Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar

title: Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar
author: How I Built This with Guy Raz
contenttype: podcast
publication: How I Built This with Guy Raz
published: 2021-02-08T00:01:00-05:00
sourceurl: https://rss.art19.com/episodes/8a1aaf4a-aa8f-4b88-9595-f9ee6e6bedf0.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg1PdmVyY2FzdAY6BkVU--3fdaf693ac55dc369c0201a1ede82e0232030d6c

word_count: 15934

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So I am really excited to finally announce our first how I built this virtual event. It's happening next month with Jay Shetty. Jay is a best-selling author, former monk and wellness coach. And if you're searching for purpose, peace, and clarity in your life or you're struggling to find meaning and motivation at work, you will not want to miss this conversation. Please join us. It's happening on Thursday, March 11th, and anybody around the world can take part. For more information and tickets, head to nprpresence.org. And I hope to see you there. And one more quick thing, just a quick note. There is a little bit of salty language in this episode. So if you are listening with kids, just be aware. And thanks. I feel like you're a cogent at that time in the morning. And then we realize that actually it was just such a terrible business. Almost anything would be better. From NPR, it's how I built this. A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists and stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raaz and on the show today, how two friends from college started a business named for a Greek Titan and built a modern-day empire, Atlassian, a software company that's been valued at over $50 billion. Back in 2018, there was an article in a major Australian newspaper of the Sydney Morning Herald. The headline read, Atlassian, the $30 billion tech giant nobody understands. Today, you'd modify that headline slightly to read the $50 billion tech giant nobody understands. So let me try and explain as best I can. Atlassian is a software company. It makes collaboration tools mainly used by software engineers and project managers. Their applications have been used by teams who sent the curiosity rover to Mars by Domino's every time you order a pizza and by Audi's designers who rely on Atlassian's project management tool called Jura. By market cap, Atlassian is one of the 20 or so biggest software companies on the planet. And those other companies, you probably know some of them. Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe Autodesk, Salesforce, Intuit, etc. Anyway, if you look at the top 30 or so biggest software companies on Earth, you'll start to notice a pattern. Most of them are based in Northern California, in Silicon Valley, which makes Atlassian an Australian tech company, an outlier. Back in 2015, when the company went public, it turned its founders, Mike Cannon Brooks and Scott Farquhar, into Australia's first tech billionaires. But the thing is, Atlassian success may have a lot to do with where it started, far away from the tech hubs of Northern California and Seattle. And while that may sound counterintuitive, launching a tech company in Australia in 2001 meant for starters, less competition, less noise, and fewer distractions. And for Mike and Scott, it also meant not a whole lot of access to startup capital. In fact, in the early days, there was none. And so the two founders didn't really have any investors breathing down their necks trying to micromanage the business. And it gave them room to experiment and to make mistakes and to grow. Mike and Scott met in college. They both grew up in Sydney, but they also both came from very different backgrounds. Here's Scott. My dad originally did some computing early in his career, but he had sleep disorder and that affected his ability to work as a computer programmer. And so he ended up doing odd jobs. So he worked at a service station at night, he did some manual labor. My mum was a housewife growing up for most of her life in Indus Burst that was different jobs. One of the early ones I remember is she was a queen, someone else's house once a week. Then she worked at Target or Tajay as we like to call it in Australia and McDonald's at different stages. And so I would say it's a middle class upbringing. We didn't want for anything, but we had one holiday a year to the same place every year type of thing down. When you were growing up a teenager, did you feel compared to other kids you knew or places you saw that you guys didn't really have a whole lot? I didn't really notice the difference in our economic status. I guess when you're growing up, you go to a school and everyone in Australia wears a school uniform so there's no real difference in fashion. I remember in high school I ended updating a girl who was from one of the private schools in Sydney and we would go to lots of different people's houses. I do remember quite a few of those houses. It looked very different to the house we grew up in. And particularly when my parents got divorced, we ended up moving into much smaller houses. When you're into a house, you could fit in someone else's living room. You sort of realise there's a very different way of people living out there. But I never felt that we missed out on anything. I think maybe with one notable exception, which I remember clearly is that I remember my friends had computers and I remember asking my parents, why couldn't we have a computer? I do remember crying as I went to sleep one night of like, dad, why can't I get a computer? So were you eventually able to get one? It was a month or a later. Some old computers that I guess had been extended their life at his work, that came available and he bought them and brought them home thinking he'd done an amazing thing and helped his son. But it turned out those computers were not compatible with any of the games that I wanted to play. And I think my fore-eye into programming or even using computers was hours, weeks, months of time spent trying to get those computers to play. Scott, I'm going to ask you just to stick around for a moment. I want to turn to you Mike for a minute. I guess your upbringing was substantially different than Scott's, your dad was a banker and I guess your family moved around quite a bit when you were young. And you went to a boarding school in the UK, right? Yeah. I was five when we moved to Australia and I went to boarding school in England from the age of seven to twelve and then came back to Australia for high school at the age of thirteen. Wow. So you were like far away from your parents for like seven years? For six years, yeah, which is it's kind of like how I got started in computers because they started the frequent fly program. So I was flying from Sydney to London four times a year back and fourth and racked up. Lots of frequent fly points as a seven-year-old, eight-year-old, nine-year-old and my parents gave me the catalog one Christmas or end of year and said, hey, you've earned all these points. What do you want to get? And you kind of look into like bottles of wine and holidays and there's an eight-year-old KJ. None of this is really good for me and the back was this computer and Amstrad PC-20, four-color, masterful device. And so I was like, I guess I'll get that. And it was how I got my first computer of myself, my own at eight and a half through frequent fly points. What did you do with that computer? I used to play lots of really bad video games that seemed like the best thing in the world at the time. And the internet took off so I was on the internet pretty early. Luckily, my sister, one of my sisters went to university in Edinburgh in Scotland and I managed to convince my parents that we could email her and that this would be a lot cheaper than sending letters. You know, paying for those 45 cent stamps would be expensive. So instead we joined an ISP in Sydney called Dialix which I can still remember. It was one cent per minute and it was all text-based and had the old motor making those funny noises as you logged in and all that sort of thing. But that got the internet into our house. That was definitely a revelation for me. Your sister's email address was probably something like ST372559 at edenbra.ac.cc.uk. It was something very close to that, yeah. I remember those days, yeah. And I guess when it was time for you to go to college, you got this pretty prestigious computer science scholarship to go to the University of New South Wales which is in Sydney, right? And this is a program I guess where part of the deal is you get a scholarship to be part of this program but you kind of agree to go work for one of the companies that is going to sponsor the sponsors of scholarship, right? Is that right? Yeah, it's called the co-op scholarship. So the whole idea is the triangle between industry, academia and the students. Right. And this is where the two of you met because SCOT had been accepted into the same program, right SCOT? Yes. And there's quite a lot of luck involved in where my can I have ended up. And one of the lucky things was that the programming languages that we got taught and the skills we got taught were actually pretty in line with what we needed to build a software company. We weren't being taught esoteric programming languages that you couldn't use or compile details where you were sort of down in the bowels of a computer trying to get it to work. We're actually building languages, in programming languages, it could be used to build