Year13 tech start-up hires ex-Atlassian exec, plots unicorn growth

Sydney-based edtech platform is expanding to the US, bolstering its operations with key hires from Atlassian, as it seeks to combat skill shortages and help school leavers.

Year13’s platform provides information and counselling to school leavers on higher education, jobs and other training, and has amassed more than two million users.

Australian edtech platform Year13 is plotting to become Australia’s next unicorn, hiring a cohort of former Atlassian staffers as it expands to the US to better ease the transition of leaving school.

Will Stubley and Saxon Phipps founded the company 13 years ago after finding what normally is expected to be the “most exciting” time of life for young people can actually be the most stressful, and for one of their friends, they took their life.

“It’s an age-old truism of the challenge of finishing school. Personally for us, both our very close friends were having particularly hard transitions out,” Mr Stubley said.

“Sax was like, ‘what is going on? It is meant to be the most exciting period of your life, and it just wasn’t the reality of a lot of people.”

For Mr Stubley, he wanted to be a builder, but then he did better than expected in his high school exams, prompting his father to say “don’t waste your ATAR”. So he went to Sydney University to study engineering.

Year13 co-founder and co-CEO Will Stubley.

Mr Phipps has a different experience. He definitely did not want to go to university. Both he and Mr Stubley went to Barker College, an independent school on the Upper North Shore of Sydney.

“His family sacrificed a lot to put him through Barker and the fact he wasn’t going to uni he, in his own words, felt like a bit of a loser. So he went travelling. When he came back he was talking about all the people and things he saw: photographers, graphic designers, we developers – all these people who were living amazing lives travelling the world.

“And he said ‘why isn’t this stuff talked about’.”

This led to creating a blog, which snowballed quickly into a forum to provide advice to other school leavers then to a fully-fledged business. Future Now Capital invested $10m in Year13 four years ago. It acquired Good Education Group, which publishes the Good University Guide, in 2023, and now Mr Stubley and Mr Phipps are planning another potential raise.

“We are getting a lot of interest from the US, so we’re exploring that (a raise) right now.”

Graham Carrick has been appointed Year13's head of engineering.

Its platform provides information and counselling to school leavers on higher education, jobs and other training, and has amassed more than two million users.

To beef-up their operations, Year13 has hired two former Atlassian executives. The software titan’s former head of customer experience, Pirow Cronje, has been appointed Year13’s head of operations, while Graham Carrick has been appointed head of engineering. Mr Carrick formerly led Atlassian’s engineering based in Sydney then Bengaluru, India.

The appointments follow Atlassian product and engineering alumni, Nick Menere and Mark “Chai” Chaimungkalanot, joining Year13 in 2023.

“They’re all friends as well, and they could do whatever they want, and they’ve chosen to spend their time and efforts on this,” Mr Stubley said.

Mr Cronje will lead the optimisation of Year13’s product, tech and commercial strategy, drawing on his 10 years of experience at Atlassian to disrupt the company’s operations and bring AI to the forefront.

Pirow Cronje has been appointed Year13’s head of operations.

“If you think about what we do, there’s two sides to it. What starts off as a small problem to the individual finishing school, that’s sort of where we started. What we’ve come to learn is that actually turns into a significantly bigger problem that affects almost everyone,” Mr Stubley said.

“30 per cent of students drop out of university in their first year, almost 50 per cent in apprenticeships. That is serious dollars for the tertiary sectors that’s already under pressure.

“You then take that a step further, you got industry, so in the US, it’s projected to cost them $US8.5 trillion ($13.06 trillion) in lost GDP due to skill shortages. And that’s where the government gets involved. This is actually an economic development problem, and so that’s where we’ve found a lot of success.”

Originally published as Year13 tech start-up hires ex-Atlassian exec, plots unicorn growth