Career
Before founding Atlassian, Canon-Brookes co-founded an internet bookmark management tool called The Bookmark Box with his university classmate Niki Scevak. The Bookmark Box was sold to Blink.com in 2000.[9]
Canon-Brookes co-founded Atlassian, a collaboration software company, of which he is CEO. He and Scott Farquhar started the company in 2002, shortly after graduating from university, funding it with credit cards.[10] They have said they founded Atlassian with the aim of earning the then-typical graduate starting salary of A$48,000 at the big corporations without having to work for someone else.[11][12]
Their first major Atlassian product was Jira, a bug tracking, issue tracking and project-tracking software. They decided to forgo the expense of hiring sales people, and instead spent their time and money on building a good product and selling it at a more affordable price via the Atlassian website.[13] As of 2016, the company still did not have a traditional sales force, investing instead in research and development.[14]
In 2005, they opened an office in New York, where most of their clients were.[13] Later in 2005 they moved the U.S. office to San Francisco,[15] which had a much larger pool of relevant technical talent.[13]
Their first external funding for Atlassian was a US$60 million round from Accel in 2010.[16] In 2014, they redomiciled the company to the UK, in advance of an initial public offering (IPO).[17]
Atlassian made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in December 2015,[18] with a market capitalisation of $4.37 billion.[19] The IPO made Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar Australia's first tech startup billionaires and household names in Australia.[20][21][22]
Canon-Brookes and Farquhar redomiciled Atlassian to the United States in 2022.[17] Since September 2024, Cannon-Brookes is the sole CEO of the company after Farquhar stepped down as co-CEO.[23][24] As of 2024, he owns approximately 20% of Atlassian, with super-voting shares.[25]