applications and build specifically build web applications which of course is where most software is these days. And SCOT, were you my close friends in college or did you kind of have your own like your own groups or did you hang out a lot? I think both of us gravitated towards group assignments where other people much smarter than us did all the work. So I think we found ourselves in offer the same group assignments early on. We go to the same parties together but I don't think we'd be hanging out on a Tuesday night at each other's houses. And Mike, what was your first impression of SCOT? Do you remember him? Yeah. I remember my early impressions. He was clearly a leader like, hey, I'm going to take charge of the situation. I'm going to sort it out. Whatever it was, whether we were organizing which pub to go to or how we should all plan for studying or what we should meet or whatever. There was certain kids that just took charge and he was very much a take charge kind of leader which was which was really good. And he was clearly into the same things I was, you know, computers and was always a good match. All right, so you were in this program. It's like part work. It's like a work study program. You got to do a couple months of school of like class work and then a couple months of working in a company and you get your assignments and what did you end up doing? What were you supposed to work? Mike? So we, you're supposed to do three six months assignments and I got my first assignment which was at Bay Networks, which is a networking vendor that became Nortel Networks before I joined because I got bought by Nortel. This was in the sort of late 90s where networking equipment, Cisco, you know, this was a real hot, hot area. I spent six months just plugging in machinery. It was the most boring six month assignment. I could say that Nortel's out of business. So it was not a fun or exciting six months and I think that was one of those signs that maybe maybe the big corporate thing wasn't wasn't so much for me. I was like, man, if this is what work life's going to be like, this sucks. So I actually left the scholarship program after that. A lot of that six months were spent working on my first startup with another scholarship kid called Nikki who now runs Australia's best venture capital firm and we actually dropped out of the scholarship course to pursue that startup after that first of three six months stints. So about two years into our four-year degree. Wow. So you dropped out of the scholarship program and what was your startup, by the way? It was called the bookmark box. So Hotmail had just kind of appeared and we were going back and forth from home to this IT placement to student computers at school, you know, you have to log in on the student network and everything and we synced people's bookmarks across their browsers and different things through a kind of a web app. Sure. Yeah. And I've always said it was a one-year amazing experience, right? The two of us, I can viscerally remember the formative moment, we got an office in a local kind of what would now be an accelerator incubator at the Australian Technology Park and the office was a room about the size of this podcast studio and we got our own whiteboard and we had a table and we walked in and the two of us were like right. Now we better do something. You know what I mean? The staring at a blank whiteboard in your first office with no windows was very much okay now it's time to get serious but we learned the time. And what happened at the startup? We ran for about 12 months and we raised a little bit of money from what we're now called friends and family, parents and uncles and stuff who felt sorry for us and gave us five grand or ten grand and we had two competitors. One was called Blink.com and one was called something else. We got what the other one was called. Anyway, Blink raised $35 million and we were sitting in Sydney and we were just like holy shit. We can get smoked. Yeah. There's no way. So we called up the two or three guys that raised a book bunch of money and said, look we got we got a couple million bookmarks and we got I think we had a couple of hundred thousand users. Do you want to buy this thing of us? And one of them said yes. So I flew to New York and did a bit of negotiating with Blink and we sold it to them for a couple hundred grand or something and paid the invested back their money and ironically the worst or the funniest part about that story. My dad would have had me say this is he I think my dad put in five or ten grand and you know barely got his money back kind of thing and decided that maybe I wasn't worth backing and so he never invested in Atlassian. Right. And he's always kind of said hey man, back the wrong one there basically right hand. I was like well sorry. Did your parents support your decision to drop out of the scholarship program? No. No. My mom was not this was not not an okay thing. I remember her saying to me that the only thing she made me promises that I would get my degree. So Scott, all right, you are still in the program. You do not drop out of it and why you were in this program. Did you start to have thoughts about what you would do when it was over? Did you just assume that you'd end up working for one of these companies that sponsored the scholarship? I worked for three companies during my scholarship. It was IBM, then PWC, then ASX, the Australian Stock Exchange, all three were at acronym companies and my experience of that was working in a large organization was just full of people that were trying their best but didn't seem to be really on the path to success and I remember during my IBM process it was the middle of the 2000 Y2K problem and my job was not to go into the code and fix the Y2K problem. If it existed it was really to go and make sure that all the contracts that they had with their customers exploited that so that they wouldn't be legally liable if they had any problems. And roughly similar experiences the other companies that we worked at and so after that it was definitely not an encouraging sign in terms of working for corporate Australia. All right so Scott sounds like you're clearly getting dissolutioned with the corporate work that you're doing as part of this scholarship program and Mike you've left the program but you're still a student at the university and you've already sold your first company at this point. That's right. And then I guess what around 2001 Mike you send out an email like to some of the people in your class or your cohort of friends see if anyone wanted to do another startup with you like what what was the email that you sent out what was the pitch? Yeah I sent an email to a bunch of folks saying before you all take grad jobs kind of things do you want you know does anyone want to do something something crazy and try our own thing and the thinking was to not get a real job right like even if we built a really crappy company and we'd been able to kind of survive and go through that would have been more exciting to me than going to work in a very large company with a suit and tie as all our friends you know sort of heading to do it just wasn't wasn't my thing you know and so I wanted if other people wanted to have that that fun experience too. And a bunch of people answered that email just one just one just just one I think yeah so ended up pretty quickly just miking myself and you answered the email and said I'm in yeah I'm in and okay great what do we get to do we get to get a website we go to get going to do what what was the idea what were you going to sell what was your business look I think it was obvious it was going to be some sort of a digital business right we were in technology we were we were all you know into using technology and building technology things yeah I should probably formally at some stage thank IBM PWC and the ASX for putting Scott off the corporate career because that was probably one of the reasons he said yeah let's try something else because he'd also had a pretty negative journey there and then you know we kind of hung out a lot and tried things tried various ways to make money. Scott I'm trying to understand how you would have taken that kind of risk at that age because you didn't grow up with money and you got this scholarship I'm sure everyone was really proud of you I'm sure your parents were really proud of you and you were gonna be sad you were gonna have a really good solid stable job you were gonna make decent cash and you were giving that up so why why were you willing to take that risk at that point. It sounds right like but it didn't feel like a big risk to to give up you know a corporate job maybe we were young and naive and but I always felt that we landed on my feet with whatever I'd done you know as a smart kid I could you know there will always be jobs for smart kids out there and if I didn't get a job with this particular graduate year I'll get a job in the next graduate year and it just felt like wow I've got better things to do in my life than you know kind of be downstream of a whole bunch of poor choices and I remember the local tie place and three Sarté chicken skewers and rice was $4.50 at the at the local tie place and I if I could get dinner for $4.50 and you don't you don't you don't have much money to live and Mike was a really smart guy. You thought hey this guy already took a risk started something successfully sold it so maybe yeah maybe there's something there and you knew him already and you liked him. Yeah he's a smart guy he's totally