2002
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.”
Topic
Atlassian
91 facts from 6 episodes, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2010
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”
2010
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.”
2019
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.”
2026
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”
Undated
Linder cited the CEO of Atlassian saying everyone must adopt AI as a reason companies require AI skills.
“It's hard to ignore when you hear somebody like the CEO of Atlassian being like, everyone has to do this, right?”
Undated
Nathan, the host, states that Atlassian is among the top one hundred global tech companies with a market capitalization of about 40 billion dollars.
“Atlassian is a top one hundred global tech company with 40 billion dollar market cap.”
Undated
Sherif Mansour says most of Atlassian's users today work in non-technical departments such as HR, finance, marketing and legal.
“So today, the majority of our users are actually from non-technical departments, HR, finance, marketing, legal, and all that.”
Undated
Sherif Mansour says Atlassian has close to 3.5 million users of its AI capabilities.
“we've got close to, I think we're 3.5 million users of our AI capabilities”
Undated
Atlassian's Rovo chat tool has built-in personal memory that learns a user's preferences, such as Sherif Mansour's habit of putting emoji in headings.
“we've got inbuilt personal memory. So over time we start to remember, you know, for me, I like to write with a lot of emoji.”
Undated
Sherif Mansour says Atlassian's products such as Confluence and Jira default to open access, and he argues this helps AI give useful answers to new employees.
“our products are open by default. And I have to explain that a little bit. When you create a documentation space in Confluence or a Jira project or whatever it is, the default is open”
Undated
Atlassian's Teamwork Graph maps users, teams, goals and the work items related to them.
“we have what we call the team graph, which is an understanding of all the users, the teams, their goals, and how the work relates to that.”
Undated
Sherif Mansour says Atlassian uses retrieval-augmented generation rather than its graph for simple lookups such as a company's annual leave process.
“what's the process for taking annual leave in my company? RAG's probably a much better solution there. We don't traverse the graph for that.”
Undated
Atlassian operates an AI gateway that proxies a mix of locally hosted and cloud models so it can swap models and test alternatives.
“We have an AI gateway, and we have a mix of locally hosted models, models in the cloud.”
Undated
Atlassian's agent framework lets customers give agents skills, which can be no-code or code, including deterministic functions.
“Our agent framework lets people create skills that the agent has. The skills can be no code or code skills.”
Undated
Sherif Mansour says general-purpose models solve 80 to 90 percent of typical knowledge-worker tasks and that customer demand for choosing a specific model is declining.
“the general purpose models are 80% to 90% easily solving the problem and we're seeing that desire for model selection just decline over time”
Undated
Atlassian acquired The Browser Company, which Nathan describes as aimed at building a browser for knowledge workers.
“Atlassian brought bought a browser company, and it's literally the browser company.”
Undated
Atlassian ran an AI Builders Week in which about a thousand product managers, designers, engineering leaders and researchers blocked time to experiment with AI.
“we just ran a AI Builders Week, a thousand product managers, designers, engineering leaders, researchers.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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”
Undated
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”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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%”
Undated
Atlassian's other co-founder retired last year and championed the idea that businesses must balance seeding future growth against harvesting current revenue.
“my my co founder, who retired, uh, last year, um, was very keen on is is you've got to manage in any business the difference between seeding and harvesting.”
Undated
Tamar Yehoshua says Atlassian's tests showed that coding agents using its teamwork graph produced 44% better quality and used 48% fewer tokens than using MCP alone.
“Increased by forty four, and very importantly, the token usage went down by forty eight. Because you don't have to give as much context to the model”
Undated
Tamar Yehoshua says Atlassian's teamwork graph contains over 200 billion entities with links between them.
“our teamwork graph has over 200 billion, uh, entities in it and there are links between it.”
Undated
Mercedes-Benz has been a customer of the Atlassian product suite for more than ten years, according to Tamar Yehoshua.
“Mercedes-Benz has been a customer of the Atlassian suite for over a decade.”
Undated
An Atlassian Confluence Slides team used Figma's MCP and coding agents to find and fix fourteen design-to-code discrepancies in an hour, work Tamar Yehoshua says would have taken days.
