Scott Farquhar

Co-Founder & Board Member, Atlassian · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@scottfarkas ↗LinkedIn ↗atlassian.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Scott Farquhar co-founded the enterprise collaboration software company Atlassian with Mike Cannon-Brookes in 2002 and served as its co-CEO until 2024. He is also a co-founder of the private investment firm Skip Capital and serves as Board Chair of Pledge 1%.

35statements → 19claims → 7claims resolved → 71%fully supported → 4.06/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → 4.5/5argument clarity · the sources → 58said about them ↓

5 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not yet assessed 8 not checkable as stated how the 19 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 predictions · 14 assertions · 5 opinions · 6 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 19 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved, 4 are not yet assessed, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Scott argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Farquhar: Atlassian reached ~$4B revenue and $40B-$50B valuation in 2023

“We're about four billion dollar business, like revenue wise, a value to 40 to fifty billion dollars, you know, today in 20, 23.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 16:39 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

50% certainty 3

100% certainty 4

83% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.5 / 5 directness 4.7 · coherence 4.8 · precision 4.5 · compression 4

answered every one of 38 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

281 words/min while actually speaking · 23.2 um and uh per 1k words · 9.8 false starts per 1k · 38.6% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 9,542 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 4/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10

setup questions received 35%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 13:39“When you take your approach, you don't have time to build that trust, that authenticity in a partnership. Is that a problem, or do you think VCs aren't really your partner and so f…” ▶ 25:59“Is Atlassian able to be fast enough to move with the speed of AI changing today?” ▶ 35:32“And I suppose there are a couple of the biggest CPOs in the world. And they said the challenging thing is it's trended towards catering to power users while upstarts have appeared …”

when Scott pushed back ▶ 13:50“No, VCs is definitely our partner, but we spent all that time up front.” ▶ 19:21“If I did best and worst, I'm not sure I'd categorize in those four categories. So if you let me deviate from that question...”

What they said35 What others said58 Episodes1

Everything Scott Farquhar said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Farquhar: AI startups without customer data move slower than incumbents

“If you're an AI startup and you don't have access to customer data and customers to test with, that can actually make you move slower.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 26:57 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Assertion Partly supported

Farquhar: Accel won Atlassian's initial round at $405M valuation

“And the valuations we got back varied between, there was one sort of high hundreds. There was three of them ended up in the two to three hundred million dollar range. And Excel, who ended up you know, winning for us came back at four hundred and five million U…”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 12:39 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Opinion

Farquhar: Atlassian built a better product than Slack in many cases

“In, in many cases, I think against Slack, we had a better product.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 16:57 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Farquhar: AI will significantly alter top tech company rankings within five years

“I do think that there's going to be a big change in how technology works and change the landscape, honestly. I think you'll walk in five years time, and the list of top companies may look very different to today, so I don't think you can avoid having an AI str…”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 22:24 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Prediction Open · timeframe Oct 2028

Farquhar: Atlassian will never require employees to return to offices

“We made the decision that we would never require someone to come back into an office”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 27:47 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Farquhar: Doubling a 10-person engineering team yields zero net productivity gain

“And when you double that team, You actually don't get any more productivity because when you double the team, they now need to document things. They now need to work like, you know, separate the code out. They needed to start micro, you know, microservices and…”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 32:46 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Farquhar: AI will disrupt high-cost per-seat SaaS pricing models

“I will put pressure on per seat pricing. I agree with that premise in general. For example, if you provide help desk software and it's, you know, licensed on a per agent basis. And in many cases, these, our competitors have these things that are a hundred doll…”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 37:57 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Disclosure

Farquhar: Atlassian's $10/Seat Model Is Less Vulnerable to AI Than $150+ Competitors

“If you're, you know, a 152 hundred dollars a seat, like you've got a much bigger pricing model change to worry about than if, like the last thing does, we charge 10 dollars a seat, and then how much is going to be augmented by AI versus replaced by AI.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 38:54 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Opinion

Farquhar: AI startups cannot be bootstrapped in today's environment

“I think today, if you were doing an AI startup, The environment's slightly different, right? Like, you're not going to be bootstrapping your AI startup these days”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 3:51 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Farquhar: Heavily funded startups outpace bootstrapped rivals in crowded markets

“I think it depends on what you're going after and the niche or niches Americans say that you're going after, because if there are thousands of other companies or dozens of other companies going after the same customer that you are, And they've raised 10 times,…”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 4:08 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Assertion Not publicly verifiable

Farquhar: Benchmark declined splitting Atlassian's initial round with Accel

“And actually like we went back to Peter Fenton at Benchmark was, I think the runner up bidder. And we went back to Excel and said, Hey, look, all things considered, maybe we should get two VCs or, you know, in there, even though there was a huge difference in …”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 14:25 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Farquhar: Scaling shifts leadership mistakes from commission to omission

