‘It’s where I have impact’: Cannon-Brookes staying put at Atlassian

The outspoken tech billionaire says running the company he co-founded 20 years ago is the best use of his time, despite the high-profile side hustle spats with Andrew Forrest and AGL.

Mike Cannon-Brookes says running Atlassian is the best use of his time and the technology veteran has declared that his extra-curricular interests, including an ongoing dispute with Andrew Forrest and a fight over the future of energy giant AGL, are no distraction in running the software company he co-founded two decades ago.

The outspoken tech billionaire, who serves as co-CEO at Atlassian alongside Scott Farquhar, recently attempted to buy AGL and is embroiled in a fight with fellow billionaire Andrew Forrest over the future of the contentious $35bn Sun Cable energy project in the Northern Territory.

Speaking exclusively to The Australian on the sidelines of his company’s Teams summit in Las Vegas, Mr Cannon-Brookes, an activist investor, said that his priority continued to be Atlassian, which over the past two decades has grown from a small start-up into one of the world’s largest enterprise software providers.

Atlassian co-chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes. Picture: Bloomberg

“I’ve had a 90/10 rule for many years … And I don’t intend to change that,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said.

“Ninety per cent of my hours are spent here (at Atlassian), 10 per cent are spent outside.

“I have a lot of great teams of people outside, but this is something that’s a very intentional choice of how to spend my time, and that’s how I can have the greatest impact.”

The company, which last month laid off 5 per cent of its workforce, is expected to announce a suite of new features and product improvements at this week’s event. Its collaboration and IT service management applications, including Jira, Confluence and Trello, have more than 250,000 customers globally.

Mr Cannon-Brookes said he could not rule out more redundancies to come, but that the company was still hiring.

“We have no plan (of more) for the moment. But yeah we did what we did and we’re moving forward,” he said.

“We’re still recruiting really hard at the moment. We tried to be really clear in all our explanations that it’s about rebalancing, and making sure we’ve got people on the most important priorities at the given time, given everything that’s going on around economic climate and AI, and everything else that’s changing in our world.

“Unfortunately that was a necessary thing to do … But we still have twice as many jobs open as we did people that unfortunately we had to let go. So we’re still hiring.”

Mr Cannon-Brookes, who with Atlassian co-chief Scott Farquhar was a major investor in Milkrun which collapsed last week, would not be drawn on the start-up’s demise.

Milkrun had raised more than $85m in venture capital funding, including from Mr Cannon-Brookes who most recently ranked sixth on The Australian’s Richest 250 list and is worth an estimated $16.1bn.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said, about Milkrun’s demise.

He also declined to comment when asked about his dispute with Mr Forrest over Sun Cable. The pair are in a stoush over the scale and scope of the $35bn energy project, and are currently presenting competing visions to creditors.

Atlassian has stood out in recent months for doubling down on its “Team Anywhere” remote work policy, at a time when other tech firms such as Amazon are mandating a partial return to the office for employees.

Atlassian made a “very big bet” on Team Anywhere, Mr Cannon-Brookes said – a bet that’s “paying off very well”.

Mike Cannon-Brookes at the Powerhouse Museum. Picture: Zan Wimberley

He pointed to statistics showing 50 per cent of Atlassian staff hired in the past 12 months live two or more hours away from where Atlassian currently or used to have an office.

“I’m the first to say it doesn’t work for every company,” he said. “But I do believe the average company will be far more distributed than it was before.

“It doesn’t matter how distributed you are, as soon as people are out of the office some days; you’ve still got to have all of the technologies available and the nature of how you work changes to be more distributed.

“We’ve sort of been at the vanguard of that and it works for us as a company. We’ve always been highly distributed, the Pacific Ocean has always been in the middle of the company and that’s probably one of the reasons we’ve adapted really well to it.

“And the distributed workforce gives us access to a much wider pool of talent.”

David Swan travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Atlassian.