“So they fixed fourteen bugs in an hour, which it would have taken days.”
Undated
Tamar Yehoshua says Atlassian has 370,000 customers, including 85 of the Fortune 500.
“we have 370,000 customers. We, um, are in eighty five of the Fortune 500”
Undated
Atlassian acquired DX, a product that measures AI adoption and developer productivity in engineering teams, in the fall before this interview.
“We also have a product called DX. We acquired them last fall.”
Undated
Forge is Atlassian's marketplace and platform where third parties build apps on top of Atlassian products.
“forge, for people who don't know, it's our marketplace, it's where people build apps on top of Atlassian products.”
Undated
Atlassian uses an AI gateway that routes each request to the most appropriate model for quality, latency and cost instead of relying on a single model.
“we do not use one model in our products, we use a gateway that then routes to the model.”
Undated
Tamar Yehoshua says 70% of projects built during Atlassian's quarterly AI Builders Week continue to be used afterward.
“70% of what's built during Builders Week actually gets used later.”
Undated
Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brooks became an enthusiastic user of OpenClaw and built agents to run his personal life, then told his executive team to try it.
“our CEO, Mike Cannon-Brooks, uh, when OpenClaw came out, got super pilled on OpenClaw and was like building, uh, agents to run his personal life and still does.”
Undated
Atlassian's enterprise offering includes a product called Guard that applies a data sensitivity layer, letting customers exclude certain data or require checks.
“We have a product called Guard in our enterprise offering that does a whole data sensitivity layer.”
Undated
Atlassian launched an AI planner that turns a prompt into a spec, technical document and work items using its context graph before work goes to a coding agent.
“we just launched what we call the AI planner, so the AI planner is, uh, is what you would do to identify what goes into the coding agent.”
Undated
Tamar Yehoshua says Atlassian products such as Jira and Confluence run millions of rule-based automations every month, and many now call AI agents.
“We run millions of automations every month and they're automations like when a bug comes in of this type, then do this with it.”
Undated
Atlassian created a website, teamwork graph dot com, where users can log in and visualize their own teamwork graph.
“But we made a website called teamwork graph dot com so that people could visualize it.”
Undated
Tamar Yehoshua says she replaced monthly OKR (objectives and key results) meetings with an agent that reviews Confluence, Jira and Slack and reports which goals are green or red.
“I, for example, no longer have monthly OKR meetings. I have an agent that runs that gives me the updated OKRs”
Undated
Atlassian's MCP and command-line interfaces expose over 500 tools to AI agents, according to Tamar Yehoshua.
“So, like our MCP and CLIs have over 500 tools from Atlassian that we expose to the agents,”
Undated
Tamar Yehoshua says about 95% of what can be done in Atlassian's user interface can also be done through MCP or CLI.
“We've gotten to the point where 95% of everything you can do in the UI, you can do through MCP or SCLI so that you can access that.”
Undated
Atlassian's MCP and CLI interfaces expose over 500 tools to agents.
“our MCP and CLIs have over 500 tools from Atlassian that we expose to the agents.”
Undated
Atlassian's teamwork graph is a per-customer context graph that builds up as the customer uses Atlassian tools.
“We have something called the teamwork graph, so the teamwork graph is the context graph that we build for each customer, for their organization, and just by using our tools, it builds your graph.”
Undated
Atlassian used the teamwork graph in its products before the AI era and significantly increased investment as AI grew.
“it's something that we've had actually before AI, we were using, uh, in our products, and then as AI became more prevalent, we have significantly increased our investment in the teamwork graph.”
Undated
Atlassian's teamwork graph contains over 200 billion entities with links between them.
“our teamwork graph has over 200 billion, uh, entities in it and there are links between it.”
Undated
In Atlassian's A/B tests, coding agents using the teamwork graph showed 44% higher quality and 48% lower token usage than with MCP alone.
“Increased by forty four, and very importantly, the token usage went down by forty eight.”
Undated
Atlassian offers a product called Guard in its enterprise offering that adds a data sensitivity layer with rules about certain types of data.
“We have a product called Guard in our enterprise offering that does a whole data sensitivity layer.”
Undated
Atlassian's products run millions of workflow automations every month.