“When you're small as a company, or what I found when we were small as a company, the mistakes are mistakes of commission. Like, you do something stupid that didn't make sense, or you invested time in something that ultimately was a waste of time. I think when …”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 16:14 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Opinion

Farquhar: Basic AI text summarization is a commodity, not a differentiator

“A lot of people are doing the simple parlor trick, which is like, let's just summarize some text, or let's, you know, give me 10 bullet points, and look, that is a commodity now, like, you know, whether you're using OpenAI or any of the other ones, it's going …”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 22:54 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Disclosure

Farquhar: Atlassian Is Not Building Proprietary Large Language Models

“So we don't have to make the huge list and investments of you know, building our own large language model or building, you know, our own thing across So across, you know, data sets.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 25:08 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Farquhar: Connectivity gains from in-person work events decay over 4-5 months

“How long does it take to return to baseline? It's four to five months actually before that returns to the baseline.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 30:08 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Farquhar's framework for overcoming sunk cost fallacy in product decisions

“It ended up not being a hard decision because the way I looked at it was, you know, could I look my staff in the face and say that the next five years of their life was going to be the biggest impact to humanity working on this product?”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 33:48 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Disclosure

Farquhar: Atlassian went 15 years without putting raised capital on balance sheet

“It took us 10 years before we put, you know, we were born VCs on board and we didn't take any money on the balance sheet for 15 years.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 3:27 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Opinion

Farquhar: Bootstrapping software startups is still viable in niche markets

“But there are many markets, like, ah, that go after very, very small, like, niche software. Constellation Software is a public company out there that does a lot of this, where they literally invest in, ah, you know, reservation systems for dog kennels or somet…”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 4:30 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Assertion Partly supported

Farquhar: Atlassian had $60M revenue and 20-30% margins when raising VC

“So we're on sixty million dollars of revenue. I think we were doing 20 or 30% profit margins.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 12:32 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Assertion Not publicly verifiable

Farquhar: Accel achieved roughly a 100x return on Atlassian

“I don't know how much Excel's made off us, like it's a hundred times, I think something like that when they distributed.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 14:44 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Assertion Not publicly verifiable

Farquhar: Pre-IPO Atlassian round saw bids ranging $1B to $4B

“We actually raised money from before we went public, the year before we went public to give some employees some liquidity, and to get in a public market investor, we ran the same process. And actually, the numbers were almost exactly the same, just out of zero…”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 15:37 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Farquhar: Resource allocation should be conducted quarterly rather than daily

“I don't think resource allocation is something you do every single day. I think if you're doing that, you're probably not going to see the forest for the trees, and so it depends on the size of company you are, but I'd say quarterly is a more reasonable cadenc…”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 18:51 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Farquhar: Market leaders in tech are rarely disrupted outside major technological shifts

“The history of technology with the way I would write it is that it's a very much a winner takes all market. And once there's a winner established in a market, it's hard to disrupt them except when there's a technological change.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 21:19 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Disclosure

Farquhar: Atlassian Has Hundreds of Engineers Working on AI

“We have you know, multiple thousands of engineers in Atlassian and we have Multiple hundreds of engineers working on, you know, AI you know, things at the moment.”

Scott Farquhar Oct 9, 2023 ▶ 24:42 Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Show 11statements(11 left)

The other half of the tape: Scott Farquhar's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 53 times in 15 episodes on 20VC. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 31 Mike Cannon-Brookes 16 Heather Fernandez 2 Tooey Courtemanche 1 Rich Wong 1 Miles Clements 1 Jean-Michel Lemieux 1

Statements about Scott Farquhar, by other people (5)

Insight

Cannon-Brookes: Co-CEO success requires equality in age, life stage, and equity

“Having two equal parties, I think, in motivation, experience, we've always talked about this, is a really important part of what made it successful. And by equal, yes, equal, I don't know, shareholding-wise, equity-wise, but equal in terms of age, life stage, …”

Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 4:05 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Cannon-Brookes: Strategic ideas you cannot convince your co-founder on are usually bad

“If I can't convince him that something's a good idea, it's probably not. That is a really good marker that something is probably not a good idea and vice versa.”

Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 9:11 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Cannon-Brookes: Co-founder partnerships work when both feel outmatched by the other

“I think it really helps to think the other person is just far better than you are at pretty much everything, because you're both stretching to try to be as good as the other person, if that makes any sense, right?”

Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 5:22 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Insight

Cannon-Brookes: Effective Co-CEOs require 60% to 80% overlap in context

“Scott and I are probably somewhere between 60 and 80% overlapped. If we're a hundred percent overlapped, like we do exactly the same thing well, there's not much point in having two of us. If we're zero percent overlapped, you're gonna have a lot of conflict, …”

Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 7:18 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Disclosure

Atlassian's first shareholder agreement had a rock-paper-scissors tie-breaker clause

“Our first shareholder agreement did have Actually in there that if we couldn't agree on something, we'd go to a game of scissors, paper, rock. Best of three.”

Mike Cannon-Brookes Oct 13, 2025 ▶ 8:28 Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings