board member that you've sat on a board with and why?

A Laurie Norrington. An absolute treasure. Sit on the HubSpot board with Lori. She is just steeped in decades of operating experience from Intuit and eBay and has been a great independent director on lots of incredible boards. Just a wonderful, smart, insightful human being. She has a gift for asking a question or shaping a suggestion in a way that's just so accessible to answer or accessible to consider. I think that's a gift because oftentimes somebody can ask a question, it can feel like I'm trying to show you how insightful my question is versus really trying to understand something more deeply, or I'm gonna make a suggestion that shows that, you know, I'm the smartest person in the room or something. She's just zero ego, you know, a hundred percent wrapped in empathy and experience, and whenever she speaks, it's just incredibly impactful.

AI assessment note: “Laurie Norrington. An absolute treasure.”

Q sales. And then also on the retention side, if it's not a star service, which it might not be, again, you don't have the brand to kind of retain. How do you think about that? When's the right time to build that Partner Network, because for me, I don't think it's day one. I think you have to reach a certain height. Am I right, or am I missing this?

A Well, you need market there. I mean, you need market for the partners to be able to grow their businesses, and then I think you need alignment around what they do, and what you do, and where you work together, and where some of the rubs will be. In our particular case, part of the catalyst for building the Partner Network was this need that we weren't directly fulfilling in the enterprise segment, with a need geographically You know, we were selling online in US dollars, and so part of the value add that a partner could support us through is, I can sell in euros, or I can sell in Japanese yen, and I can invoice you locally because you're gonna buy online from effectively a US and Australian entity, and you might want an invoice with a local address for tax reasons. That was sort of like one thing that the partner could fulfill. The other thing that was really symbiotic with our particular approach is, There was a service opportunity in our products for partners to service. They could configure, tune, customize, deploy. There's a kind of a bunch of things that potentially a large customer would need help with that we could either choose to invest directly, or we could choose to invest through a partner to service those kinds of things. And I think one of the mistakes maybe that companies make is, and I learned this in the company prior to Atlassian, there's a gravitational pull …

AI assessment note: “you need market there. I mean, you need market for the partners”

Q strange almost, but I listened to your discussion with Alex now at Excel, and in that discussion, you mentioned actually being in Asia, and being a musician in Asia. When you were very young, it just struck me as quite a Transformative moment of someone's life being in Asia at such a young age on your own. How do you think it impacted your mindset and who you are today?

A Yeah, I was a young kid from a small town on the coast of Washington State, and I'd gone to college in Seattle, but Seattle at the time was a pretty small and provincial place, so to suddenly land in Seoul, Korea, and Tokyo, and Burma was incredibly eye-opening, and just an incredible experience. Opened my perspective a lot. Taught me, you know, I think, to look for and appreciate differences. Helped me to listen more carefully. I mean, when you're in places where they're not speaking your language, and they can speak part of your language way better than you can speak part of theirs, you really have to tune your ears, and you have to slow down and kind of connect with human beings on a different level. So that taught me a lot, I think, and helped shape me. I was in my twenties for a period of time, kind of all over Asia. Playing piano, and so sort of the other superpower that I kind of took out of that experience was I learned how to play my way the Frank Sinatra song in every key, so whoever wanted to sing it could on demand.

AI assessment note: “Opened my perspective a lot. Taught me, you know, I think, to look for”

Q What do you think are the biggest challenges in terms of building out these economies? You mentioned Microsoft, there's obviously Atlassian, there's many others in play today. What do you think are the biggest challenges that are maybe common throughout in terms of that economy build out?

