Atlassian

“Atlassian just launched. They finally were able to really monetize their AI agent and it's crushed their stocks up.”

“I think that the biggest thing is when people say, I hate that software and everyone buys it, that's probably a pretty good business, because they're not buying the software, they're buying what's underneath of it, and that to me is actually much more durable …”

“I will say, though, that one of the things that is pretty clear to me is that the way we build software is fundamentally changing, and I think that Agile might be one of the things that gets hit with this new way of developing, and that makes me think that the…”

“A lot of their revenue is still developer focused, which, where I think the seat is under assault, a permanent, permanent assault, the seat is.”

“And when I look at it at Atlassian, I think that the customers are the ones that are more likely to build things with code code, right? Because with code code, because they are developers, right? So I'm always in, in a bit of a concern there because I'm like, …”

“Taking it last, for example, I don't think it's like, it's not going to 10 X from here, right? It's not, and it's never going to be a AI first, you know, five X, 10 X growth company.”

“The public markets have the right idea, but the wrong direction. The public markets think vibe coding and Claude are their threat. No, the threat is what the agents pick. And actually, if you look at overall, the markets are, they almost get it right. They're …”

“And so, you know, for me, it, it's companies like Tesla early on and Atlassian on the software side and, you know, on and on like this, where massive respect for the entrepreneur belief in the vision and just couldn't quite get there.”

“Today we have one applications. I want 40 of them, you know, and when I look about Atlassian, when I look about Zoho that's the type of company I want to build because every year I want to focus on another, building another brand, building another product, ser…”

“Neither of these companies has to lay off anybody. Okay. Atlassian has substantial free cashflow meta. I don't know. They're in the, their free cashflow is dip, but it's still like in the mid forties, right? They don't have to do this.”

“Atlassian has, you could argue they have proprietary data. Now they need to use that data to build products. They have unique proprietary data on all the code out there because it's being checked in. There's a lot of stuff they have, which they need to use for…”

“Monday probably has a score of one, I think. They have a workflow mode. I'm not sure if they have the other modes. So you're right. Monday, in theory, has a much weaker score, I guess, than Atlassian on this.”

“Never bet against Mike Cannonbrooks. Absolutely not.”

“This is the best thing that's happened to our business, right? We're in a knowledge world. We have tools to play with that knowledge, to act on that knowledge, to do all sorts of other things, to solve the jobs our customers have always hired us for.”

“To me, businesses are a set of processes. They're not a system of record. Like, these are all process-based systems, right? Everything Alex has just said is totally true, but there are processes like reference checking or other things, and your ability to coor…”

“I definitely do not believe that it will be the majority pricing manner for all software or all SaaS based software, because when you talk to customers, they hate it.”

“Most businesses, I think, will have three to five large scale agent platforms running internally, and they say, hey, I use Agent Force for this, or I use Gemini for this.”

“I feel like in the technology world, sometimes we get so obsessed by, like, model quality, you know, it's almost trite now to say the models are far ahead of the actual value they're delivering now. The underutilized capabilities are so big.”

“These are all, I would argue, a fundamental foundational design and experience problem. They're not a technology problem, right?”

“I suspect as we get more of these tools and experiences, just like mobile, two years now and five years now, that'll be very standard. They'll all say, yeah, I get how to do this, right?”

“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.”

“As an armchair, if we're abstracting away from everything else, this is the best pick on the list because it, of the ones that have been beaten down the most, it's the one that's accelerating. None of the rest are accelerating. So if you had to be simplistic, …”

“So, so the founders of Atlassian, they were besties. They built this massive company together, wildly successful, multi-gen, you know, basically two decade run. Incredible run. And they decide, you know, we've had an incredible run. Let's, let's keep the run g…”

“Atlassian beat the quarter. It's re-accelerated at five billion in revenue and it trades at Forex ARR.”

“We use Anthropic a lot. It's one of our biggest models. We use, you know, multiple models which I think is what most good SaaS vendors are doing within their customers' choices, right? Like we use a lot of Gemini, a lot of Anthropic. We have a whole bunch of L…”

“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%.”

“Some of our features are a thousand times cheaper to run than when we introduced them today.”

