Yahoo Finance Australia’s biggest tech start-up story that almost didn’t happen
The CEOs of Nasdaq-listed software company Atlassian, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, are arguably Australia’s best-known tech billionaires.
It’s difficult to imagine Australia’s tech and start-up scene without them – they’re vocal about very political issues like climate change and have a major hand in shaping the local start-up scene in Sydney.
But what if Atlassian – now worth over $30 billion – never existed? What if the tech duo had never met?
According to a BBC profile on Farquhar, they almost didn’t. After finishing high school, Farquhar had applied, and was accepted, into the Australian Defence Force Academy.
But the acceptance letter got lost in the mail. When it finally arrived at the Farquhar family home two months later, the future chief executive had already decided to study at the University of New South Wales, where he met Cannon-Brookes.
“If the letter had turned up earlier, history may be slightly different,” Farquhar told BBC.
The duo launched Atlassian in 2002, with their fortunes changing a short year later when American Airlines sent them a purchase order in 2003. Since then, they’ve gone from strength to strength: 2010 saw them raise $60 million in venture capital and the 2014 financial year saw them turn over $215 million in revenue, a growth of 150 per cent from just the year prior.
December 2015 saw Atlassian make its debut on the NASDAQ stock exchange, placing the Sydney-based company squarely on the global tech map.
Now, the company boasts more than 3,000 employees, serves more than 125,000 customers and most recently turned over $874 million in revenue – and they do it all without any sales staff.
Atlassian is now worth more than $30 billion, and the two co-CEOs are estimated to enjoy a personal fortune of around $10 billion each.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
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