A Maybe a big one is you have to have trust that a third party or a partner or Somebody that's an extension of you can do things as well as you could. In some cases they're going to do things differently. In some cases they need to do the same things. And, you know, we invested at Atlassian, we invested early on, we had built this self-service online e-commerce flywheel for customers to buy the product. And as we moved into the enterprise, we had an opportunity to either invest directly in building an enterprise sales organization or indirectly in investing in a partner network and a channel that could help resell our products into larger companies around the globe. But also service and support and configure and install and upgrade all those products. And that requires a lot of faith. When you're a young company, you could say, well, I know what I need to do. I know how to do this. And probably it's a more sure-footed path for me just to do that directly. And it takes both faith, investments, patience to invest in an alternative, but you've got to believe that that alternative provides this sort of long-term, durable, positive benefit to the company. There's some tension in that. I think there's also tension in continuing to invest in it. Even if you pick channel as sort of one component of economy that you can build, I think, you know, history is sort of littered with examples o…

AI assessment note: “Maybe a big one is you have to have trust that a third party”

Q sales. And then also on the retention side, if it's not a star service, which it might not be, again, you don't have the brand to kind of retain. How do you think about that? When's the right time to build that Partner Network, because for me, I don't think it's day one. I think you have to reach a certain height. Am I right, or am I missing this?

A Well, you need market there. I mean, you need market for the partners to be able to grow their businesses, and then I think you need alignment around what they do, and what you do, and where you work together, and where some of the rubs will be. In our particular case, part of the catalyst for building the Partner Network was this need that we weren't directly fulfilling in the enterprise segment, with a need geographically You know, we were selling online in US dollars, and so part of the value add that a partner could support us through is, I can sell in euros, or I can sell in Japanese yen, and I can invoice you locally because you're gonna buy online from effectively a US and Australian entity, and you might want an invoice with a local address for tax reasons. That was sort of like one thing that the partner could fulfill. The other thing that was really symbiotic with our particular approach is, There was a service opportunity in our products for partners to service. They could configure, tune, customize, deploy. There's a kind of a bunch of things that potentially a large customer would need help with that we could either choose to invest directly, or we could choose to invest through a partner to service those kinds of things. And I think one of the mistakes maybe that companies make is, and I learned this in the company prior to Atlassian, there's a gravitational pull …

AI assessment note: “Well, you need market there. I mean, you need market for the partners”

Q Can I ask, I had a very seasoned exec turn VC on the show the other day, and they said the hardest, hardest element is writing that first check. It's like having the conviction to write the first check as an institutional investor and, you know, put the first badge on the portfolio board. How did you embrace that? How was that moment for you?

A My first check was a company I'd known for a while. It was a company called Century IO. They provide software to help developers monitor and fix errors and performance in their code and the applications that they're building. And so part of the big secular shift around software eating everything and the importance of software development, software development teams. So it was sort of one that I, I was close to based on my 12 years at Atlassian, but incredible product, fanatical customers, and like Atlassian, you know, the ability to serve Small and huge customers simultaneously. You know, it's kind of daunting when you write the first one. I think maybe the hard part about investing in general is you can, you know, it's easy to imagine what a company is going to look like two years into the future. Lots of investing is closing your eyes and building some assumptions around what the company could look like five to 10 years into the future. And that's hard because so much can change, right? Markets can change. New competitors can kind of enter the market. You can have Big tectonic shifts in a particular category that can create headwinds for that company. It's really difficult to predict the future with certainty that far out. That's actually, I think anytime you're writing a check, whether it's like early stage or even in growth stage, and you're saying, man, what do I need to b…

AI assessment note: “You know, it's kind of daunting when you write the first one.”

Q Best board member that you've sat on a board with and why?

A Laurie Norrington. An absolute treasure. Sit on the HubSpot board with Lori. She is just steeped in decades of operating experience from Intuit and eBay and has been a great independent director on lots of incredible boards. Just a wonderful, smart, insightful human being. She has a gift for asking a question or shaping a suggestion in a way that's just so accessible to answer or accessible to consider. I think that's a gift because oftentimes somebody can ask a question, it can feel like I'm trying to show you how insightful my question is versus really trying to understand something more deeply, or I'm gonna make a suggestion that shows that, you know, I'm the smartest person in the room or something. She's just zero ego, you know, a hundred percent wrapped in empathy and experience, and whenever she speaks, it's just incredibly impactful.

