The Exchanges

Q Alright, so you're in this program. It's like part, it's like a work study program. You gotta do, you know, a couple months of school, of, like, class work, and then a couple months of working in a, in a company, and, uh, you get your assignments, and where, what, what did you end up doing? Where did you have to work? Mike?

A So we, you're supposed to do three, six months assignments, and I got my first assignment, which was at Bay Networks, which is a networking vendor that became Nortel Networks before I joined, because I got bought by Nortel. This was in the sort of late nineties where networking equipment, Cisco, you know, this was a real hot, hot area. I spent six months just plugging in machinery. It was the most boring six month assignment. I can say that now. Nortel's out of business. So, um, it was not a fun or exciting six months. And I think that was one of those signs that maybe, maybe the big corporate thing wasn't, wasn't so much for me. I was like, man, if this is what work life's going to be like, this sucks.

AI assessment note: “I got my first assignment, which was at Bay Networks”

Q but that was actually an advantage that they had because people really got into it. The learning curve was really steep, but then once people got it, they were hooked. And from what I understand, it's kind of similar with Jira, that it was actually pretty complicated for people to figure out at first But that actually is something that developers liked. Was that intentional? Did you make it complex?

A I think it's, I wouldn't say we intentionally made it complex. We were madly adding functionality to the application for, for many, many, many years. The good side about that is the people who got up The curve of understanding the power of Jira became these huge fans, and they became superstars at their company because they could solve all these problems for the company really, really cheaply. Again, hey, we've already spent the 800 bucks. You got another problem? I'll solve that with Jira. So the people who solved the complexity or understood it, they saw the matrix, if you like, right? And we ended up hiring a whole bunch of those superfans as well, like people who were like massive Jira fans. We'd say, hey, do you want to come work for us? Like, you know so much about our application. And they would then make it better. Now, over time, we've had to remove a lot of that complexity, and we've tried to simplify it, but keep the power. But in the early days, we were just, yeah, we were certainly just adding, adding power and complexity at the same time.

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't say we intentionally made it complex. We were madly adding functionality”

Q other person around the company for that time. When you did that, was there any thought, among either of you, that maybe you should just, you know, you did well, you could probably sell it, cash in, And, uh, move on. Was that ever a thought that, or ever a conversation the two of you had? Could have probably walked away with, you know, 25, thirty million bucks each, maybe.

A Yeah, so we had a, um, it's actually a good story, because I think you have those moments where you have to stop and think. And it was around 2009, maybe early 2010. We had spent eight years at the time building the business, you know what I mean? And, and I often describe it as we were heads down, like we were looking at our feet, just trying to run and not fall over for many, many, many years. And for some reason, Maybe it was turning 30, maybe it was getting married, maybe it was whatever. We both had a bit of a life inhalation, a bit of a pause, right? And the business was probably on its own feet by then. I mean, it sounds ironic. I think we had like fifty million bucks in the bank and probably fifty million dollars in revenue kind of scale and profitable, but we felt like, okay, it's not gonna die. Now, we didn't really intend to get here, What do we want to do? What do we really want to do? Like, what's, what's next? And you sort of had, it was almost a look back, look forward kind of moment. You know, it was eight years in, and we sort of realized, hey, wow, we could, we could probably sell this thing to someone. We had taken no, no, no capital, no investment. Um, we still owned a hundred percent of the company. You know, we could probably sell this thing and be pretty set, right? And it sounds naive now what we actually thought we were going to get for it. Um, And we, …

AI assessment note: “we sort of realized, hey, wow, we could, we could probably sell this thing”

Q Was there a point where one or both of you consciously sat down and said, hey, you know, this isn't working. Let's do something different, or did it just, did that just happen organically? What do you remember?

A I think what we started to do is we started to write software to try to make our own business better. So we wrote an application to put a lot of that content, the documentation online. We had kind of like a knowledge base type thing. We wrote an email archiving tool because a lot of it was done via email and you, you had no archives of the shared inboxes sort of thing. So we wrote one of those. Uh, and then we wrote a support system, uh, Which actually we called the Atlassian Support System, which has since gotten us in a lot of trouble, um, because it was known by its acronym, and it was not, um, particularly well branded.

AI assessment note: “I think what we started to do is we started to write software”