The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 98 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Cannon-Brookes: Atlassian cloud revenue grew 26% past $5B with 44% RPO growth
“We're accelerating our cloud revenue, which did a 26% quarter growth rate at well north of five, six billion at the moment. And we grew our RPO by 44%.”
Cannon-Brookes: Engineering bandwidth remains a permanent constraint on profitable ideas
“I still have a bandwidth constraint of the number of people I have in R&D and engineering to build the ideas that the business could profitably build. That is still a constraint, and I think will be, I believe forever, but it's certainly a constraint that we'v…”
Cannon-Brookes: AI will lead enterprises to build significantly more disposable apps
“It'll probably mean our customers make, I think, far more apps, or more apps per customer than they ever did beforehand. But a lot of them, maybe they throw them away, right?”
Cannon-Brookes: Unconstrained thinking is useless because constraints drive progress
“I think unconstrained thinking is not particularly useful, right? Constraints are what makes everything happen.”
Lawson: Atlassian and Mike Cannon-Brookes will stay aggressive on acquisitions
“So I think Mike will be one of the more aggressive on the acquisitions front because they've always been and so I think it's in the DNA of Atlassian, so I do think we are looking at one of those, even if I am not fully on board with the most recent.”
Lemieux: Tech leaders must hire 'full-stack debuggers' across all company layers
“That you need someone who, you know, has the, has like the ability to like see and address things that every layer Of your company, right? From the code to the emotions, and seeing that, like, you're basically hiring people who are full stack debuggers of thin…”
Lemieux: Dream job questions reveal how candidates act when unsupervised
“I've got so many jobs open. You could do anything here. What's your dream job at Atlassian, at Shopify? What is it? And could you know, could you talk to me about why that is for 10 minutes, right? So, so that question for me is like the ultimate snowboard tes…”
Courtemanche wishes Procore used closed-envelope fundraising to avoid VC manipulation
“I would have run probably a much more, you know, I listened to your discussion with Scott from Atlassian and how they did the closed envelope fundraising. And I'm like, I was thinking to myself, I wish we had done that because it would have taken a lot of this…”
Meyer: Plumtree attempted to acquire Atlassian early on, but was rejected
“We tried to acquire Atlassian back in Like, 98 or something. We thought we should get them cheap. They're a little dinky company, but they had a plan, you know, and they're like, pound sand, there's no way.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Farquhar: 92% of Atlassian staff say remote work improves performance
“92% of them say that they, Think our remote policies help them to do their best work.”
Farquhar: In-person team gatherings boost employee connectivity by 30%
“When you get together, people together, we see our team connectivity boost by 30%.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Farquhar: 80% of Atlassian's UK workforce lives outside London
“80% of our staff in the UK live outside of London.”
Lemkin: Atlassian and MongoDB are bouncing off business bottoms
“When I look at what Atlassian is saying, like, they're bouncing off the bottom, and Mongo's bouncing off the bottom, and other folks are seeing things improve.”
Egan: Direct feedback should be periodic, not a daily loop
“When I think of direct feedback, I think of it in terms of a ratio. So there's the day-to-day work that we're trying to get done. There's the challenges that we're facing, and we should be enjoying those challenges and having fun with it. But there's also time…”
Kevin Egan: Top sales reps maintain enough pipeline to avoid unnatural deals
“The best reps are creating ample pipeline throughout the year, and they somehow have so much, you know, they create enough pipeline that they're able to hit their quarterly numbers without doing any, anything unnatural to get those deals in, because if one fal…”
Egan: Early Enterprise Sales Teams Must Prioritize Product Feedback Over Revenue
“Well, I think at first the sales team is, is obviously there for revenue growth, but almost even more importantly, providing customer feedback into the product group, giving the product team that they're working with a sense for why do these people gravitate t…”
Egan: A/B Test Rep Accounts Versus Digital Channels to Measure Effectiveness
“In a PLG world, I think rep effectiveness, the best companies out there are doing a lot of A-B testing. Atlassian is famous for A-B testing. What happens if I put this account in the hands of a rep versus my regular online channels? And I'd say the most effect…”
Egan: Atlassian Does Not Discount Software Prices for Any Customers
“In my current role at Atlassian, we don't discount. We try to work on terms that work for our customer, but everything's programmatic. So if our customers were to speak with any other customer, they know that they're in the same boat and that we're transparent…”
Kevin Egan: End-of-quarter deal cramming harms brand and customer relationships
“Jamming deals at the end of the quarter is always kind of obnoxious, but it happens. It does work, but sometimes there is a detrimental effect to kind of Cramming deals at the end of the quarter from a brand standpoint and from a relationship standpoint.”