trustworthy and the decision to start with Mike you know it wasn't it didn't seem really risky because the graduate salary I remember was $48,500 if you weren't worked at PWC and the thesis was if we can earn $48,500 and not have to wear a suit to work and a tie to work and work with you know kind of average people then you know we've won. So what was the idea what was the business that you came up with? The initial business was essentially a pretty bad business idea and I was grateful that it was so bad that it failed but the original business idea was to provide support for someone else's software and it was a company out of Sweden that produced software and we'd been using it previously and we thought it was a great bit of software but they had terrible support you know great software terrible support like wow we can provide that amazing support I could have match made in heaven so we got an email address got a web server put up some content so that people would find us we our pricing model was horrifically broken we would have it such that you would only pay us if we were successful in solving your case which meant that wow you know and I think you had to pay us $300 if you're in successful. $60 US dollars was the initial price. And did you get authorization from the company that made the software to be their tech support? Not really. No I got you okay. They were renowned as having amazing software and terrible documentation support everything so we thought well if we write their documentation sort of people will come and read it and then when they have a problem they'll they'll call us and maybe they'll pay us the money to do that. Now the problem is the documentation we wrote was pretty good that they would only call us with the hardest possible problems and then the $360 was totally not a worthwhile business model to solve what were the 1% of really really hard problems. One of our first support calls was at a party and I remember disappearing upstairs in the middle of this party was actually Mike's house and I had to get him to give me his password for his computer and I had to sound you know very official like however last year and of course there's party going on music people screaming like people downing alcohol and I think I spent the next five hours trying to debug this person's support call and not surprising I didn't end up solving that customer's support call at 4am in the morning in city time but I do remember waking up the next morning I don't know what time it was 11 or something and walking down the street and coming to me the answer to their support call I ended up solving it I guess in my sleep that night and that weekend. Is it related to what is or computer associates or someone like that? They faxed us I remember their check 360 bucks on a fax machine and you called the business Atlassian from the beginning right? Yes. Where did that come from? I mean Atlas I guess. So my my mom is a Latin and ancient Greek major I suppose you would say in America and because we were initially going to provide customer service that's what we were doing where we were providing tech support. Atlas was a Greek Titan he was actually a bit of a bad guy and his punishment was to theoretically hold up the sky and so we thought this was kind of what we used to we had this branded term legendary service we were going to go above and beyond just a little this amazing legendary service right and he was a legend that was providing service to the world. Holding up the sky. Sky would have fallen down theoretically and so we sort of turned it into an adjective because Atlas.com was taken so Atlassian was an Atlassian effort you know was there was a legendary service effort. So when you started this tech support company you're both so young you were two kids you had some experience starting up a business mic and selling it but did you guys go through the whole formal like you know in the US you would incorporate into an LLC I mean sometimes depends I mean you would have a conversation about equity and who got what did you did you do that any of that in those days. So we did we did the incorporation thing yeah we went and bought a business name in Australia was $110 or so you'd get a little local agency and somewhere we still have this laminated piece of paper with the Atlassian business name somewhere and then you know there was two of us so there's a hundred shares I think you have 50 shares each and I remember I'm actually going into a bank and because we had wanted to set up a business account and I remember going into the bank and thinking should I hope no one knows notices that I have no idea what I'm doing and like are we a legitimate business like are you are open a business account like do we need to have done something business before we could open this account and then you know later on in life we you know got a lawyer to kind of look at the you know we start having employees and wanted to make sure it was more solidified I guess you know a shareholders agreement and the lawyer you know sort of says I great was 50 50 if you were going to settle a dispute how do you you know settle it and I think we know there was a miscalation processes but at the very end it's like well what's the final way of doing it and we put in Rochandot or rock paper scissors into our shareholders agreement and so it's changing our Republic company we can't solve problems like that anymore yeah but you know for the first few years if we disagreed it would have ended up at rock paper scissors and I was highly incentivized to never let that happen because I think I I was every single game of that whatever played with Mike so you lost every game of rock paper scissors it don't know it's statistically very unlikely that that is possible but it feels like that like yeah it's I mean statistically rock wins the most of course yeah so you guys have you've got the service business this tech support business for this one product and how long does that last how long are you in the service business before you realize it's not working I think it was less than a year that we were in the service business I would have my computer running 24 hours a day under my bed you know so I had this sort of fan spinning up and and down where you're trying to sleep both our mobile phones were turned on to the loudest ringtone they possibly could we'd alternate which nights we were on call and you get up at two in the morning and try and answer you know the phone calls like oh last of last year that's yeah we're you know trying to sound like you're you're cogent at that time in the morning and then you know trying to sound like you're a big company we realize that actually it was just such a terrible business that almost anything would be better and our true passion was not supporting software it was building it and from that we then started exploring where we wanted to you know build software was there a point where one or both of you consciously sat down and said hey no this isn't working let's do something different or did it just did that just happen organically what do you remember I think what we started to do is we started to write software to try to make our own business better so we wrote an application to put a lot of that content and documentation online it kind of was like a knowledge base type thing we wrote an email archiving tool because a lot of it was done by our email and you you had no archives of the shared inboxes sort of things so we wrote one of those and then we wrote a support system which actually we called the Atlassian support system which has since gotten us in a lot of trouble because it was known by its acronym and it was not particularly well branded it's great acronym yeah we totally nobody realized this for years I got to be honest and then suddenly someone said hey do you realize and we're like oh no um so that was an application to provide that support right so people could file a ticket and there was comments and all that sort of this is like pre-google docs where you could just put everything in the margins you're just like sending these back and forth yeah it was a pretty primitive application for providing support online I suppose and that writing of software convinced us that that was a much more both fun thing to do and obviously in the application we were supporting we saw that they were making a lot more money in selling the software thousands of times and writing it once then we were every single time to make a dollar we had to provide this support it was a very non-scalable business right if we'd read enough business books we would have probably realized that a lot earlier than we did so we sort of pivoted to try to sell some of the applications that we had made for ourselves thinking maybe other people wanted to use these software applications and just to be clear these were basically applications to assist people who were building online businesses at the time right yeah back then all the scaffolding to build an internet business didn't exist right you know there was no eloquire there was no front there was no hub spot survey monkey you know kind of all these things that people take for granted just didn't exist and so we built almost all them from scratch in house and you know so yeah we build an email archiving tool that would be you know probably equivalent to something like you know front or you know other email group tools today we built a way to track our visitors across our website we built a content management system you know sort of