The Exchanges

Q you joined first. You've been with them, you know, the company for over a decade. You joined first as in sales. You're now president. I want to pick up actually right at the Trello acquisition. So you mentioned with these guys, you know, you're running into them a hundred million active users. You both share the same goal. Why did that deal make a lot of sense for you guys?

A A couple reasons. I think, first of all, the, the two companies shared the same mission of, you know, really changing teamwork and unleashing the potential of, of what people are trying to do together at work. And, uh, I think had very similar cultures. And then there was like, just good product fit in the portfolio. If you think about what Trello is, Trello is, you know, sort of like a digital whiteboard where you can kind of rearrange cards on it. And at one end of, of the opposite spectrum is, is Jira, a product of ours that is very structured. Um, to manage collaborative project tracking management. And then the other end of that spectrum is a product of ours called Confluence, which is just a bank blank page teams can write on. So I think it kind of fits snugly in between very structured, very unstructured to help people do different things.

AI assessment note: “fits snugly in between very structured, very unstructured to help people do different things.”

Q I'm going to Forced you to, to, to roll the circle over, roll the ball over and show me the dead patch underneath. What was one, one surprise, even a little, right? One surprise you didn't expect after the acquisition, whether it was the integration or the cross selling or whatever.

A You know, one was Trello famously was a, was a remote first company and Atlassian wasn't. And Atlassian is a very distributed company. We have offices and, you know, now seven different countries around the world, but being distributed is very different from being remote. And, uh, there's a lot that we had to learn and we were much bigger. There were a hundred, a hundred, you know, a hundred people when we acquired them a year and a half ago, and we were sort of roughly, I don't know, 1819 hundred, probably. And, and so to, to, you know, bring on board a company that has a very remote first culture is, is used to like, they had pretty hard rules around when you joined a zoom or when you joined a meeting and there were maybe five people in a room, everybody went to five different places and joined a zoom from five different locations. And so the people that were outside of the office, We're on equal footing to the people that were, and that required us to kind of change and recalibrate how we think about, um, connecting to people that are remote and people that are in the office.

AI assessment note: “Trello famously was a, was a remote first company and Atlassian wasn't.”

Q month. They just actually, the CEO gets a dopamine hit. Right. From doing these demos, it feels really good. So it's really difficult to remove it from the process and they just resist, resist, resist, but you know, you just gave one great example doing the recorded demo. Are there, can you point to any other examples you guys did to remove human touch from again, a low ASP sale?

A RFPs is another one. You know, like, we've been selling it to the enterprise for a long time, and, you know, you often get a lot of requests for, hey, help me fill out this, you know, this RFP document or this questionnaire that I basically have to provide to my boss to justify the purchase or just the adoption of this particular technology. We would say we don't do that, but we've, we've taken every RFP question that we've ever been asked to submit, and we've compiled basically an answer to all of them, And we'll let you basically copy and paste. You can search for whatever the thing your, your RFP is trying to answer, like what we do with security or what we do with scale or, you know, whatever the question is. The best answer we could possibly give is right there. You can copy and paste it in yourself. Now, listen, early on, some customers actually didn't like that. They were like, well, you're, your competitors are going to fill this out for me. And we had to have, have kind of the fortitude to say, like, we're, we're basically just not structured to do that at Scale. We're trying to win thousands and thousands and thousands of customers. You're important to us, but if you need somebody to fill out a document as part of the process, we might not be the right fit for you. Um, and that might be, you know, a deal that a customer wins. Now, like we had a couple of things in our…

AI assessment note: “RFPs is another one. You know, like, we've been selling it to the enterprise”

Q because of your role, you were involved obviously aggressively in the going public conversation. There's a lot of people Maybe not back then, but today they're saying there's so much money in the market. We can really IPO, but actually, you know, provide liquidity to early folks, but stay private. Why did you decide that that was not an option for you? And, and really going public was the best.

