Atlassian began in 2002 when Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, two students at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, decided to start a software company rather than take corporate jobs after graduation. With $10,000 in credit card debt and no external funding, they founded Atlassian in a spare bedroom, initially providing technical support and services to other companies while building their own products on the side. The company's first product, Jira, was launched in 2002 as a bug-tracking and project management tool for software developers. The name 'Jira' was derived from 'Gojira,' the Japanese name for Godzilla, reflecting the founders' ambition to create something powerful. Jira was initially sold as a downloadable, on-premise software product with perpetual licenses, a model that was standard for enterprise software at the time. The company's early growth was driven by a combination of product quality and an unconventional distribution strategy: rather than building a sales team, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar made Jira available for download with a 30-day free trial, published pricing transparently on the website, and relied on word-of-mouth and online discovery to drive sales. This self-service model was radical for enterprise software in 2002, when most competitors relied on direct sales forces and opaque pricing. The strategy worked because software developers, who were the primary buyers of bug-tracking tools, preferred to evaluate products themselves rather than sit through sales presentations. By 2005, the company had reached $1 million in annual revenue with no salespeople. In 2010, Atlassian raised its first venture capital funding, $60 million from Accel Partners, after eight years of bootstrapped growth. The funding was used to accelerate product development and international expansion, not to build a sales force. In 2011, the company launched Confluence, a team collaboration and documentation platform that complemented Jira and expanded the addressable market beyond software development. In 2012, the company acquired HipChat, an enterprise messaging platform, entering the real-time communication market. The company's IPO was executed in December 2015, raising $462 million at a valuation of $4.37 billion, with shares priced at $21 and surging 32% on the first day to close near $28. The ticker symbol TEAM was chosen to reflect the company's conviction that the atomic unit of economic output is the team. The post-IPO years were characterized by continued product expansion, including the 2017 acquisition of Trello for $425 million, the 2018 launch of Jira Service Management, the 2019 rebranding of HipChat to Stride (later discontinued), the 2020 acquisition of Mindville for asset management, the 2021 acquisition of Chartio for data visualization, the 2022 acquisition of Percept.AI for AI-powered virtual agents, the 2023 acquisition of Loom for approximately $975 million, and the 2024-2025 launch of Rovo and Atlassian Intelligence. Throughout this journey, the company has maintained its headquarters in Sydney and San Francisco, its product-led growth model, and its co-CEO leadership structure, making it one of the most distinctive enterprise software companies in the world.