everyone uses WordPress today but we built our own version of that you got to remember we're on the far side of the planet right here and we had done the evening thing that wasn't any fun working overnight all night we also didn't have any money so we couldn't hire anybody so the Atlassian business model came because we knew we needed to sell software somehow online because we didn't have any salespeople we couldn't afford to hire them we didn't have any money so it kind of had to sell itself and that required us to do a lot of this tracking and modern things a long time ago I want to I want to sort of dive in a little bit to actually the ideation of the products that you started to build because people who listen to this show know that the vast majority of the things that we do on the show are like consumer facing products right like pita chips or a cosmetics brand and your products are mainly used by businesses and really used by software developers still huge business we'll get to that but how did you begin to think about what pieces of software to build like were you guys sitting in a room together saying hey let's build this because maybe businesses will use will use it and maybe we should use our time and energy building something like this or was it just more like hey you know we need to solve this problem for ourselves let's build it like what was the process it's a lot easier to explain to your parents what you do if you're you know so good right yeah yeah that sounds like it sounds great but the for us it was building stuff that we needed ourselves and realizing that there's going to be a lot of other people out there they're going to need the same thing and it really was a process of constraints I really think if we had grown up in Silicon Valley and had venture capital around us that we would have built a very different company that wouldn't have been as disruptive as ours has been because we didn't have venture capital we didn't have people that had done it before to sort of drag us back to the mean and we just grew up without anyone telling us the way you know it couldn't be done and our experience of computers was you know downloading and using computer games and that was a very different world to the way that Enterprise Software was sold back then but not today like you know these days you download Enterprise Software in the same way you would download a computer game and I just think we were at the forefront of how that happened and almost the thing we built in that model is actually almost less important than the fact that we changed the business model of how people adopted Software to be much more consumer like to Scotspoint I think we built three applications in the early days that we needed and we put them out to say did anyone else need this and we sort of do a little online promotion and this and that and that Atlassian Support System kind of became the guts of what is now Jira which is still our biggest application and in simple terms Jira is basically software that helps teams of people manage projects and I guess initially this is for software building projects but now all types of projects right sure yeah yeah definitely started with software developers right software developers were great audience because they went and found tools to solve their problems and they worked with a lot of other groups inside those companies so we would watch people using our software and say hey why is your marketing department using this and they would say well because we brought it in and they work with us and they like it so they started using it we like great and it turns out there's way more non software developers in a company to sell to than there are software developers but this is still a great sort of entry into the company if you like so the two of you really just kind of hammering away at the keyboards you built together what became Jira yes and how long did that take that first version I think that the first version probably took us three months or so I think before we put something on the website that was I'm surprised anyone would have downloaded it and I think it probably took us six months till we go to what we would say is a 1.0 version so something that we felt was you know good enough for people to use and was it did it require a lot of resources or cash or was it just literally the two of you and you had to pay for an internet connection and he just started coding if you look at our our costs we didn't pay ourselves for a long time and even after that I think we paid ourselves $300 a week for the first two years so we were relatively inexpensive and then it was the cost of you know broadband internet back then cost of a website and you know bandwidth costs which you had to pay for separately so it was relatively cheap we say that we put it on a credit card what I really mean by that is we put it on my credit card because I think I had about a $1,000 limit on my university credit card I think my card you know 10 or 20 grand and so we could you know for to build our business on that and it consumed our time too you know we didn't have anything else to do but work and so when you have your own business especially one that's 24 set you know we didn't have a cafe that we had to open and close a certain hours right and so you know if there was something else on we'd go do it if friends were going to the pub you know we'd go at six o'clock and we'd go have a couple of beers and at 10 o'clock we would go back to the office if we didn't want to go to sleep and keep working yeah it sounds like you guys really had it together I mean I I guess I shouldn't be surprised but it sounds like you really had this plan and I didn't what did you feel different from your peers did you feel like you guys were kind of oddballs in that way I I feel different to our peers on a couple different fronts one is you know they've all taken safe jobs and there's a high pressure of man we fucked this up we're gonna work like the idiots right like we know we're the we're the ones that kind of are gonna be working for these people when we kind of crawl back to corporate world and they'll be our bosses in a couple years and so I think there's a high level of kind of anxiety around you know proving that you've done something especially when your peers have all taken a very different path but also I think in in Australia like the idea of an entrepreneur just didn't really exist and so there wasn't even really a category for you know to be even to be called that whereas today I think people are okay you start a company that's about career path yeah my girlfriend at the time my now now wife she is an investment banker and was back then and all her investment banking friends would tell her like why are you dating Scott he he doesn't really even have a job and you know and so it was just such so unusual and I think you have something to prove and I think you had simple it was gonna say it's simple existential goals I mean if we didn't make money we were gonna die but there was no big well of money behind this business it was just us so the fear of death was pretty clear when we come back in just a moment how Mike and Scott started to market their software using some pretty clever guerrilla tactics one of which involved several hundred bottles of fine Belgian beer stay with us I'm Guy Razz and you're listening to how I built this from NPR when you're starting off with 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Hey welcome back to how I built this from NPR I'm Guy Ross so it's around 2002 and Mike Cannonbrook's and Scott Farquhar have decided to turn Atlassian their two person tech support company into Atlassian a software development company and their hopes hang on a set of development tools known as Jira. Jira used to sell for $800 again it was a terrible pricing scheme it was $800 for everything oh you could like that was it and we needed to sell one copy a week and if we sold one copy we would pay rent do all the things I was $800 split two ways and everything else right if we didn't sell one copy we were gonna go bust if we didn't sell one copy for too many you know some weeks we'd sell two copies that was amazing right but then some weeks you'd sell zero the motivation of such a simple hole I remember like there's a reason you went back to work after the pub is like it's Wednesday and we haven't sold anything this week like we need to sell one thing so you'd go home and back to the office and you'd answer every customer service email as quickly as you could or you'd get back to someone or you'd get on the phone and try to ring them can we help you like what because you needed to sell just one thing a week for $800 and in the early days our website would always make it seem like we were bigger than we were you know we'd say Atlassian has a number of international offices that number just happened to be one we'd have sales at Atlassian and accounts at Atlassian it supported Atlassian and they would all go to Mike and myself both equally and you know people called up it'd be like oh cool can I speak to to accounts you'd be like sure I'll get accounts on the line and like Mike your accounts now okay and so you need to hand the phone over to Mike from accounts and if it's not even accounts stable how can I help you so you know we just did every job that there was to do and sometimes we put different hats on when we did them and different voices so you have a website for your business at Atlassian and and what I mean you just kind of hang a shingle