Pure self-serve works in developer tools because developers avoid sales calls
“There are some categories where you can get really far with a self-serve only model. I'm thinking about Atlassian and how far they went in the sort of in that DevOps world. It makes total sense, right? No developer really wants to get on a phone or get cold ca…”
Simons: Atlassian wouldn't be the same company without an early second product
“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 comp…”
Simons: Atlassian grew 40% to 50% annually for 15 straight years
“Atlassian grew between 40 and 50% for more than 15 straight years.”
Simons: Atlassian wouldn't be as successful had it targeted enterprise early
“We made choices where we could have really early on invested in the enterprise segment, and instead of selling a 10,000 dollar product, chose to sell a 200,000 dollar product. And again, the counterfactual is tough to paint what Atlassian would have looked lik…”
Simons: Atlassian built a partner network instead of direct enterprise sales
“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 org…”
Most of Atlassian's equity is still held by its founders
“We've got Atlassian, which is undisputedly a great company, but most of the stock is still held by the founders.”
Restricting VC investments to driveable Silicon Valley startups is outdated
“I think it's pretty obvious now, whether it's companies like Spotify or Supercell or Atlassian or other companies of that form, that that is now an outdated view.”
Lemkin: Atlassian's revenue growth accelerated to 23% at $6.3B revenue
“Atlassian's accelerating. A year ago it was growing 20. Now it's growing 23% at 6.3 billion revenue. It's accelerating, and yet it's the biggest decliner of the entire group, and it's accelerating.”
Atlassian is hiring more university graduates than in previous years
“We're hiring more grads this year than we did last year. More than we did the year before.”
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.”
Iconic Growth logged $8.5B Netskope and $1B DX exits in one week
“And Iconic had two billion dollar exits this week, Iconic Growth, okay? It had Netscope, which no one talked about, eight and a half billion dollar exit, and they congratulated themselves on DX, which Atlassian bought for a billion”
Farquhar: Atlassian disclosed a 2010 breach to prospective VCs and customers
“We called these VCs up to tell them what had happened because we felt, you know, openness and transparency was important, even though may have never come out, may have never like come out publicly. You know, we told VCs, we told customers because I guess that'…”
Farquhar: Atlassian Raised $100K in 5 Days with $5 Promo
“So we said, let's make our software five dollars for five users for five days Only. And we ran basically a one week campaign to just see, well, is there a desire for a five years of version of our software? And by the way, all the money goes to charity. And so…”
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.”
Atlassian had 200 employees on Stride before selling to Slack
“And so in the end, like, you know, deciding to shut down that product, we had a couple hundred people working on it. It was hard because a lot of people had poured their light, you know, heart and soul into it. We sold it to Slack”
Simons: Atlassian has over 500 partner resellers and solution providers
“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.”
Simons: Atlassian drew inspiration from Microsoft's platform ecosystem strategy
“We drew a lot of inspiration from Microsoft, which I think is a textbook case here.”
Simons: Atlassian enabled third-party add-on ecosystems from an early stage
“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 customizatio…”
Simons: Atlassian launched its second product Confluence in year two
“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.”
Fernandez: Atlassian co-CEOs explicitly ask board members to challenge them
“So taking Mike and Scott as an example, they're incredibly humble and transparent with their board, clearly outlining their perspective, asking us to directly challenge them across core issues facing the company.”
Accel offered a high-end valuation term sheet to win the Atlassian deal
“So, a company like Atlassian, I think we were not on the low end of how we put in our term sheet in terms of the valuation that we ascribed to Atlassian at the time.”