AI assessment note: “Laurie Norrington. An absolute treasure. Sit on the HubSpot board with Lori.”

Q Do you find that tough? Because I do. You look back on your day, and you might as well have done nothing if you actually want to look at, like, productive work done.

A I do. I do find it tough. You're looking for, I mean, you're building out, you know, a portfolio, and the portfolio is going to be selective. In my particular case, I'm probably choosing four or five You know, over the course of 12 to 18 months that I want to deploy a lot of capital into, but also deploy a lot of time and energy and attention. And so, even though, to that degree, it makes sense to sort of spend a lot of time qualifying out, it's hard. It's sort of like your time is inverted, where the majority of it is filtering the things that you're going to pass on, you're going to say no to, to try to find those four or five really special companies that you want to marry.

AI assessment note: “I do. I do find it tough.”

Q When was the last time your mind was blown, and what was it with?

A So this is a music thing, so pretty arcane, but there's a musician named Jacob Collier, who's a fellow countryman of yours, who has perfect pitch. And perfect pitch means he can sing precisely any note in tune. Jacob can do this thing where he can also sing microtones, which are sort of the tones in between regular notes. So if you look at a piano keyboard, you know, there are tones in between the keys that you can play with your fingers. His perfect pitch is so dialed in that as he's singing, he can slightly modulate the key so it's out of tune. And he does, there's a video on YouTube that just blew my mind where I think he was delivering this course at MIT and he played a chord on the piano. And he began to sing the song. He took his hands off the keyboard. He began to sing the song and to your ear, it sounded perfectly in key, but he had slightly modulated it to the point that a minute later when he played the chord, the piano was out of tune or he was out of tune actually, but it made the piano sound out of tune. And it's just this dazzling innate ability. It's like watching somebody draw a human face at a photographic level. You're like mind blown, but it's just this innate superpower that, you know, you're born with, but to see it is like magic.

AI assessment note: “there's a video on YouTube that just blew my mind”

Q When's the right time, if we think about kind of many founders listening, when's the right time for founders to think about building out that economy beyond just building product and getting initial users to love it? When should they think about economy building?

A I think in the earliest days of the company, in the formation of the company, you know, as you're building the product, I think you should be thinking, What are the economies, the extensions of our business that we can invest in that will have transitive properties back to our own company? And, you know, when we thought about it, even sort of one of the examples that I mentioned, a partner economy of resellers and solution providers, we, I think Atlassian now probably has over 500 of those. And these are individual companies that are hiring and creating culture and exploring dimensions of Atlassian's market that Atlassian doesn't have the time or capacity to really think through. You know, I think if you're a company that thinks about that and you architect it right, you're creating kind of these independent businesses that think exclusively about your business. So your growth is their growth and vice versa. And they're cheering fanatically for you and they hustle like on your behalf. So, you know, whether it's a partner that's doing some value added service that I mentioned, or developer building something on top of your platform or a customer champion that believes that their next pay increase is going to come from the expertise that you've helped them develop. They're all hustling on your side of the field, and that hustle and the growth that's related to it compounds like a…

AI assessment note: “I think in the earliest days of the company, in the formation of the company”

Q about this, I mean, the big thing I hear is that you have to be a really meaningful part of their business, if not the sole part of their business, because you have to be aligned in that way. How do you think about equipping your team to manage that partner network? What does that internal infrastructure look like to ensure that you get the best from the partner network?

A In our particular case, it is about architecting a program that has Clarity around the purpose and the mission, and where you're aligning with the partners that you're recruiting into that program, what's going to happen? On top of that program, you know, we didn't have salespeople in the field, but we had, at the time, what we called experts. We referred to our partners as experts because we wanted to signal to, you know, the market and to our customers that there are companies alongside us that have deep expertise in our products, and that's actually what you want. You want somebody that really knows how to take Atlassian products and put them to work inside of your business, and so We're going to represent not a reseller, not a VAR, not a service provider. We're going to represent an expert to you. We invested in developing that expertise in these companies. So we didn't have field salespeople, but we had expert managers around the world who were deeply focused on recruiting, enabling, assisting, helping, managing this network of affiliated partners and partnerships. Also understanding what could we do better inside of the company, inside of the program, inside of the products. To enable their growth because their growth would yield more growth for us.

AI assessment note: “we had expert managers around the world who were deeply focused on recruiting, enabling, assisting”

Q How do you feel about the importance of partner networks, channel networks, and those providers in a world of much more kind of democratized product-led growth?

A I think it can be a little trickier if there isn't something for the partner to be able to do with your product. If your product is so simple and so easy that the barrier to entry in the product is literally a signup form and I'm in, and the product basically Doesn't need configuration or training or assistance or help. And there isn't something that you can stretch it around to do that requires expertise or prior experience. It's going to be harder. And it may be that then you have more of a partner orientation around reselling or training, you know, some other thing that the partner could do. But I think it's important to understand, like, if I'm going to build this network of affiliated relationships, what are they? And by the way, the other dimension that I mentioned was, it was important to us is we had Extensibility in Atlassian products from a really early age. And so one thing that partners could do is they could extend them and kind of build add-ons and customizations individually for specific customers. But third parties and independent developers could also use those same extensions to build products they could sell into our customer base. And that was, again, a huge area of investment for us where we focused on making sure that the APIs and extension points were richer and richer and richer for things, for individuals to do things with and small companies to do thin…

AI assessment note: “I think it can be a little trickier if there isn't something for the partner”

Q a massive question for founders is like, when's the right time to build that secondary or ancillary product? I know it's very different dependent on market product insertion point, a lot of different factors, but how do you think about kind of the core of when's the right time to add that second product and really start building out the product portfolio if that's the strategy you want to take?

A I think it's more common, a more common mistake is companies probably wait too long. Versus doing it too early. I think history is littered with examples of great companies that didn't invest in, you know, a durable second act, and they're putting all their energy in the first act, and eventually the first act runs out of gas or steam, and then it's too late. Then you're in sort of that wartime save the first act mode versus, you know, investing in the optionality of kind of that second product or that second act of growth. I think it's impossibly prescriptible timing because it is so situational, but the advice I'd probably give Always have some part of you, some part of the company thinking about new innovation, new problems to solve for customers, and just investing in that. You know, in Atlassian's case, our second product, Confluence, was created in year two of the company, which was incredibly risky, I think, to diversify focus so early. But, you know, as I mentioned earlier, I think it was foundational to the company Atlassian became. It was very much a high beta move, right? High risk, high reward. But that move also led to Early explorations in M&A, because we understood how to manage multiple things in the product portfolio, and we understood the virtues of building out that portfolio. Those are all muscles that every company ultimately needs to develop. If you're goi…

AI assessment note: “a more common mistake is companies probably wait too long. Versus doing it too early.”

Q Can I ask a weird one? Is it harder than you thought? I think, you know, for a lot of founders and incredibly, as I speak to, you kind of go, What do you VCs do all day? Like, is it harder than you thought?

A In some dimensions it is. I mean, I think what's hard for operators that move into investing, it's easy to sort of look at things through the lens of maybe what you do as an operator. And so that challenge is you can see maybe a lot of potential in lots of businesses based on what you believe would be the right focus or execution. And that's based on what you've been through and what you've built and what you've seen. That can be a challenge because I think Yeah, I've seen lots of great businesses that potentially could be exceptional. And by the way, that's true of any investment, but sort of like the right execution and kind of right strategy and right focus. But, you know, I think the day-to-day job I found thrilling, right? I mean, the opportunity to spelunk into different markets and different products and different founders and different stages of growth is awesome. I mean, having spent 25 years really single threading on one thing where I wake up every day thinking about one market. And only the dimensions of that one company to have the opportunity to be blessed with the opportunity to learn about a lot of different markets and products and problems that you're solving is just exhilarating.

