Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar

Atlassian's origin story centers on two Australian college friends — Mike Cannon‑Brookes and Scott Farquhar — who met in the University of New South Wales' co‑op computer science program and launched a company that would, by 2021, be worth roughly $50 billion. Both founders described humble middle‑class upbringings and early fascination with computers: Mike got his first machine via airline frequent‑flyer points while at boarding school in the U.K., and Scott recalled begging his parents for a computer in adolescence. They fell into entrepreneurship while still students: Mike had already started and sold a prior startup to Blink, and in 2001 the pair formed Atlassian initially as a two‑person tech‑support business.

Their earliest venture model was a support shop for third‑party software, which quickly proved unscalable. The founders experimented by building internal tools to run their own business — a knowledge base, email‑archiving, and an online ticketing/support system they called the Atlassian Support System. That ticketing tool evolved into Jira, a project‑tracking application aimed first at software developers and later used across many business teams. Scott and Mike emphasized that this product pivot came organically from solving their own operational problems, then discovering others had the same needs.

Bootstrapping defined much of Atlassian's early trajectory. The founders paid themselves about $300 per week for the first two years, charged infrastructure and early costs on personal credit cards, and kept expenses ultra‑lean — relying on low monthly bandwidth, cheap hosting, and long development hours. Early pricing for Jira was simple (about $800 per license), and their break‑even math required selling a single license a week. By year one they reported roughly $100,000 in revenue. One milestone memory was an American Airlines purchase order arriving on the fax machine — a symbolic moment when the product began to sell at scale without hand‑to‑hand sales work.

Without venture capital or a large marketing budget, the founders had to invent low‑cost distribution and growth tactics. They bought early Google AdWords, attended conferences as ordinary attendees (no paid booths), left flyers for targeted audiences, and executed stunts such as buying hundreds of Belgian beers at a European conference and sticker‑branding them to seed word‑of‑mouth. The Australian context mattered: being far from Silicon Valley meant less competition for talent and customers, and less external investor pressure, which Scott argued allowed experimentation. The founders also shared anecdotes about governance and culture — a 50/50 stock split, a laminated business‑name registration, and even a rock–paper–scissors tie‑breaker in their shareholders' agreement — that illustrate how ad‑hoc and scrappy the company was at first. Those constraints, combined with a product‑led, self‑service licensing model, ultimately enabled Atlassian to scale from a student project to an enterprise software giant used by teams running projects from NASA's Curiosity mission to enterprise customers like Domino's and Audi.