Scott Farquhar
Co-Founder & Board Member, Atlassian. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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%.
3shows
3appearances
59statements
7resolved
5supported
0contradicted
71%fully supported
59said about them ↓ Everything Scott Farquhar said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Farquhar: Daily office attendance does not correlate with employee connection
“And what we did is we correlated those answers with how frequently people come to an office and how frequently they do what we call intentional togetherness gathering. And we found that people just turning up to the office every day was not correlated.”
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: 40% of Atlassian staff live over two hours from an office
“About 40% of our Atlassian employees live more than two hours from an office”
Farquhar: Deliberate team gatherings boost employee connection for 3 to 5 months
“However, when people did get together deliberately, we saw a huge spike of connectedness to each other and to the company. The surprising part was the decay function. I thought a week or two later we'd be back to baseline, but it turned out that the data showe…”
Farquhar: Office attendance should not be about justifying commercial real estate rent
“We don't need to turn up to offices to make people feel good about paying rent.”
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 says raising Silicon Valley capital would have made Atlassian less disruptive
“I really think if we had grown up in Silicon Valley and had venture capital around us, that we would have built a very different company that wouldn't have been as disruptive as ours has been because we didn't have venture capital.”
Farquhar claims starting in Australia is the only reason Atlassian became successful
“Starting Alassian in Australia is the only reason we're successful.”
Farquhar: Top talent does not live within 90 minutes of an office
“We also believe that the best talent around the world doesn't all exist within a 90 minute commute of an office, and we have people all over the world working for us, so we got a talent advantage there.”
Farquhar: Teams need intentional togetherness, not daily commutes
“We believe that you do need to get together to build social bonds. Our belief though, is that you don't need to get together every single day to sit next to each other on a zoom call in an office and commute back and forth to get that benefit. We believe that …”
Farquhar: Return-to-office mandates are as arbitrary as dictating pen color
“Some people who are forcing a back to office mandate, in many cases that's like telling people they need to use a blue pen instead of a black pen. Does it matter which pen you use if the output's the same? Does it matter where you are doing the work if the out…”
Farquhar: Presence in an office is no proxy for productivity
“Presence in an office is not any proxy for productivity.”
Farquhar: Compromise hybrid work models will disappear in the coming years
“The hybrid middle thing doesn't make any sense to me, and I expect that to disappear over the coming years where people realize how bad that kind of foot in both camps is.”
Farquhar: Two-tier remote work policies fail to attract top talent
“Some companies operate a two-tier system where they say you can work remotely, but that is a second-class career path, and we're reluctantly doing that. That's remote or distributed in name only, and you're not going to get the best people.”
Farquhar: Atlassian candidate offer acceptance rate rose 20% under distributed work
“Our candidate offer acceptance rate's gone up 20%.”
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 …”
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 across the shows. 6 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 31Mike Cannon-Brookes 16Heather Fernandez 2Tooey Courtemanche 1Rich Wong 1Miles Clements 1Jean-Michel Lemieux 1
Statements about Scott Farquhar, by other people (6)
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, …”
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.”
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?”
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, …”
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.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 53
2026 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 32 mentions in 4 episodes 8 per episode
- Atlassian CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes on Why Everything is Overvalued & Are We in an AI Bubble · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- OpenAI’s $10BN Secondary Sale, Ramp Hits $1BN ARR & Brex Hits $700M · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- OpenAI Restructuring: Who Wins and Who Loses & Mercor Raises $350M at a $10BN Valuation · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Benchmark vs a16z: Why Stage Specific Firms Win · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2023 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- Roundtable #7: Spotify, Adobe and Linkedin on How AI Changes The Future of Product & Design | E1097 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Tooey Courtemanche: From Construction Worker to Billionaire CEO | E1090 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Keith Rabois & Mike Shebat: Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic| E1087 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- David Meyer: Why You Should Hire People Who Aren’t In Product Already | E1076 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2021 3 mentions in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Scott's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & Board Member, Atlassian | 1 | 35 | 71% 5/7 | full record on 20VC → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Co-Founder & Board Member, Atlassian | 1 | 18 | — | full record on Masters of Scale → |
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder & Board Member, Atlassian | 1 | 6 | — | full record on How I Built This → |