CO-FOUNDER AND CO-CEO, ATLASSIAN

midday then mind the kids in the afternoon. We check in with people around the world, doing video calls and keeping communication high. Twice a week, Mike [Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO] and I get in front of our staff with a video or a town-hall format in order to stay ahead.

Atlassian came from humble beginnings but your strengths include being cashpositive from day one. Was that key to your success?

People say cash is king and I think one of the things you need to do as a CEO is make sure your business never runs out of cash. We have more than US$2 billion [about $3 billion] in the bank and we do hundreds of millions of dollars of cash flow every quarter so we’re in a really good position to ride out most storms. We’ve always taken a long-term perspective on how we fund the business.

Many companies have been forced to transform very quickly – we’ve seen change happen in months that ordinarily would take years. What are the pros and cons of that?

The future is here; it’s just been unevenly distributed. In COVID-19 what we’ve seen is a more even distribution of that future. Suddenly, people are getting a crash course in how to work with digital tools. That’s going well but I think we still have a long way to go on practices, such as what’s appropriate when we link to a Zoom meeting or how do you socialise on a Friday afternoon with a video call? How do you build social bonds? Being in a crisis while working at home is different from being set up and working at home properly. I’m optimistic that over time there’ll be a best-of-all model and people will be more productive working in this new way. And I’m optimistic that this could become a catalyst for more digital businesses in Australia producing things for the world. We’ve turned a corner on how we become more digitally native.

You’ve long advocated for Australia to grow its technology industry, instead of relying on mining and resources. Is this our big opportunity right now?

It’s up to individual business owners to look to the future. In business you can choose to say, “Okay, how do I quickly run back to the way we were before? What’s the quickest way for me to get everyone back in the office working nine to five?” I don’t believe that’s the way we should be thinking about it. The businesses that are showing true leadership are thinking, “How do we not let this crisis go to waste? How do we change the way we work for the better? How do we allow people more flexible working hours?” The businesses that are going to do better out of this are thinking about a new normal.

Do you think some business leaders have seen the uptake of digital and are now more willing to experiment with other formats? Could they be more open to AI or automation?

I don’t think there’s going to be a direct link between picking up AI technologies and people knowing how to use videoconferencing – it’s going to be one step at a time. But remote working can open up a diversity of talent, thought and location.

What does Australia need to do to encourage more entrepreneurs and tech businesses?

When we started 20 years ago, there was no venture capital industry in Australia. You couldn’t raise a seed fund; you couldn’t raise an angel round. You had to go overseas and, as a result, most things didn’t get off the ground. When the government rolled out the Venture Capital Limited Partnership program [in 2002], it gave tax breaks to allow venture capital to flow and now we have a thriving venture capital system. We’re also trying to create a technology ecosystem in Sydney. If you want to become a lawyer, there’s the Supreme Court; if you want to become a doctor, there are hospitals. But if you want to work in technology, where do you go? Atlassian is working with the NSW state government to create a tech precinct in Central [Sydney] so that’s a big thing for us. Any way we can encourage more entrepreneurships and non-standard paths from school to uni to a big bank or insurance for consulting is good.

It seems that business and government have been at cross-purposes for a while but is the coronavirus crisis an opportunity for the two to work together to ensure that Australia has a stronger future?

During this time, I’ve seen business and government work together better than ever, with business reaching out to government to provide advice or support and government realising that many people in business can move faster. ResMed produced ventilators for the government; we helped with some of the technical work for the COVIDSafe app, as well as assisting it to build the coronavirus WhatsApp service. That’s a great improvement and I’m very hopeful it can continue after the crisis is over.

You started your own relationship with government by lobbying about issues facing Australian entrepreneurs. How have you seen this change?

If you go back 20 years – and to some extent this is still true today – technology as an industry largely said, “We don’t need a government handout. We don’t need special conditions or protection from overseas players.” We wanted to be left alone. We appreciated it when government helped the venture capital industry but generally speaking, the technology industry has been poor on interacting with government. The government didn’t really understand technology, either, like, “What is this internet thing in 1997? Oh, it doesn’t really apply to me.” I think we forget sometimes how big the technological change has been. Government is now wrestling with issues of privacy and security and how to have a thriving domestic technology ecosystem – and the technology industry has been engaged with government on how to solve some of those problems. Now everyone realises we need to work together.