out and say hey here's Jira you can download it to to try it or to buy it but how did you even market it I mean how did you get anybody to even know what it was did you start calling people did you just kind of hope that people would land on the web page by accident I think there's a belief that if you put it up there people will come and totally not true no I think that there's a couple of things that worked well for us we were the very early days of internet marketing and so we could buy you know Google AdWords which were just new back then and things that would now cost you $10 or $20 for a click would cost us $10 or $20 and I always wish we had more money to spend on that you know we our marketing budget might have been you know $100 a month or $100 a week like it was very small dollars back then we would turn up to software events and obviously that's where you know the bulk of our customers would be but we couldn't afford a booth at the software events and so we would turn up as attendees and try and hand out business cards or try and you know corner people in the hallway to give them a demo we did plenty of guerrilla marketing remember we went to was it in San Francisco somewhere we printed out a whole bunch of flyers basically and then snuck them into the conference and we just did you just just leave 20 on a random bar top table that was you know and kind of walk around the conference and just keep leaving flyers around for hopefully someone to pick them up. You guys were going that early in your business you were you were going to the US to promote this product that's US and Europe yeah that's where our customers were and so we were at a conference in Belgium which is one of the biggest technology conferences and they had a session where they were going to do a live podcast at three o'clock in the afternoon in front of an audience right and so we thought we asked them if we could provide beer for their session for the sort of five six hundred people that are watching them you know the three of them on this panel podcast and of course they said sure yeah whatever that sounds great we didn't ask the conference organizers of course because we would have gotten in trouble and it wouldn't work so instead we took our little rental car to a local bottle shop and bought as many cases of really good Belgian beers we could and then we stood at the front as people were going in and every time someone walked in we would put a sticker that said it last year on the front of the beer as if it was kind of our beer and then give it to the attendees right and they thought this was fantastic this was like the best session ever and we had four of our everyone on stage had one and we would just do sort of stunt marketing like that to the right communities which got our name kind of known I love that so great so in the first sort of year after you released Jira was it I mean I can't imagine it was a massive hit I have to imagine it was like kind of you know you'd sell it here and there and people who bought it liked it but it wasn't I can't imagine it like flying off the shelf so to speak we started with the one copy a week I don't know that's flying off the shelf we didn't really have a shelf right wasn't it certainly wasn't flying anywhere right but by the end of year one it was doing alright I think we made maybe a hundred grand in year one yeah and in the early days it was very much kind of hand-to-hand combat like every customer is someone that you have spent a long time hand-holding through to the sale and a big milestone for us was I still remember it when the the the fax came off the fax machine back then and it was American Airlines and American Airlines it basically faxed us you know a purchase order or a check for the $800 and I went to Mike and said Mike I haven't been dealing with American Airlines like it's a year thanks for doing all the work behind the scenes getting them across the line and my like I haven't done any work in American Airlines either and so we looked at each other and I'm like holy cow like American Airlines just sent us money over the internet for doing nothing and obviously they you know benefit from our self-made but that was sort of the moment when we went from having a almost like a corner store business to having a scale business and and my god American Airlines cheesed that's a bar I mean they just spent $800 and such that that didn't even have to go through like anybody that was just some random person American Airlines who authorized it because you know that's nothing it's a not even a rounding error for them and was that I mean and that was it it was like you just buy it and then you own it yeah you bought the $800 got you one year right unlimited usage but updates for one year so we were improving the software every week or two weeks and so our hope was they would buy a maintenance contract which was $400 for the second year and the third year and the fourth year and that maybe they would pass $400 a year assuming we kept adding value to the software right was that common in 2002 2003 to you know update software that regularly no it was very unusual and it's almost like a back then it's like CDs right every person you'd buy your CD and once you bought it that's you know the artist had to go out and produce more soft you know more more music and I think very early on we said well that's not a great model because that means we're incentivized to hold back all the new features it's like you know if a Dell had a great album and she had great songs she's like well actually I'll keep it half of them in the good album and I'll save half of the good songs for the next album because I only get paid by you know selling albums whereas we thought the model was was better if you were aligned by hey if you use our software and continue using it and being happy with it you pay us to go but that was incredibly unusual back then and you know it's interesting a couple weeks ago we had the founders of Riot Games in the show and they you may know their their their game League of Legends right very big game one of the biggest PC games of all time and what made that game really popular early on with gamers was how complex it was actually it's a very very complex game and but that was actually an advantage that they had because people really got into it the learning curve was really steep but then once people got it they were hooked and from what I understand it's kind of similar with Jira that it was actually pretty complicated for people to figure out at first but that actually is something that developers liked was that intentional did you make it complex I think it's you I wouldn't say we intentionally made it complex we were madly adding functionality to the application for for many many many years the good side about that is the people who got up the curve of understanding the power of Jira became these huge fans and they became superstars that their company because they could solve all these problems for the company really really cheaply again hey we've already spent the 800 bucks you got another problem I'll solve that with Jira so the people who solved the complexity you understood it they saw the matrix if you like and we ended up hiring a whole bunch of those super fans as well like people who were like massive Jira fans we'd say hey you want to come work for us like you know so much about our application and they would then make it better now over time we've had to remove a lot of that complexity and we've tried to simplify it but keep the power but in the early days we were just yeah we were certainly just adding adding current places in town I'm curious because there's there's a concept and now it's of course tutton business schools and it's you know every venture capital firm looks for this called the network effect basically and and it's this idea that uh that if you can create a product that can sell itself then you've hit the holy grail so for example drop box we had drew Houston on the show recently and you know he created a product that when you used it when somebody sent you a file you have to sign up for a drop box account and it was free but that's how it grew and then you had it and then if you wanted to send somebody a file they and and so you know there's a chain and it's something that really happened with your product with Jura from the start right that it really kind of became the self perpetuating yes phenomenon so what's important here is is teams so our viral effect is not like a Facebook or a Slack or a calendar they're all fantastic applications our viral effect is teams right often we we talk about the individual gets all the credit but the team really did the work right Neil Armstrong landed on the moon but there was a massive team of people at NASA that put that thing into the air and got them in and everything else right and so teams are the people who really do the work and we believe that and it's true so we would have an early goal we want to get one team to solve one problem with our application brilliantly because most people in companies don't work on one team they actually work on three or four different teams and different projects different things they work with other teams etc so you know almost all our applications now are basically free for a team why because we want one team to download or sign up to you know online applications use it and get value and think this is brilliant then we want them to go to the other team that work on them be like man working on this team stinks we're