A Uh, well, we'd already provided liquidity, so, so, you know, maybe somewhat unusually for the company. I mean, Atlassian, I think, is one of the best bootstrapping success stories of all time. I mean, the first time that we raised primary capital was when we went public in 2015, 13 years after founding. We did two, we did two secondary rounds. We did a secondary round in 2010 with Excel, and then we did a secondary round with T. Rowe Price, uh, uh, uh, in 2013. And so we'd sort of, like, had already basically allowed employees to, you know, to To participate in liquidity of the company. I think going public was, was really about operating as a best in class company. And we were ready. You know, we, we basically had onboarded an institutional investor into your price to understand what, what institutional investors going to ask us and, you know, how will they operate with us as sort of a shareholder in the company? What are the kinds of things they'll push us on or want to understand more deeply? Because they're a representative sample of everybody that we're about to expose ourselves to. And then we, Operated as if we were a public company for a couple of years. So we were ready. And then I think, you know, we had, we felt like we have a big market we're still growing into. We've got great durable growth. We've got a business model that I think is a huge advantage in terms of h…

AI assessment note: “I think going public was, was really about operating as a best in class company.”

Q And that's, that's logo or revenue retention year over year?

A Revenue retention is going to be north of a hundred percent, but you know, logo retention, like the companies that actually use our product from year to year, it's 98% of them that basically return if they spend more than 50 grand. And, you know, with our products, you know, we start at a team level, and so we can land inside of a big company at, at a very small unit, but because we're collaboration software, there's a, there's sort of a, you know, a viral effect where one user invites another user, one team invites another team, and the more teams that get invited, the stickier we become, which is part of like what all our growth momentum or our growth motion is. How do we get people to invite their colleagues? How do we get people to share more? How do we get people to create collaboratively? Because that just is going to increase retention and expansion.

AI assessment note: “Revenue retention is going to be north of a hundred percent, but you know, logo retention”

Q So did you adapt that principle across your H and her folks, or did you kind of force them to kind of stick in your system?

A We did. It's a little bit of, of meeting in the middle. And, and I think like we've learned, uh, new habits around embracing and connecting to remote teams. Um, I'll give you another example. Like we have a ritual called, um, ship it, which is basically a quarterly hackathon. Um, You know, ship-its for us, even though we had people that worked remote, were really an office-centric, uh, tradition. And, you know, after acquiring Trello, we had remote ship-its, like a remote-only ship-it. We used to do, um, or we, we still do an annual end of year, uh, you know, a little bit of an annual end of year, let your hair down day. And again, that was an office-specific thing, uh, where people do scavenger hunts and a whole bunch of things, and we plan those now for, Remote participation where everybody that's remote can participate almost as a kind of a single team. So there's been, I think a lot of learning on both sides.

AI assessment note: “We did. It's a little bit of, of meeting in the middle.”

Q so take me, take me back. I believe it's what, 2008 when you're joining in a low touch sales model. I don't think you're, you're doing an inside sales approach with quota and trying to sell big ACV things. You're more like a no touch, 20 dollar a month kind of thing. Is that true? And if so, what were you as your first focus coming in that first year?

A Uh, so when I joined, we were just a little over twenty million in, in annual revenue. And, uh, you know, the model was very oriented around low touch. I mean, it was a little bit higher touch kind of in the beginning. And, and, you know, part of my job was to continue to figure out how to remove friction from the customer path. And so even when I joined, like there was, uh, basically a team, we called them product advocates. We still have them today. Now we're a little bit more of a customer success team, but their orientation was if you're a trying Atlassian's product. We'll tell you, hey, if there's anything that we can do to make this easier for you or answer questions that, that you're not finding the answers to on your own, let us know. We'll bend over backwards. Now that team did a, did a lot of, uh, can I, can I schedule a demo? Can I do X? Can I do Y?

AI assessment note: “part of my job was to continue to figure out how to remove friction”

Q Facebook are becoming very monopolistic is because they can run the most tests at one time. So 10,000 tests and win. So what I want to ask you is how did you scale your testing velocity in your marketing channels? You know, at that, you know, 20, twenty million in AR up to a hundred million in AR to, to quickly pick winners and losers and then launch new experiments.

A A lot of work and, and a lot of effort. I mean, you know, it's sort of easy, like we started really early on, I think, as a company in marketing doing, you know, experimentation and A-B testing in sort of all the channels that most of your listeners would just head nod around. Um, we were maybe a little bit later stage in adopting, uh, and building, you know, growth experimentation muscle where in product as a modern SaaS company, you have the ability to, you know, ingest thousands and thousands, thousands of, of either existing or potential users or tire kickers. And figure out like, what are the tweaks that we can make in product or in funnel or part of the experience that's going to, you know, increase yield or increase lift from all these people that we're trying to ingest. And I would say, you know, we probably, um, you know, ran headlong into that endeavor about six years ago.

AI assessment note: “we were maybe a little bit later stage in adopting, uh, and building, you know, growth experimentation muscle”