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 35 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
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.”
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…”
Farquhar: Atlassian built a better product than Slack in many cases
“In, in many cases, I think against Slack, we had a better product.”
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…”
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”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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”
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,…”
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 …”
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 …”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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: 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…”
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: 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: 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: 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…”
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: 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: 80% of Atlassian's UK workforce lives outside London
“80% of our staff in the UK live outside of London.”
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: Jira will never be as simple as products built for five-person teams
“We're never going to be as simple as something that, you know, has built from scratch for a five person team.”
Farquhar: Software Won't Become Free Despite the Collapse of Per-Seat Pricing
“So, in general, the premise is true. I don't think we know what we move to, and I don't think software is suddenly going to become free because, you know, per user pricing just doesn't work.”
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 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”
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: Pledge 1% Has Inspired 18,000 Companies to Donate
“All the philanthropy stuff ended up inspiring me to start Pledge One Percent, which is you know, a foundation that encourages startups and companies to give one percent of equity, product, profit, and employee time to non-profits, and that's inspired about 18,…”