EP 64: Jay Simons (GP, BOND Capital) On How Product-Led Growth Turned Atlassian into a $40B Company

Jay Simons is a General Partner at BOND Capital and former President of Atlassian. Jay ran Atlassian between 2012-2020 taking them from pre-IPO to about $3B in revenue. Jay is known for being one of the earliest SaaS leaders to adopt and implement a product-led growth strategy. In this episode Jay shares his background, stories from the early days at Atlassian, building two products at once (Jira & Confluence), and his philosophy on management and leadership. Jay has since joined BOND Capital investing alongside Mary Meeker - he shares his investment strategy and what BOND looks for in the companies they invest in. (0:00) Intro (1:19) Welcome Jay Simons (10:15) BEA Acquired by Oracle (14:19) Joining Atlassian (16:58) What was the company growing at when you joined? (22:10) Divorcing the success from the tactics (34:48) Control your destiny of what the market is going to take (40:22) How do you orient your team? (46:42) Having two products early on (55:07) Seeding the community (1:07:29) Crucible moments at Atlassian (1:22:11) Path to advising (1:33:28) Soft diplomacy in decision making Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett, and on this episode, you're gonna hear a conversation that I had with Jay Simons. Jay was the longtime president of Atlassian, leading it from private business to $40 billion public company. Atlassian was one of the pioneers in product-led growth, and Jay led a number of those initiatives. So we have a conversation about how they invested nearly 2X in R&D versus sales, as well as the lessons he learned about how to build a product-led growth engine. Then we talk about Jay's transition into venture capital. Jay is now at Bond Capital. We discuss what led to that decision to come over to the dark side, as well as how Bond goes about making decisions, what they look for in companies, as well as what Jay has

• 0:48Logan Bartlett?

  learned working with one of the iconic investors in the field, Mary Meeker. So trust you'll enjoy that conversation with Jay here now. Jay Simons, thanks for doing this. So I want you to know, I gotta come clean. I asked you to do this like nine months ago, and then I never followed up, and it was because I felt like I had to have my own partners on before I had like, you know, quasi, we're quasi-competitors, right? I don't think we actually like compete, but I, before I started platforming other VCs, I felt like, I felt like I should like invite some of my own partners on.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  So I saw the guest list, and I understood the downgrade.

• 1:21Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, come on, come on. No, this is, this has been a long time coming. I'm excited to do this. I, so I want to talk about, we'll start with Atlassian, or actually, I want to start with Plumtree. So how did you, so you grew up in the Pacific Northwest, grew up in Washington. How did you end up in Silicon Valley doing enterprise software?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it was the late 90s, so lots of people were diving into technology, and I went to school at University of Washington, and so kind of grew up in the shadow of an exploding Microsoft, and wanted to escape the rain. And so I came to San Francisco in the late 90s.

• 1:58Logan Bartlett?

  Was there any like draw? Did you have buddies coming down, or what was the?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, a bunch of friends from college had moved down to San Francisco, and had spent some time down here a little bit, spring break here and there, and, and I was drawn to, you know, the combination of technology and sunshine. That's what did it.

• 2:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  And just like a cool, big city that I wanted to live in.

• 2:16Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  And so.

• 2:18Logan Bartlett?

  And was tech like something that was on your radar, given the growing up in the shadows of Microsoft?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  It was. It was like, you know, everybody's got the, I got a TRS AD when I was a kid story and taught myself HTML and did that sort of stuff. But, you know, it was, not that I had a crystal ball and could see the future, but I was just intently interested in, in software and kind of working for a technology company and getting into technology. And so my path into that was sales.

• 2:43Logan Bartlett?

  So, but you, so you got an offer from Oracle?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:47Logan Bartlett?

  And, and you decided not to take that because you got a better offer from Plumtree?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  That's right. And the better offer from Plumtree was, was two things, like one, they were going to pay me more, which mattered. But two, Plumtree was actually in the city and I lived in the city. At the time in the late 90s, I think Plumtree was maybe the only software company in the city, maybe one of the few technology companies in the city. Everything else was down the peninsula. And so kind of what required buying a car, which I didn't have a car and, you know, shuttling down to Redwood shores. And I was like, screw that. I get to walk to work and, and get paid more doing it. And so it was, Plumtree was a good pick.

• 3:25Logan Bartlett?

