Which software company startup was founded by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar? Atlassian. Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in Sydney in 2002 after meeting at the University of New South Wales. They initially financed the company with about $10,000 in credit-card debt and aimed to build a business that could provide the income of a graduate job without working for a large employer.
Their first major product was Jira, a tool for tracking software bugs, issues, and projects. Instead of relying heavily on a traditional sales force, Atlassian emphasized building useful products and selling them online at comparatively accessible prices. The company later added Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello, and other collaboration and development tools.
Atlassian is often confused with general workplace-app companies such as Asana, Basecamp, or Slack. Those companies overlap in collaboration software, but Atlassian’s roots are especially tied to software development, issue tracking, and technical project management. Atlassian went public on Nasdaq in December 2015, and its founders became Australia’s first technology startup billionaires.