AI assessment note: “In some dimensions it is. I mean, I think what's hard for operators”

Q almost concern with today is the fact that actually with capital markets where they are, Atlassian, if it was today in its two, three year formation, say the first years, it would have been so stuffed with capital from so many different multi-stage crossover funds, you name it, that actually it could have been so diverted from the beauty and simplicity of what it was. Do you think that's fair?

A You know, again, it depends on the situation. I think there's businesses that need capital that you need to blitz scale because like there's an opportunity that was so large and so meaningful. That if you're not chasing it as quickly as you can, somebody else is, and the first to get there is probably going to be the winner take most. I think there's certainly examples of that. Then there's examples where, you know, I think capital scarcity can also benefit you. You know, we were forced to kind of fund the business from the cash register, and I think that created, you know, a discipline. It created a compelling need to really, really materially understand ROI, and so anywhere we were going to Spend money. We are going to analyze the crap out of that just to make sure is this money well spent? You know, we could still be speculative and we could still experiment and try things, but every experiment was thought through. What are we trying to prove here? And how do we know that this is working or not working? And I think if you're not capital constrained, potentially you're not doing that because you don't have to, but you know, I think it's a horses for courses thing. It really depends on the situation, the market, the competitive landscape and how you're choosing to compete.

AI assessment note: “I think capital scarcity can also benefit you. You know, we were forced to kind of fund”

Q That is very, very kind of you, but I do want to start with some context, and I always love a bit of background, so how did you make your way into the world of venture and come to be a GP today at Bond?

A Well, I've spent the last 25 years building companies, and the last 12 I was at Atlassian building out GoToMarket and the business operation there. And joined the board of HubSpot, a company called HubSpot, about four years ago. Just got a lot of gas in the tank from the ability to help that company in that particular capacity in that role. And at the same time, I began investing personally in younger companies and mentoring and meeting founders. Both of those two things I drew a lot of energy from. And so after 25 years of building companies, I could choose between rebooting and single threading on another company that I could help build and grow. We're taking the accumulated merit badges, and experiences, and scar tissue, and trying to be useful across more dimensions, and a bunch of different companies, and different markets, and different founders, and different stages of growth, and that's what I was attracted to.

AI assessment note: “began investing personally in younger companies and mentoring and meeting founders.”

Q That is very, very kind of you, but I do want to start with some context, and I always love a bit of background, so how did you make your way into the world of venture and come to be a GP today at Bond?

A Well, I've spent the last 25 years building companies, and the last 12 I was at Atlassian building out GoToMarket and the business operation there. And joined the board of HubSpot, a company called HubSpot, about four years ago. Just got a lot of gas in the tank from the ability to help that company in that particular capacity in that role. And at the same time, I began investing personally in younger companies and mentoring and meeting founders. Both of those two things I drew a lot of energy from. And so after 25 years of building companies, I could choose between rebooting and single threading on another company that I could help build and grow. We're taking the accumulated merit badges, and experiences, and scar tissue, and trying to be useful across more dimensions, and a bunch of different companies, and different markets, and different founders, and different stages of growth, and that's what I was attracted to.

AI assessment note: “taking the accumulated merit badges, and experiences, and scar tissue, and trying to be useful”

Q almost concern with today is the fact that actually with capital markets where they are, Atlassian, if it was today in its two, three year formation, say the first years, it would have been so stuffed with capital from so many different multi-stage crossover funds, you name it, that actually it could have been so diverted from the beauty and simplicity of what it was. Do you think that's fair?