“We run millions of automations every month and they're automations like when a bug comes in of this type, then do this with it.”
Undated
Mercedes-Benz has used the Atlassian suite for over a decade.
“Mercedes-Benz has been a customer of the Atlassian suite for over a decade.”
Undated
An Atlassian team working on Confluence slides compared Figma designs against code to find differences.
“They took the designs from Figma and then the code and said, where are the deltas between the designs and the code?”
Undated
Using Figma's MCP and coding agents, the Confluence slides team fixed fourteen design-to-code bugs in an hour, which Yehoshua says would have taken days.
“So they fixed fourteen bugs in an hour, which it would have taken days.”
Undated
Confluence launched Remix with Rovo, which lets users highlight text on a page and remix it into a new format.
“So Confluence launched, uh, Remix with Rovo, where you can take on a page, you can highlight some text and use our Rovo AI to remix it into a new format.”
Undated
Atlassian acquired DX, a company that measures AI adoption in engineering teams, in the fall before this conversation.
“We also have a product called DX. We acquired them last fall and they measure um, AI adoption in engineering teams”
Undated
Yehoshua's team at Atlassian also runs corporate development and Atlassian Ventures.
“my team also runs, uh, Corp Dev and Atlassian Ventures.”
Undated
Yehoshua says Atlassian has 370,000 customers and is used by 85 of the Fortune 500, with some running their most critical workflows on it.
“we have 370,000 customers. We, um, are in eighty five of the Fortune 500 people run, uh, their their tier zero workflows on Atlassian.”
Undated
Atlassian launched an AI planner that turns a prompt into a spec, a technical document and work items before coding begins.
“we just launched what we call the AI planner, so the AI planner is, uh, is what you would do to identify what goes into the coding agent.”
Undated
Atlassian's AI reviewer uses language models plus the context of a customer's previous incidents documented in Jira to review generated code.
“we have the AI reviewer, which uses um, LLMs again, but we have the context of all of your previous incidents.”
Undated
Atlassian's AI SRE looks at past production issues and incidents as code is deployed.
“the AI SRE will look at what are the issues and the incidents that you may have had previously in production.”
Undated
Atlassian built a website, teamwork graph dot com, where users can log in and visualize their own teamwork graph.
“we made a website called Teamwork graph dot com so that people could visualize it.”
Undated
Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brooks became enthusiastic about OpenClaw and built agents to run his personal life, and he told the executive team to try it.
“our CEO, Mike Cannon-Brooks, uh, when OpenClaw came out, got super pilled on OpenClaw and was like building, uh, agents to run his personal life and still does.”
Undated
Atlassian holds AI Builders Week once a quarter, pausing normal product and design work for training and a project.
“once a quarter, we take a week out of everything that everyone's doing in product and design, and we, um, we train them on a subject.”
Undated
Yehoshua says 70% of projects built during Atlassian's AI Builders Week continue to be used afterward.
“70% of what's built during Builders Week actually gets used later.”
Undated
Yehoshua describes Forge as Atlassian's platform for third parties to build apps on top of Atlassian products.
“for people who don't know, it's our marketplace, it's where people build apps on top of Atlassian products.”
Undated
Atlassian uses an AI gateway that routes each job to the most appropriate model based on quality, latency and cost.
“we use a gateway that then routes to the model. That's the most appropriate model for the job that takes into account quality, latency and cost.”
Undated
Atlassian's Jira, Jira Service Management and Confluence include built-in automations that call agents and run millions of times monthly.
“We run millions of automations every month”
Undated
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.”
March
Nilay Patel said Atlassian laid off about 10% of the company in March, announced in a Loom video by Mike Cannon-Brookes.
“In March, you laid off about 10% of the company. I watched the video you made in in Loom about that.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
pre-COVID
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?”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
Mike Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian runs its own business entirely on the Atlassian platform.
“We do. We run entirely on the Atlassian platform.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
Nilay Patel said Atlassian acquired The Browser Company for a little over $600 million about a year before the interview.
“You acquired a company called the Browser Company, uh, I think, for a little over 600 million. That was a a year ago.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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?”
Undated
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”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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”
Undated
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.”
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