Mike Cannon-Brookes
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
2002 – Present
24 years (current)
Key Decisions & Impact
Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar met as computer-science students at the University of New South Wales and founded Atlassian in 2002 using $10,000 of credit-card debt rather than venture capital, a bootstrapped origin that shaped the company's famously low-touch, self-serve sales model long before most enterprise software companies embraced product-led growth. Since Farquhar's August 2024 departure, Cannon-Brookes has run Atlassian as sole CEO for the first time in the company's history, while remaining an outspoken advocate for climate investment through his separate venture fund Grok Ventures. Cannon-Brookes has also used his wealth to fund large-scale renewable-energy projects in Australia, including backing efforts to build the world's largest solar-and-battery export project, positioning himself publicly as one of the country's most prominent corporate climate-action advocates. His Grok Ventures took full control of the project, known as Sun Cable, in 2023.
Legacy
Cannon-Brookes has led Atlassian since founding it in 2002, taking it from a $10,000 startup to $6.57 billion of fiscal 2026 revenue, and has been sole chief executive since Scott Farquhar stepped down on August 31, 2024. He set the product-led distribution model and the research-heavy spending profile that put 50% of fiscal 2026 revenue into engineering against 24% into marketing and sales, and he is the architect of the Atlassian System of Work. He is also a prominent investor in climate technology in Australia.