Scott Farquhar: Founding Atlassian; How We Scaled to a $50B Valuation; The 4 Jobs of a CEO | E1070

... could I look my staff in the face and say that the next five years of their life was gonna be the biggest impact to humanity working on this product?

(instrumental music) Scott, I am so excited for this. I've wanted to do this one for a long time. So first, thank you so much for joining me today.

Of course. This is our pleasure.

Now, 20 years, it's an incredible journey. I just wanna go back to the very beginning. You and Mike sitting in a room together. Just take me to that founding moment before we dive in.

So Mike and I started Atlassian graduating out of college, and neither of us wanted to get a real job. He had dropped out of his degree to do a startup that he eventually sold, uh, and then he worked in a tech company for a bit. Uh, I was coming out cold, but I didn't have any entrepreneurial experience, but I didn't want to go work for a bank and insurance company. And so we tried a bunch of different things, uh, around software. We tried doing third-party support and eventually we built a product called Jira. And, uh, 22 years later, 250,000 customers, 11,000 staff, like it's sort of grown a lot, uh, since the two of us.

Did you love the problem of Jira? You said there about kind of working on software and bouncing around different products to find what worked. Did you love the problem of Jira? I'm always trying to understand whether you do have to focus on something you love.

Look, I'm a firm believer that two things. One is that you've gotta love what you do, uh, otherwise someone else out there who's just as smart as I am, who is more passionate about what I'm doing will beat me, like every single day of the week. So I'm a firm believer you need to be passionate about what you do. At the same time, I think there's an aspect of you, when you get good at something, well, you learn to love it more. And, uh, I think you need to, you know, try something on for size. And so for me specifically, I've always loved building software, like loved the idea that you can create something out of nothing, uh, write some code, and it, you know, controls this thing called a computer. So I've always loved that. And, you know, if you said, "Hey, would you," you know, "Is bug tracking like your, what your life is gonna be, you know, like for the next 20 years," you know, that's wh- which is what Jira originally started with, I don't think I would've said, "Yes, that's my life's calling." But when I look at what we've done around, you know, turning that, you know, initial starting point into a great company that people love to work at, and our mission now is, uh, to unleash the potential of every team. And so I get super enthused about that mission.