How Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes grew Atlassian to $4.4B revenue and 300K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is Jay Simon's he's responsible for all revenue generating activities at Atlassian including customer success and retention operations and marketing he joined in 2008 as vice president of sales and marketing to lead at the Alaskans pioneering efforts to develop a high velocity low touch sales model he's overseen the company's global expansion introducing of its starter license program a disruptive approach to freemium where the company donates all proceeds to Gerard will cause it's also growing worldwide customer community and programs in 2011 Atlassian introduced its cloud-based offering Atlassian on demand and evolution its fast-growing SAS platform he's now president of the company Jay are you ready to take us to the top already it's a long right we're excited so sorry I'm excited to have you on so I want to touch on a few things here you know you joined first you've been with them you know the company over a decade he joined first as in sales you're now president I want to pick up actually right at the Trello acquisition so you mentioned with these guys you know you run into a 100 million active users you both share the same goal why did that deal make a lot of sense for you guys couple reasons that I think first of all the the two companies shared the same mission of you know really changing teamwork and unleashing the potential of what people are trying to do together at work and I think had very similar cultures and then there was like just good product fit in the portfolio if you think about what Trello is trillo's you know sort of like a digital whiteboard we can kind of rearrange cards on it and at one end of the opposite spectrum is JIRA product of ours that is very structured to manage collaborative project tracking management and then the other end of that spectrum is a product of ours called confluence which is just a bank blank page teams can ride on so I think it kind of fits snugly in between very structured very unstructured to help people do different things this was with January 2017 right yeah about a year and a half so you and your team and your board he put together the proform as you say here's what I think it's gonna look here's what the crossover is gonna look like how is it panning out as is the pro forma becoming true is it generally working how you expected it is you know the integration with with Trello inside of a lot anything is is now if you ask Trello and Alaskans it just feels like they've always been here which i think is a you know a good signal for an acquisition into performance like we've exceeded our expectations you know we signaled to the street what we thought our revenue expectations was and we're in front of that and it's good yeah things are great I'm gonna force you to roll the circle over roll the ball over and show me the dead patch underneath what was one supported one surprised even a little sweat one surprised you didn't expect after the acquisition weather was the integration or the cross selling or whatever you know one was Trello famously was a was a remote first company and that last name wasn't and Atlassian is a very distributed company we have offices and you know now seven different countries around the world but being distributed is very different from being remote and there's a lot that we had to learn and we were much bigger there were a hundred hundred you know hundred people when we acquired them a year and a half ago and we were sort of roughly I don't know 1800 1900 probably and and so to you know bring onboard a company that has a very remote first culture is used to like they had pretty hard rules around when you joined the zoom or when you joined a meeting and there were maybe five people in a room everybody went to five different places and joined a zoom from five different locations and so the people that were outside of the office were on equal footing to the people that were and that required us to kind of change and recalibrate how we think about connecting to people that are remote and people that are in the office so did you adapt that principle across your agent or folks or did you kind of force them to kind of stick in your system we did it's a little bit of meeting in the middle and and I think like we've learned new habits around embracing and connecting to remote teams I'll give you another example like we have a ritual called snippet which is basically a quarterly hackathon you know ship it's for us even though we had people that worked remote were really an office centric tradition and you know after acquiring Trello we had remote ship it's like a remote only ship it we used to do a week we still do an annual end of year you know a little bit of an annual end of year let your hair down day and again that was an office specific thing where people do scavenger hunts and a whole bunch of things and we plan those now for remote participation where everybody that's remote can participate almost as a kind of a single team so there's been I think a lot of learning on both sides I want to go in because I think your brain is uniquely positioned to speak about the freemium you know you led sales marketing you know this is your model and a lot of people struggle with a freemium model or they think they have one but they don't actually because of some some loops they haven't recognized it so I want to talk about in a second let's work backwards though so today what what's the last report it run right you guys are at our last quarterly revenue was just shy of 250 million 250 okay good and that's quarterly quarterly yeah okay so take me take me back I believe it's what 2008 when you're joining in a low touch sales model I don't think you're you're doing an inside sales approach with quota and trying to sell big ACV things you're more like a no touch $20 month kind of thing is that true and if so what were you is your first focus coming in that first year so when I joined we were just a little over 20 million in annual revenue and you know the model was very oriented around low touched I mean it was a little bit higher touch kind of in the beginning and and you know part of my job was to continue to figure out how to remove friction from the customer path and so even when I joined it like there was basically a team we called them product advocates we still have them today there were a little bit more of a customer success team but their orientation was it but you're a trying alaskans product will tell you hey there's anything that we can do to make this easier for you answer questions that that you're not finding the answers to in your own let us know we'll bend over backwards now that team did a lot of can I can I schedule a demo can I do X can I do Y for like a $30 a month kind of account yeah I mean ASP I pay s be at the time was probably like 1,800 bucks annually and so you know we're ian strim ended that we thought man it's like it's it's super high-calorie actually to do a demo just for an individual customer even if they're they're you know worth more than 1,800 bucks annually and you know we started to do things like let's record the absolute best demo we could possibly give and anyone that wants it will just point them online and again this is you know a little bit more common today but we try to figure out how can we automate a lot of this kind of higher higher calorie you know higher higher intensity you know human touch and make it really easier for the customer to get that stuff on their own and that's the the part of the model we've continued to scale you know ten years later that's a huge nugget in terms of just taking your top salesperson who gives the best demo with the highest conversion ranges automating it and removing the rest of touched there I wanted I'm gonna dig in here because the biggest that what I see a lot of people going from like twenty to thirty to forty million bucks in ARR where they've got a you know a monthly are poo under a hundred bucks a month they just actually the CEO gets a dopamine hit right from doing these demos it feels really good so that it's really difficult to remove it from the process and they just resist resist resist but you know you just gave one great example doing the recorded demo are there can you point to any other examples you guys did to remove human touch from again a low ASP sale RFU's is another one you know like we've been selling it to the enterprise for a long time and you know you often get a lot of requests for hey help me fill out this you know this RFP document or this questionnaire that I basically have to provide to my boss to justify the purchase or just the adoption of this particular technology we would say we don't do that but we've we've taken every RFP question that we've ever been asked to submit and we've compiled basically an answer to all of them and we'll let you basically copy and paste you can search for whatever the thing your your RFP is trying to answer like what we do with security or what we do with scale or you know whatever the question is the best answer we could possibly give is right there you can copy and paste it in yourself now listen early on some customers actually didn't like that they were like well you're right your competitors are gonna fill this out up for me and we had to have have kind of the fortitude to say like we're we're basically just not structure to do that at scale we're trying to win...