so inefficient can we use the thing that we use on that other team and so we would find one team two teams five teams ten teams you know and you go to a big company there are hundreds of thousands of teams in these big companies I guess by like 2006 right this is just insane to me this is just three four years in I mean you had fourteen and almost fifteen million dollars in revenue you've got 50 people okay so let me let me just back I want to kind of back up from the product for a moment and just talk about the business side because you know yeah I get Scott you kind of have leadership tendencies and Mike you know you had a little startup but but really both of you were were most of the time those early years it was a two of you just grinding away at a computer what did you know about how to lead 50 people and run a business like that must have been a pretty steep learning curve I still am not sure that we know everything there is to know about waiting people I mean I think we you know we had increasing confidence over time that we knew what we were doing I think one of the most important things is we were always very first principle driven I mean you sort of set it in your question we were both incredibly naive the good thing is we knew that we didn't know what we were doing yeah we knew that we didn't know anything about business and so we had to figure it all out from first principles so for example when it came to people we both knew that we had terrible experiences working other places and so we want to build somewhere that we want to come to work and hopefully other people will want to come to work there too I have a strong memory when you know we were very early on in our last unit our friends had just joined all these big companies and we used to go and have lunch together and I remember this distinctly we were downstairs at a yum cha place and one by one people sort of bitched about their jobs they complained about the people they were for once smart they complained that they weren't listened to and I remember after that lunch coming back to Mike and thinking wow I never want to be or build a company where these incredibly talented you know these people many times smarter than me have gone to work and they don't feel empowered to get job done or you know and they're only way to improve things as a bit to their you know friends at lunch yeah I'm trying to understand how you and I know you've sort of jokingly probably there's some serious to this but that you know when you say well we're still trying to figure out how to be leaders but here you guys are at this point you're in your late 20s so you're still really young right and you've got a growing team at this point like 50 and then the next year 100 and that becomes tricky right that that starts to create potential points of friction and I wonder whether you guys really understood how to manage people right was it was it pretty easy where people just kind of self erected or did you know what you were doing? look I'd say we've probably made every management mistake in the book in the first five to 10 years and probably some more in the last 10 years but we were honest enough to know when we've made those mistakes Scott in the early days I remember distinctly when you're a startup you hire the first dozen people the you know few dozen people yourself and at some state you transition hiring from you doing it to people that you've hired hired the next people and I would say the first 50 we hired ourselves and the next 50 you know were hired by other people and we looked around one day and realized that's second 50 people we'd hired really weren't fitting in like they'd turned up because you know we were a cool place to work we had beer in the fridge we had a ping pong table back then but they weren't aligned with how we wanted to work our work ethic or our mission as a company and Mike and I sat down and said well obviously that's not the fault of the people that you know have done the hiring like we haven't told them what's important and we did a exercise that Jim Collins actually created where you effectively do a mission to Mars and you say we were going to recreate it last year on Mars which people would you want to transplant and make it feel like the same company and in many cases they're not the senior leadership you know it's that one person that embodies something about the company that is really important and what you do is you identify those you know half dozen people and then you back solve and say well what is it about those half dozen people that makes them a laced in and you know and as a result we sort of on a bit of butcher paper at an off site we wrote up what has become a laced in values and they haven't changed in that sort of 14 15 years since we created them but that really came because we screwed up early on you screwed up by picking around people yeah and one thing we've always believed is you know if our business is going to double every two years as individuals and as leaders we can only justify our positions if we are more than doubling our capabilities every two years because logically otherwise you end up with the kind of constraint at the top right in us and that's sort of been our i guess mantra for self-development right you can't read this stuff in a book you you can go and talk to other people you can learn however you learn yourself but we knew that we needed to grow faster than the company otherwise you know it wasn't gonna fulfill its mission when we come back in just a moment my kids got explain how you can have a meeting about possibly being acquired without knowing you are having a meeting about possibly being acquired stay with us i'm gyra's and you're listening to how i built this from npr are you inspired by the stories on how i built this take the next step in your entrepreneurial journey with a graduate program at babson college the alma mater of a ring founder jamey simanoff bombas co-founder david heath and butcher box founder mike selgero whose stories you've heard right here on how i built this babson gives you the skills network and hands-on experience to turn your ideas into reality learn more at babson dot edu slash grad school when i first started how i built this one of the very first tangible things i ever made was a stack of business cards nothing fancy just my name the logo in the title but i remember holding those cards in my hand and thinking wow this is real now in that moment actually inspired me to think bigger if i can make business cards why not make something for listeners t-shirt sweatshirt stickers you know things people could wear and share and see out in the world well that's exactly what vista print helps small businesses do turn ideas into real tangible products you can be proud of vista print supports you at every step from choosing the right product to getting the design just right they've got you covered whether you need a small tweak or a full on rebrand vista print offers design services that fit your style and your budget vista print print your possible right now new customers get 20% off with code new 20 at vista print dot com hey welcome back to how i built this from npr so it's around two thousand six two thousand seven at last year is about five years old and at this point it's revenue is like twenty to thirty million dollars a year and it's safe to say the company is starting to get noticed so i'm guessing that that you guys already had people coming to you looking to acquire you when you were like doing you know ten fifteen twenty million dollars did that happen i mean did you did you have companies coming to see if you guys would sell we didn't have a lot of explicit offers in the early days or acquisitions because we were on the far side of the world and everyone assumed we were far smaller than we were and australia wasn't really a it was the brain was on a tech map no no that's true and by the time anyone did show up i think we were even more confident in our abilities and the business which made it very easy to to say no to any sort of offers along the way right we were always looking at and saying well we know how big we're going to be three years from now we're really confident in that now why would we do this it just it just never made any sense so it was it was always a pretty relatively easy decision for us along the way do you want to tell the story about uh the meeting that ended up in retrospect acquisition meeting but we didn't realize it yeah i did have one relatively famous what i now know was an acquisition meeting um i was with our then president and we were in you know some silicon valley office pocket this big firm famous guy running it i want to say who it was and everything was going on and they were kind of a competitor i guess you might say but we worked together in some ways and you know this and that and then we were just getting through the pleasantries the meetings sort of discussing road maps and various other bits and pieces and then a fire alarm went off a kid you know the fire alarm goes off and they're like oh we've got to get out of here so we all pile into the fire stairs and go down this silicon valley office park three floors and we're all standing on the car park it's almost like it's i remember in the car park thinking wow i'm literally in office space here like i'm looking at this big boring building like we're holding their car park and you know we must have shared some numbers and and back and forth and they're kind of confused and and we must have been having