Mike Cannon-Brookes
Co-founder 2002Background
Mike Cannon-Brookes is a computer scientist who met Scott Farquhar while studying at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Cannon-Brookes' founding philosophy was that enterprise software could be sold without a traditional sales force, relying instead on product quality, transparent pricing, and self-service adoption to drive growth. He believed that developers and technical teams preferred to evaluate and purchase software themselves rather than sit through sales presentations, and that this preference created an opportunity for a different business model.
Role at Atlassian Corporation
Atlassian was founded in 2002 in Sydney, Australia, by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. The founding of the company is a notable departure from the traditional Silicon Valley startup narrative. The two founders were computer science students at the University of New South Wales who had no grand vision of changing the world or disrupting an industry; they simply wanted to avoid putting on a suit and getting a traditional corporate job. They famously set a modest initial goal: to earn $48,500 a year each which was the starting salary of a typical graduate entry-level position at a major accounting firm. Without external venture capital funding, they decided to build software for developers. They funded their early operations through a $10,000 credit card debt. Their first product, Jira, was an issue-tracking tool designed to help software engineers manage bugs and project tasks. It was built specifically to solve their own internal frustrations with the clunky, expensive enterprise software tools that dominated the market at the time. Because they had no money to hire a traditional enterprise sales team they were forced into a profound structural innovation: they had to build software that was so cheap, intuitive, and easy to download that it effectively sold itself over the internet directly to developers. They famously posted their prices publicly on their website, a heresy in the opaque world of B2B software pricing in the early 2000s. This radically transparent, product-led growth strategy was an unexpected success. Without ever taking a dime of traditional Silicon Valley venture capital during their foundational years, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar organically bootstrapped Atlassian into a global leader, eventually executing a successful IPO on the NASDAQ in 2015 and becoming two of the wealthiest self-made individuals in Australian history.
Mike Cannon-Brookes was born in 1979 in New Haven. Education: Cranbrook School.