A You know, again, it depends on the situation. I think there's businesses that need capital that you need to blitz scale because like there's an opportunity that was so large and so meaningful. That if you're not chasing it as quickly as you can, somebody else is, and the first to get there is probably going to be the winner take most. I think there's certainly examples of that. Then there's examples where, you know, I think capital scarcity can also benefit you. You know, we were forced to kind of fund the business from the cash register, and I think that created, you know, a discipline. It created a compelling need to really, really materially understand ROI, and so anywhere we were going to Spend money. We are going to analyze the crap out of that just to make sure is this money well spent? You know, we could still be speculative and we could still experiment and try things, but every experiment was thought through. What are we trying to prove here? And how do we know that this is working or not working? And I think if you're not capital constrained, potentially you're not doing that because you don't have to, but you know, I think it's a horses for courses thing. It really depends on the situation, the market, the competitive landscape and how you're choosing to compete.

AI assessment note: “if you're not capital constrained, potentially you're not doing that”

Q Can I ask, I had a very seasoned exec turn VC on the show the other day, and they said the hardest, hardest element is writing that first check. It's like having the conviction to write the first check as an institutional investor and, you know, put the first badge on the portfolio board. How did you embrace that? How was that moment for you?

A My first check was a company I'd known for a while. It was a company called Century IO. They provide software to help developers monitor and fix errors and performance in their code and the applications that they're building. And so part of the big secular shift around software eating everything and the importance of software development, software development teams. So it was sort of one that I, I was close to based on my 12 years at Atlassian, but incredible product, fanatical customers, and like Atlassian, you know, the ability to serve Small and huge customers simultaneously. You know, it's kind of daunting when you write the first one. I think maybe the hard part about investing in general is you can, you know, it's easy to imagine what a company is going to look like two years into the future. Lots of investing is closing your eyes and building some assumptions around what the company could look like five to 10 years into the future. And that's hard because so much can change, right? Markets can change. New competitors can kind of enter the market. You can have Big tectonic shifts in a particular category that can create headwinds for that company. It's really difficult to predict the future with certainty that far out. That's actually, I think anytime you're writing a check, whether it's like early stage or even in growth stage, and you're saying, man, what do I need to b…

AI assessment note: “it's kind of daunting when you write the first one”

Q How do you feel about the importance of partner networks, channel networks, and those providers in a world of much more kind of democratized product-led growth?

A I think it can be a little trickier if there isn't something for the partner to be able to do with your product. If your product is so simple and so easy that the barrier to entry in the product is literally a signup form and I'm in, and the product basically Doesn't need configuration or training or assistance or help. And there isn't something that you can stretch it around to do that requires expertise or prior experience. It's going to be harder. And it may be that then you have more of a partner orientation around reselling or training, you know, some other thing that the partner could do. But I think it's important to understand, like, if I'm going to build this network of affiliated relationships, what are they? And by the way, the other dimension that I mentioned was, it was important to us is we had Extensibility in Atlassian products from a really early age. And so one thing that partners could do is they could extend them and kind of build add-ons and customizations individually for specific customers. But third parties and independent developers could also use those same extensions to build products they could sell into our customer base. And that was, again, a huge area of investment for us where we focused on making sure that the APIs and extension points were richer and richer and richer for things, for individuals to do things with and small companies to do thin…

AI assessment note: “I think it can be a little trickier if there isn't something for the partner”

Q about this, I mean, the big thing I hear is that you have to be a really meaningful part of their business, if not the sole part of their business, because you have to be aligned in that way. How do you think about equipping your team to manage that partner network? What does that internal infrastructure look like to ensure that you get the best from the partner network?

A In our particular case, it is about architecting a program that has Clarity around the purpose and the mission, and where you're aligning with the partners that you're recruiting into that program, what's going to happen? On top of that program, you know, we didn't have salespeople in the field, but we had, at the time, what we called experts. We referred to our partners as experts because we wanted to signal to, you know, the market and to our customers that there are companies alongside us that have deep expertise in our products, and that's actually what you want. You want somebody that really knows how to take Atlassian products and put them to work inside of your business, and so We're going to represent not a reseller, not a VAR, not a service provider. We're going to represent an expert to you. We invested in developing that expertise in these companies. So we didn't have field salespeople, but we had expert managers around the world who were deeply focused on recruiting, enabling, assisting, helping, managing this network of affiliated partners and partnerships. Also understanding what could we do better inside of the company, inside of the program, inside of the products. To enable their growth because their growth would yield more growth for us.