two or three different conversations fire alarms over we all go back upstairs in the conference room two or three pleasantries meeting over where you all go we get out of here thinking i'm like what what happened i said about president what what what just happened there like we were having a good meeting and then the far alarm went off and it seemed like they just kicked us out he's like oh yeah they realized that we're bigger than they are and they were trying to buy us and in that in the far alarm cop oc they had realized that based on revenue we were actually larger than they were well and so this it wasn't going to happen so they just kicked us out of the room and i was like wow that totally didn't understand that you knew that you had and you were looking at the trajectory and you knew that you were you were going to get bigger and bigger and bigger you could just see that from from the growth and the sales we were very confident in our business model yeah and its ability to deliver growth into the future yes patiently run right i mean what's really important about the elacian business journey has been patience patience for revenue to come later but we're more solid model behind it if if you like and part of that was we're very patient people were very long-term thinking we've always had these super long-term goals for the business the second part of that is Australia we're a very resourceful sort of survivor nation right it's a pretty rough country it's super hot it's super dry you know we've had to figure out how to farm the land we've had to figure out how to what products can we make down here and ship to the rest of the world because we're a million miles from anywhere we had to be patient because we couldn't afford to hire any salespeople and we had to figure out how to sell things online and once we had done that and saw the effect of that patience all we did is kind of continue to double down that model every year right we would hire more engineers instead of once we get afford to hire salespeople we were saying well hang on a second if we make the product better we're not only going to sell a dollar this year we know we'll sell two dollars next year and three dollars a year afterwards that's a way better equation for us over a three to five year period so let's go higher that extra engineer if you can demonstrate value to someone you don't need a salesperson they've already using a product they already got the value they get it I guess in 2009 so this is like almost 10 years in nine eight years in both of you got married that year and you turned 30 and each of you separately took a three-month sabbatical like you to to travel with your partner and the other person around the company for that time when you did that was there any thought among either of you but maybe you should just you know you did well you could probably sell it cash in and move on was that ever a thought that or ever a conversation the two of you had kind of probably walked away with you know 25 30 million bucks each maybe yeah so we had a such a good story because I think you have those moments where you have to stop and think and it was around 2009 maybe early 2010 we had spent eight years at the time building the business you know what I mean and I often describe it as we were heads down like we were looking at our feet just trying to run a not fall over for many many many years and for some reason maybe it was turning 30 maybe it was getting married maybe it was whatever we both had a bit of a life inhalation a bit of a pause right and the business was probably on its own feet by then I mean it sounds ironic I think we had like 50 million bucks in the bank and probably $50 million in revenue kind of scale and profitable but we felt like okay it's not going to die now we didn't really intend to get here what do we want to do what do we really want to do like what's what's next and you sort of had it was almost a look back look for a kind of moment you know as eight years in and we sort of realized hey wow we could we could probably sell this thing to someone we had taken no no no capital no investment we still owned a hundred percent of the company you know we could probably sell this thing and be pretty set right and it sounds naive now what we actually thought we were gonna get for it and we kind of you know we did a lot of really good talking and thinking and realized that we weren't done you know what I mean we both believed that the next decade was going to be better than the last decade for the company and that was really a really powerful moment so that's when we as you said said well okay well we've got to take a sabbatical in scout what was what was that time like for you it's weird I'm I remember being quite an emotional time it sort of just even opening up that door and saying well hang on that's even something we should consider it's kind of a tough conversation to have to sort of you know even to throw that on the table and say hey there's an option here that we should talk about and that's that's pretty emotional and also I feel that you know when you're grinding away for eight years it's tough because you're your identity is the company yeah you know and I remember for a while I talked about with my wife about this is that when when you first meet your partner in why so it's like well what's more important the company or my life partner you know and you know the early days it's the company right like you know girlfriend's come and go and at some stage you go actually my wife partner is more important than the company yeah and I think over time you start extracting your emotional state you know you kind of identity from the company but it was it was a pretty emotional time to sort of even just consider it you know and of all the founders of co-founders I've ever interviewed I think the two of you are most similar I know you that you've got differences obviously but most similar in temperament and I wonder I'm just I just wonder whether you were always aligned I mean you now had employees you had a growing company you were you know the leaders of this company I'm trying to figure out how you were always able to see eye to eye and not have conflicts because I've never ever seen that with co-founders ever we had we had the scissors paper rock solution ready at any time and so when you know that that's the end solution you're like we better work this out because we get to that man shit we might just lose I think it's always helped us as well well been more helpful than less helpful that we're in exactly the same life phases at each stage yeah so when we started getting paid nothing and drinking the cheapest beer we could find we were both doing that so that felt fine and we didn't really know any different around that time you're talking to 2009 to 2010 we were both getting married we got engaged no within a year of each other and so it was a similar view on life right I often think if one of us at that stage had been 50 and looking to retire and you know the kids are going to college or something we had built like it might have been a different view on the world but because we kind of had similar views on where we were at and then as you know as family started to come along we had kids you know it's it's a super brutal time for sleeping and trying to run a business and everything else but because you know kind of through that time that you'd give the other person a lot more slack because you're like oh man I understand man I've been there that that sucks that's a really hot period as you grew and eventually you you you know became you decided to go public at a certain point I mean you became I think you were the first so-called Australian unicorn billion dollar plus company today your market cap as I think last time I checked 50 billion US dollars as you really started to grow and become huge you also started to become visible people in Australia and Australia is a it's a big country but it's also a small country in a sense right yeah we have a it's Australia is about 25 million people do you how have you dealt with that visibility of being visible us I mean you're you now you're no let's just put it out there you two the richest people in the country multi billionaires when you think about wealth is it does it mean anything or is it just like a number on a piece of paper from a bank statement that's not doesn't really mean anything it's been hard coming from a background where you know I always view time and money is a sort of almost the same scale like you can generally spend money to save time and in many cases you can do many of the same things if you have enough time without the money and I went for a driver and Tasmania over the weekend lucky we've opened up in Australia and I remember thinking wow I'd really need to fill up the petrol tank before I return the car like that'll you know they're gonna screw me on the petrol yeah and and I was thinking but hang on like is that really worth sort of 15 minutes out of my way you know to save probably eight dollars on petrol and you know in a different life like I would have done that yeah and it was really hard I think to sort of go actually no I value my time at more than you know the eight dollars it would have saved and so I think it's just a thousand things like that that change and you know to try and make the right choice which may be different now than it was growing up in that sort of time value time money trade off yeah you know possibly the only one of the few places more obscure to