Very early in the COVID-19 crisis you worked with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, who has described you as a legend. How exactly did you help?

My friends have given me a lot of grief over that [description]. It hasn’t helped my reputation in any way [laughs]. I think we helped encourage stronger action by government to close the country down. I’ve learnt a lot from Gladys’s leadership. She does a very good job of deflecting praise – when someone praises her, it’s always someone else who did it.

One of the things the premier talked about was the fact that you really helped with the modelling and looking at the data. Is that something a lot of companies struggle with – they get so much data but they don’t really know what to do with it or how to assess it?

Understanding data is a skill that we need to teach people. Businesses are struggling in a sea of data, trying to work out what’s relevant and what’s not, and governments are doing the same. So this is something we need to teach our children. At Atlassian, we make data-informed decisions all the time. We get to test and learn from the data we have. There’s often a sense that opening up any data source is going to be bad – the benefits almost never outweigh the downside because something will go wrong or somebody will use it incorrectly in some way. There’s always that chance but in this crisis we said, “Let’s get it up because we need to and if we have to adjust it later or shut it down, we can do that.” So we pushed all levels of government to open data on caseloads and testing and stuff that will allow people to make informed decisions. If we know there’s a cluster of cases in Bondi, for example, it will allow people

to more quickly shut down Bondi Beach, which they probably wouldn’t have done. Data helps us all make informed decisions.

Some companies tend to keep data close to their chest or don’t think it’s appropriate for the wider team.

I believe data should be open by default, whether it’s at a government level or inside an organisation. That’s the way we run Atlassian. It used to be that data came up from the bottom and decisions came down from the top. Today, my job as a leader is to ensure that people understand the context from the top but the data and the decisions need to be made much closer to the business, to the customer.

I want to turn to purpose. In March, Atlassian released its report (see box, right). How important is it that corporate leaders have a voice on social issues?

Employees want their leaders to take a stance on social issues and drive meaningful change as a result. If you go back 50 years, there were churches and community groups and things outside of work. As work has taken on more prominence in people’s lives, employees are expecting more of their workplaces. We focus on ROI metrics from a dollars-and-cents perspective but we also have to focus on our impact on society. We’re not a mouthpiece for our employees – that would turn it backwards – but we’ve started things like the Pledge 1% movement, which is about getting every business to give one per cent of their profits, one per cent of their employee time, one per cent of their product and one per cent of their equity to non-profits in order to change the way philanthropy happens. That’s an example of us trying to drive meaningful social change as a business on top of the public encouragement we give governments when we want them to change things, such as gay marriage. We stand up for the causes that matter to our employees.

And that will presumably become even more of an expectation from employees, particularly among younger generations?

It’s the younger generations that are driving it. Everyone wants to work somewhere that has purpose – they want to work for something greater than themselves.

I noted that mental health was a key issue for the respondents. Are you worried about the mental health of your employees after the COVID-19 crisis?

It’s a key issue for Atlassian, something we survey our employees about and have active programs in place around. Some people are thriving in this new environment; some people are not. The survey showed that people with kids at home were struggling more than others so there are areas in which we’ve given people a budget to help with configuring their home workplace and so forth to reduce stress or make it more productive.

What have you learnt about yourself as a leader during this period?

It’s been a good reminder that we’re in a people business. Atlassian has always been about bringing your whole self to work and this has reinforced that – there’s not a “work you” and a “personal you”.

What’s your great hope for the future of the tech industry?

My hope is that Australia will produce more global-winning tech businesses that are first in their market. We’re about one per cent of the world’s GDP, give or take. For us to be successful, we need to produce one per cent of the world’s technology and we’re far away from that. My hope is that we can build one per cent of the world’s technology businesses here.

That would be a big saving grace for Australia in the next couple of years.

We’ve been talking about this for 10 years. We need everyone – not just governments but schools and