“Our cogs has gone up, or rather cogs has gone down, right? Our gross margin has gone up. Last six or seven quarters.”

“In COVID in 2020, we formed a group of SaaS CEOs. I think there were 16 of us that got together, we'd meet on Zoom every single week, right? At one stage, 10, 11 of us were public, maybe more, we all had earnings calls, and you know, it was a really good thera…”

“When the Excel guys invested in Atlassian, right? It was all secondary. They put sixty million bucks in 2010. And they bid highest of the five VCs.”

“We're a better company because we're a public company. Like we have become a better business, right? We're better at forecasting. We're better at planning. We're better at executing.”

“I think if you spend a hundred percent of your time at work, you make worse decisions.”

“Atlassian got incredibly successful selling JIRA and other products for five bucks a month with discounts to folks at companies. Now folks will spend 400 dollars, in some cases, 5000 dollars on cursor. That's why it goes to a billion.”

“You put a process in place, you write a doc down, you talk about how to do the work. You talk about how to set up your tracking system on like, you know, Atlassian or linear or whatever. Doing all that feels like real work. I just don't think it's real work at…”

“Five years from now, we'll have more engineers working for our company than we do today. More software developers working for our companies. We will create far more. They will be more efficient.”

“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, …”

“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.”

“Firstly, very early on, we thought there would likely be multiple foundational models that were competing. And hence we've built our technology to be multi-model on purpose in almost every way, and that we were not going to make foundational models. It's unlik…”

“I don't think we know in the AI era if all those apps just disappear into some godlike Siri agent that we just talked to. I, I'm not a believer in that world view. I don't think it's likely to happen. I do think AI is going to have to change all of those appli…”

“In theory, AI can generate some code, write the code to create a new interface for every single screen you look at, right? I don't think we'll probably see that. It'll be too discombobulating for users. They'll get lost. They'll be like, wait, everything's mov…”

“I'm in Barcelona and we're launching one at the moment.”

“If you ask me, in Atlassian, I will end up with far more generalists. People, I will end up with a wider organization, and people will do far more things, and their jobs will hopefully be more fulfilling because of it, right?”

“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?”

“We're hiring more grads this year than we did last year. More than we did the year before.”

“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…”

“No, probably not. I mean, maybe if they gave me 10 times the productivity.”

“I think unconstrained thinking is not particularly useful, right? Constraints are what makes everything happen.”

“I just read this Alassian state of product report. And it was like, 40% of product teams, like basically don't run experimentation at all.”

“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”

“Look, it's not going to make them, quote, an AI leader, but it, you know, they're doing the smart thing that existing corporations do, buying relatively new technology to, you know, to try.”

“The thing I would say though about any company in SAS today, and Atlassian is a Prime example of this is they are primed for, ah, disruption right now because AI is going to decimate their seat base for their products. It'll decimate the roles people are playi…”

“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.”

“I don't know if you saw the browser company got acquired by Atlassian”

“The other hack that helped us is we just don't hire anyone from Google or Microsoft or a giant company that it's like a different level of abstraction from where we're at. It was used to having, you know, a lot of staff and a lot of help around that maybe we'r…”

“The most likely outcome is that the currently dominant companies are going to get more dominant. But I don't think this idea that it would just cause a spring up of a whole bunch of new, new apps that will more easily challenge the incumbents makes any particu…”

“At Adassian, we did something similar. We had a global holdout group, actually, that was held out of all experiments. There was an interview, experiment platform couldn't target that group at all. So, 10% of all people never saw anything ever.”

“When I joined Atlassian, and like I shared with you, we had no Salesforce at all, actually at all. Literally nobody to sell the software, it sold itself or it didn't get sold at all. And we grew to have 80,000 customers.”

“Toyota we found pays Matlab, fifty million dollars a year. Boeing pays Simulink and MATLAB hundreds of millions. Samsung has an eight figure contract with Atlassian.”

“I don't think we fundamentally understand brand marketing as SaaS in India. So whether you look at Dropbox or Atlassian or even Mailchimp when they started, they understood the value of brand marketing. We are more focused on this performance and quantitative …”

“My hunch is at some point when they grow large enough, not the not linear, but the companies and they need more processes, they will have to sort of move up. Like people move from HubSpot to Salesforce”