start a tech company and then Sydney at the time was Ottawa Canada which is where Toby led key started Shopify and Toby was in the show a year or so ago and he said that if he that Ottawa actually is why Shopify became successful that he really resisted starting that company or scaling the company in Silicon Valley even though investors really tried to push him to do that that Ottawa was the secret weapon you know finding really talented committed people in this freezing cold place that enabled him to build this hugely successful business um there were a lot of challenges to starting this company in Australia certainly when you did it because there was no there's no community but do you think that starting in Australia actually turned out to be what made it successful that had you done this elsewhere it may not have worked totally starting Alessia in Australia is the only reason we're successful um we had venture capitalists telling us that we couldn't build the company you know we were a bit of a million dollars of revenue they said oh that's really nice you you've built a tiny little tiny company you can never build a ten million dollars of revenue and we went back when ten million dollars of revenue and they're like yeah well you never get to a hundred and we sort of stopped going back after that and I think just the fact that we you know didn't have people you know that was the only person telling us the way we couldn't do it allowed us to do things totally differently and uh you know at the right time when the internet's coming out that's what was needed was totally different thinking and our tenure is better like we've got you know employees to stick around for a very long time and it's been totally critical uh to our success but we also have one foot in you know in Silicon Valley like if you started a company in Australia in the 70s you wouldn't be able to tap into the podcasts and the blogs and the email newsletters and all the information that flows around and so the world is flatter in some ways than it's ever been before and so I think that combination has made it successful how has I know Australia isn't a different place than the United States and many countries around the world when it comes to covid you're in a much better situation and have handled it infinitely better than the United States has although everybody has um how has covid changed your your your business and has it changed it forever I would say we separated two things in that that are really really important first is the ability for people to choose where they work we're not saying we're going to close our offices we're saying if you want to come to an office you can if you don't want to come to an office you can do that too um that's let us to separate how we work as a company from where we work we were a long way down that path before covid hit you know we had I don't know maybe five or six hundred people working from home on a given day and a bunch of remote employees and then we send five thousand people home in one day and you know the world's largest telecommunic experiment has taught us all how to do that the goods the bad yeah but that's really forced us to solve those problems in a really rapid fashion has it also changed do you think the way I mean companies used to say well you got to be here right at last year you got to play ping pong you got to have the you got to go to the meet people walk around it's the campus there's the the cafeteria but now it seems like that idea is completely evaporated that everyone is saying you know actually distributed the distributed model works you can you can actually have executives who live in a different time zone in different country what do you think i mean do you think that um the office culture is is crucial to maintaining a company's culture it suits Australia i would say we've always been you know colloquially on the ass end of the world and so traveling and moving around and other things have been a part of the Australian existence in business for a long time yeah and hence we use a lot of virtual technologies we're very early technology adopters i believe because of that right it's a lot easier to get on a zoom call than fly to San Francisco and back trust me i've done it i don't know a thousand times in the last decade and a half probably more but we're still going to need to meet each other right one of the things we value is human connection the question is do we meet each other to work or do we meet each other to connect yeah so we're increasingly having meetings you know if you're going to fly to meet your team or your group you're going to do that but when you do that don't work right do the work at home when you remote from each other and when you're meeting build the social bonds go out to dinner like run exercises whatever you're going to do but don't meet to do work both of you are forty i think right now forty one forty one as of two days ago and uh you've got a lot of life ahead of you you're really rich you can just stop working right now and have a you know foundation and give away a bunch of money and you know whatever you wherever you want to do whatever you want to do what what's stopping you from doing that why why wouldn't you just kind of walk away now i think that you know with everyone's life you try and work out how do you have the biggest impact in the world or at least if i'm like in my life that's been a big part and like our mission at Alasian is to unleash the potential of every team and i keep thinking okay well if i fell left Alasian where would i go or what would i do to have a bigger impact you know the teams that use our products put people in space like they create electric cars they you know decalbinate the planet there you know the american red cross like our customers and we get to help them do their their work better and i don't know i feel if there was something better out there you know i'd be tempted but like the it just doesn't seem a better opportunity to have a big impact in the world might i think it's not an own DNA because you got to start out by trying to build a product and solve a problem not start if people start a business i want to make money you're like okay well that what are you going to do to do that right you got to provide some value to a customer but secondly if they were lucky enough to provide some value to a customer they would have left long ago once a business post i don't know five million dollars in revenue or ten million dollars in revenue that my kids got would have sold back then they would have they would have been gone so they wouldn't be here so then you're asked your question will hang on if i didn't sell yesterday and i don't want to go and you know sit on a beach or whatever why would i sell tomorrow and the answer is the same reason i've been here every day for the last 20 years before i let you go last question for both of you and i'm going to ask you the same question how much of your success do you attribute to your hard work and your intelligence and grinding away and how much do you think it happened because you got a lucky Scott first to you i think you need both like i really believe that you make your own luck to some extent and so you need to work really hard and teach yourself and so forth but there's been a lot of things that you know worked out in retrospect were lucky you know we live in an era and time when Australians cannot operate on a world stage if i were born 50 years there'd be what harder you know the internet came around so there's a lot of things that were the right timing and we just managed to take advantage of them because of who we were and what we our skills were Mike I would say 50% luck 50% Scott's hard work smarts and ingenuity so you just sat around and eat bonbons yeah i guess i did that's my cannon brooks and Scott Parkwater co-founders of adalacian and just remember the secret to their successful relationship three words rock paper scissors jay that there's a there's an easy way to win rock paper scissors or rather not not lose oh yeah what does it what you do is you you have to control the timing yep so when you're going scissors paper rock whatever do it start to slow it down and go really really slowly and then just watch their hand and if their hand stays together or starts moving as soon as their hand starts moving you go for scissors yeah because you know you know they're either paper or scissors yeah and if their hand doesn't move right you go for paper yeah and so you know you're going to get a draw or not and so if you can do that you can usually statistically well more than 50% but if you tell somebody that statistically rock works the most wins the most then you can always place it paper against them uh you see you've got the game theory going on going yeah yeah i got two kids so i always win rock paper scissors hey thanks so much for listening to the show this week if you're not a subscriber to our podcast please do so wherever you get your podcasts if you want to write to us our email actresses h-i-b-t at n-p-r dot org if you want to follow us on twitter or at how i built this or mine at gyros and if you want to follow me on instagram i'm at gy dot raws this episode was produced by james de la hussie with music composed by roteen arab luie thanks also to li's mezzo ferris safari darent gale jc howard julia carney niva grant and jeff rogers our intern is jannit lujung li i'm gyros and you been listening to how i built this this is 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