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2 episodes · 42 quoted claims
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian grew about 30% in the most recent quarter on a roughly $7 billion run rate, its fastest growth in about two years.
“We grew thirty odd percent last quarter on 7 billion dollar run rate, um, which is the fastest we've grown in about two years.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian has roughly 12,000 to 13,000 employees worldwide.
“we are, um, I think publicly twelve, 13,000 odd, uh, around the world.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said about 60% of Atlassian employees come to an office three or more days a week, while 25% never come in.
“About 60% of people come in three days a week or more. Um, but 25% of people don't come in a single day per week.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian started with operations in both Australia and San Francisco, making it a globally distributed company from the start.
“When you start in Australia and San Francisco, you kinda get used to the Pacific Ocean being a little bit distribution.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian had only a few thousand employees before COVID.
“Pre-COVID, we were a few thousand people, you know what I mean?”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian currently has two chief technology officers, each paired with a chief product officer over a large product group.
“So we have a CRO, we have a CFO, we have, uh, two CTOs at the moment.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said well over half of Atlassian's research and development spending goes to its shared platform rather than individual apps.
“Well over half of our R D is on the platform.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian runs its own business entirely on the Atlassian platform.
“We do. We run entirely on the Atlassian platform.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian's internal IT and engineering function now reports to its chief people officer, combining talent and systems work for AI adoption.
“Uh, now reports to our chief people officer, and I've combined those two roles, which is unusual.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said roughly 96 to 97% of Atlassian employees regularly use Dia, the company's own web browser.
“I think it's like ninety six, 97% of Atlassian now uses DR on a regular basis.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian customers who use its MCP servers and command-line tools grow their annual recurring revenue with Atlassian at twice the rate of those who don't.
“They grow their ARR at twice the rate of customers who don't use our AR, our, uh, CLI and MCP servers.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said more than 98% of people using Atlassian's MCP server also use its regular user interface.
“More than 98% of people using our MCP server also use the user interface, and that is not changing, right?”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said that around 2000 mobile banking led many to believe bank branches were dying, though branches later grew in number as their role shifted to higher-level services.
“Around 2,000, when mobile banking came along, everyone thought bank branches were dead.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian built an MCP server and command-line tool for its publicly published design system at Atlassian.design.
“we now have an MCP and a CLI for our design system internally we have a award winning design system uh Atlassian dot design”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Dia's morning brief, which summarizes a user's calendar, messages and documents, runs locally on the user's machine rather than in the cloud.
“And it happens locally, it happens in on, it doesn't happen in the cloud, it happens on your machine.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Dia was in beta on Windows with general availability expected soon, and was already widely used on Mac.
“It's in beta on Windows G A's very, very soon, um, and it's used on the Mac by a huge number of people on a daily basis”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Uber did not launch until around the iPhone 6, using it as an example of how killer apps arrive years after a platform shift.
“Uber didn't come along until the iPhone six.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said he tells large customers not to centralize everything on the Atlassian platform and positions Atlassian as a connected hub rather than a control tower.
“I am probably the only C E O that goes into customers, massive, large scale customers, and says, do not centralize everything on my platform.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian's Team '26 Europe conference in Amsterdam was about ten days away at the time of recording.
“Uh, we have a biannual conference, our team, twenty six, E U in Amsterdam, uh, in ten days time”
Mike Cannon-Brookes says the first version of Atlassian's Jira was a bug tracker aimed at technical teams.
“The very first version of Jira was actually a bug tracker, which was definitely for far more technical parts of technical teams.”
Cannon-Brookes says more than half of Atlassian's users work in non-technical teams and have for over a decade.
“More than half of our users are in non-technical teams, uh, and have been for well over a decade.”
Cannon-Brookes says Atlassian has existed for almost 24 years and aimed from the start to be a multi-decade technology company.
“we've been around twenty, almost twenty four years now, twenty three.”
Atlassian began building its teamwork graph, which maps links between work objects across apps, around 2019.
“we started maybe six, I think 2019, building what we call the teamwork graph.”
Cannon-Brookes says the teamwork graph holds over 100 billion objects and connections and is growing rapidly quarter on quarter.
“It's now a massive graph. It's north of 100 billion objects and connections, and it's going up at like, I think it's growing like north of 50 quarter on quarter”
Atlassian said on its latest earnings call that it had passed 3.5 million monthly active users of its AI features.
“we said on our last earnings call, we've passed 3.5 million AI. MAU”
Cannon-Brookes says Atlassian has always treated monthly active users as its top metric, rather than customer count or seats sold.
“So we've always tracked monthly active users as our number one metric.”
Cannon-Brookes says he wrote a book on open source Java programming as a teenager.
“I wrote a book on open source Java programming when I was a teenager.”
Cannon-Brookes says AI coding tools could cost thousands of dollars per developer in token costs, versus roughly $50 a head for the older IDEA editor.
“Now I have the potential to spend thousands of dollars per developer in token costs across lots of tools.”
Cannon-Brookes says Atlassian would spend tens of millions of dollars a year on AI coding tools.
“Tens of millions of dollars that would be spent every year by us on these types of tools.”
Cannon-Brookes says DX's DX4 framework was written by some of the original authors of the DORA metrics and combines numerical measures with surveys.
“They have a a scheme called DX4, which is, I would argue, better than the Dora metrics.”
Atlassian makes Rovo Dev, Claude Code, Cursor and GitHub Copilot available to its engineers and compares them using DX.
“between, like, robo dev, Claude code, cursor and GitHub copilot, of which we have all four, uh, for for engineers here.”
Atlassian's research and development organization has over 10,000 people, giving it a large sample for comparing coding tools.
“we have, you know, R and D orgs is over 10,000 people, so we have lots of statistical data on them.”
Cannon-Brookes says Atlassian's AI gateway runs more than 75 models in production, and Rovo Dev typically uses two or three per conversation turn.
“our AI gateway has, I've lost count now, it's north of 75 models running in it in production.”
An internal Atlassian service changed its API, which required updates to more than 500 repositories, done with Rovo Dev and human review.
“We had to change more than 500 repositories internally.”
Cannon-Brookes predicts Atlassian will employ more developers in five years than today.
“I think we'll have more developers in five years time at Atlassian than we have today.”
Cannon-Brookes says AWS's Matt Garman told him at an event that AWS would also have more developers in five years.
“I sat on a, uh, I I spoke with with Matt Garmin at AWS at an event, and he said exactly the same thing.”
Cannon-Brookes says Loom spread inside companies partly because young graduates, used to video, adopted it in place of meetings.
“What happened in Loom was graduates new to the workforce were much more video-centric”
Around 2010, when it first considered going public, Atlassian had roughly $50 million in revenue and $20 million in profit, according to Cannon-Brookes.
“we were probably eight, nine years old as a business. I think we were doing call it $50 million in revenue and probably $20 million in profit”
Cannon-Brookes says that around 2010 a company needed roughly $100 million in revenue to go public.
“At that time, you needed about 100 million bucks in revenue to go public.”
Cannon-Brookes says Atlassian's latest quarter saw revenue growth of about 21% and cloud growth of 26%.
“we grew revenue twenty, twenty, change percent, uh, 21%, I believe. Our cloud business, which is our largest business, grew 26%”