Focus on philanthropy and start-ups next for Scott Farquhar after Atlassian exit
The self-made billionaire is making waves in Sydney’s uberwealthy east – owning two of the city’s most expensive houses and pushing for Cranbrook to take in girls. What’s on his radar now?
Self-made billionaire, investor and philanthropist, 44-year-old Scott Farquhar is the boy from Sydney’s western suburbs now making waves in the city’s uberwealthy east – owning two of the city’s most expensive houses and pushing for one of its oldest boy’s schools, Cranbrook, to take in girls.
As he steps down from the company he founded with Michael Cannon-Brookes, Farquhar and his wife, Kim Jackson, will be stepping up their focus on philanthropy and their investment company, Skip Capital. Farquhar, who has been a driving force behind the establishment of the Technology Council of Australia, is also keen on promoting the sector as an industry in its own right with its own special interests – including the need for easier visa conditions to bring in workers from offshore – and he also wants to mentor other tech start-ups.
While Cannon-Brookes has taken a high-profile role both inside and outside Atlassian, Farquhar and his wife have taken a lower key approach to life, but with a strong passion to use their skills and money to make a difference.
Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar have taken a team approach since they first got together to do business after meeting up at the University of NSW, specifically choosing the word TEAM as their sticker name for their listing on the Nasdaq in 2015. Now Farquhar’s team of the future will involve working with his wife.
A former investment banker who worked at companies including at Hastings Funds Management, Jackson has been the driving force behind the establishment of Skip Capital.
Farquhar’s departure from Atlassian will see more focus on the role of Skip as a backer of start-ups. Founded by the Farquhars in 2017, Skip has had a history of backing female-led start-ups as well as a focus on technology and green energy companies.
Its investments have included Canva, Airwallex, Culture Amp and Brighte, a company which helps with financing the installation of sustainable energy including solar panels, battery storage and hot water pumps.
Jackson was awarded the prestigious Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the year in 2019 for her efforts in supporting female entrepreneurs in a ceremony at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. In her acceptance speech, which her husband filmed on his mobile phone, Jackson called out what she saw as the “despicable” lack of funding for women-led companies. “We can do much better than that,” she said.
Jackson is fiercely protective of the privacy of her family including that of their three sons.
“They are both very private and very family-orientated,” says one well-connected Sydney public relations executive on Friday. She described Jackson as being “formidably intelligent” but also “shy and not seeking the limelight”.
In an interview last year, Farquhar said the couple wanted to use Skip to “get behind great founders”.
“A great part about being a private family office is that we don’t have a fund size or mandate that we can invest in X, Y and Z,” he said. “We have always been flexible about what we can invest in.”
The couple have been making their mark in the property market in recent years. In 2017 they bought Sydney’s waterfront Elaine in Double Bay for $70m from the Fairfaxes, the former newspaper owning family, smashing property records.
This was followed by Cannon-Brookes and his wife Annie, buying Fairwater, the home of the late Lady Mary Fairfax, next door for a reported $100m.
But in a bizarre turn of events, neither couple actually live in the houses, both having extensive property portfolios elsewhere.
An application by the Farquhars to Woollahra Council for the development of Elaine, which reportedly included a tennis court on the roof, has not gone ahead.
There were reports that the proposal caused tension between the Atlassian wives.
(Cannon-Brookes and his wife Annie announced their separation last year, with Annie spending much of her time in the Southern Highlands, where their children go to school.)
After several moves, the Farquhars went on to set another record when they paid $130m for the historic Uig Lodge in 2022 at Point Piper, not far from former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
“We are excited to have found a family home to move into,” the couple said at the time.
The Farquhars have also become players in the controversial push for the prestigious Bellevue Hill boys school, Cranbrook, whose former students have included James Packer and Rodney Adler, to take in female students.
The process saw them become supporters of Cranbrook headmaster Nicholas Sampson, who was forced to resign from his $1m a year role in March over another issue after a report by the ABC’s Four Corners.
While Cranbrook has committed to going co-ed, phasing the move in from 2026 to 2029, with the Farquhars promising scholarships for girls, the push for the school to take in girl students has created mixed feelings among some former staff and parents.
Farquhar has come a long way from his origins in the western suburbs. His mother worked at Target and then McDonald’s while his father worked at a service station. He had to badger his parents to buy him a computer, although he knew they couldn’t afford it.
His father eventually relented and brought home an old Wang which never quite worked.
In contrast, Cannon-Brookes, the son of a Citigroup banker, was able to buy one of his first computers using frequent flyer points he gained from flying between Sydney, where he was at school at Cranbrook, and London, where his parents were living at the time.
Farquhar’s sharp intellect saw him attend the selective James Ruse Agricultural High School.
He went on to get a scholarship for the UNSW bachelor of information technology course where he met Cannon-Brookes, both part of a group of 35 talented people studying IT at the height of the dotcom boom. By all accounts Farquhar’s sharp technical and operational skills have complemented Cannon-Brookes’ more ambitious view of the world, which worked well in the founding of Atlassian.
Former Atlassian president, American Jay Simons, who joined the company in San Francisco in 2008, says the Atlassian founders are “very grounded and down to earth”.
But he describes Mike as “more the dreamer”, the one who has always been “incredibly aspirational and ambitious”. “He is always thinking about a new mountain to climb,” he says. “Scott is more operational. He will be thinking about the pathways to get there. Mike is usually the one who is challenging the bigger, taller, harder looking mountain. Scott will be thinking: ‘how do we get from where we are to the top?’ ”
Long time Atlassian director, American Rich Wong, describes Cannon-Brookes as setting high goals, with Farquhar having the practical ideas on how to get there.
“Scott … tends to look at the entire system and think about how the pieces interact and allow that vision, or that point on the horizon, to become a reality.”
Just how Scott Farquhar plans to make his visions of 2024 a reality will be watched closely as he turns his talents and his wealth to his own interests to the next stage of his brilliant career.
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