AI assessment note: “we had expert managers around the world who were deeply focused on recruiting, enabling”

Q When you think about like the success you had in terms of building a start with Atlassian, when you think back now, is there anything you would Do differently. You would have done earlier. You wouldn't have done. Is there anything that you would do differently when you look back at the journey you had in terms of building out this network at Atlassian?

A And I don't know. I always, the counterfactuals are always hard because, you know, we made some pretty unconventional choices around strategy and where we were going. And it's always hard to say, well, what if we had gone right instead of left? It's hard to say. I mean, I'm proud of The choices that we made. We spent a bunch of time debating them. And there's unconventional things like, you know, we added a second products really early in the company's life cycle. That was a very unconventional and risky choice. But I think if I look back, had we not done that, we probably would be a very different company. Who knows? Like if we were just the Jira company and not Atlassian that has a portfolio of products, how different would we be? I think that we wouldn't be the company that Atlassian became. We also deferred focus on the enterprise segment. For about 10 years, we were still selling into the enterprise, but we were selling differently to the enterprise and really not kind of maximizing the value that we probably should capture for the value that we were giving really large companies. We deferred that focus and that ability to capture that value for a number of years, and I think as a strategic choice, that helped us competitively because we were a different shaped company for enterprises. We were still being adopted At the user level and brought into organizations. But the al…

AI assessment note: “the counterfactuals are always hard because, you know, we made some pretty unconventional choices”

Q When you think about like the success you had in terms of building a start with Atlassian, when you think back now, is there anything you would Do differently. You would have done earlier. You wouldn't have done. Is there anything that you would do differently when you look back at the journey you had in terms of building out this network at Atlassian?

A And I don't know. I always, the counterfactuals are always hard because, you know, we made some pretty unconventional choices around strategy and where we were going. And it's always hard to say, well, what if we had gone right instead of left? It's hard to say. I mean, I'm proud of The choices that we made. We spent a bunch of time debating them. And there's unconventional things like, you know, we added a second products really early in the company's life cycle. That was a very unconventional and risky choice. But I think if I look back, had we not done that, we probably would be a very different company. Who knows? Like if we were just the Jira company and not Atlassian that has a portfolio of products, how different would we be? I think that we wouldn't be the company that Atlassian became. We also deferred focus on the enterprise segment. For about 10 years, we were still selling into the enterprise, but we were selling differently to the enterprise and really not kind of maximizing the value that we probably should capture for the value that we were giving really large companies. We deferred that focus and that ability to capture that value for a number of years, and I think as a strategic choice, that helped us competitively because we were a different shaped company for enterprises. We were still being adopted At the user level and brought into organizations. But the al…

AI assessment note: “there's lots of things that I think I wish we would have done faster”

Q Can I ask, when you're investing today, do you actively look for these economies within the investments that you make? And I guess, what are the signs within founders' speech, actions, that signal to you that they clearly understand the importance of this economy building around the core business?

A I do. I look for either the early formation of them or the ability to form them. And, you know, just I think the belief kind of in a founder or a company that there is an opportunity for businesses to build around your platform or your company. We drew a lot of inspiration from Microsoft, which I think is a textbook case here. And over the decades, they've done just an incredible job of continuing to build and grow economies around the Microsoft world. Microsoft business across all the dimensions that I highlighted more. But I think if you look back on time before they had the brand and direct reach that they have today, they had reached through this incredibly durable partner ecosystem and the customer economy built around getting Microsoft certified and having that sort of credential be part of your identity. And that takes, you know, I think there's different moves that they could have made early on, but sort of they chose to invest in extensions of themselves. I think those extensions have made them, in addition to technology and innovation, all of the other things that they've done as a business, but has made them the durable, incredible business that they've become over generations.

AI assessment note: “I do. I look for either the early formation of them or the ability”