  Were you going to be a sales rep in both cases?

• 3:28Speaker 01

  My first job, yeah, inside sales.

• 3:30Logan Bartlett?

  Inside sales.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  You know, it was like, it was the, the inside sales training bootcamp at Oracle, which by the way, was hard to pass up because like I'd heard like this is actually, you know, a kind of military program of spitting out highly effective salespeople. And I wanted to learn the craft in technology. And then, you know, I went to Plumtree, which had, I think at the time, maybe like, I don't know, 20 people, 25 people. And was still trying to find product market fit.

• 3:52Logan Bartlett?

  The irony of you, someone that I think, I mean, Brian Halligan said, you are the, maybe the canonical voice around PLG for startups and all that, almost being an Oracle enterprise sales rep is a interesting path not taken. I'm sure the irony of that isn't totally lost on you, but you, you ended up being a sales rep anyway, right?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  And part of it was also just seeking, you know, seeking. In an environment that has a meritocracy where like, you know, you remember what you were like when you're 20s, you're like, man, I just want to go downfield and have somebody chuck me the ball, give me a shot at catching it, even though I've never played the game. And, and I chose that over going into a program where they basically just teach you how to be maybe more effective in that role. And you're on this sort of a kind of stunted path of graduation where you're like, you go to level one and then level two and level three. And that ended up serving me pretty well because you know, I, I picked a company that once it found product market fit in plum tree exploded.

• 4:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it was, it was like lightning in a bottle. Right. Through, so you joined what late 90s?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, 97 and the company had done like no revenue. And that first year, I think we did like, you know, 300K. This is like revenue, not ARR, because it was perpetually licensed software with, you know, 18% maintenance and support and kind of in years two and beyond. And then it went, so 300K to like 3 million to 30 million to 80 million. And it just, it just ripped right up to the dot com crash and then.

• 5:22Logan Bartlett?

  Can we make people's eyes glaze over for a second? And what, it was an internal, it was an intranet?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  It was kind of borrowing a consumer pattern from Yahoo. So Yahoo still probably has this.

• 5:33Logan Bartlett?

  Portal.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you can find people to use it, but it had sort of a way to personalize the, the internet. And so you would create kind of a my Yahoo page before kind of Google, you know, took off with search. And, you know, you would create little snapshots of like sports teams that you were tracking and stock quotes and kind of weather in your region. And, you know, a little, little widget that, that brought in your Yahoo email, you know, email inbox and things like that. And so we applied that concept to corporate internets where if you were a big company like Ford or Procter and Gamble or Starbucks, you would want to aggregate kind of little snapshots of all of the business systems inside of a company. And so kind of knowledge management, information aggregation, search and discovery, kind of all bucketed into, you know, the portal consumer concept.

• 6:18Logan Bartlett?

  And then Plumtree ran into a little bit of a buzzsaw, as did a lot of companies during that time of, uh, which was the dot com crash. And I, uh, they actually cut back on free lunches, which, uh, they went down with half paying for lunches and then not paying for lunches at all. And maybe, what, what, uh, what was that period like? And what would you, what did you internalize from that? That's like actually applicable to today and startups going through that.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  So Plumtree had, uh, had, which became very common, uh, but at the time was pretty unusual, this free lunch program. Remember this is like Google didn't exist and sort of like, you know, I think the benefits that, uh, and most technology employees are used to, um, you know, didn't exist at the time. And so like we had.

• 7:00Logan Bartlett?

  The massages hadn't started yet.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  No, uh, and the thing that we had is like, we had a, we had, you know, a subset of like a free lunch program. And it was like, just, it was super cool. I was at headquarters here in San Francisco and just all of the people from, you know, all different parts of the business, engineering product, customer support, customer service, sales, kind of sat together and ate lunch together. And, uh, and, you know, maybe I've told this story before, but when, when we hit hard times, kind of, we, we went through this, uh, I don't know, progression over, over a couple of years of what felt like kind of hard paper cuts of just, you know, recalibrating kind of like what we could afford to give employees really. And it went from, you know, free lunch to actually like it's, we subsidize half of it to we'll order it for you, but you pay for it.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  And it just comes out of your paycheck to it's easy to, uh, hey, the vending, there's of any machine with like free cliff bars to actually they're a quarter to their 50 cents. And, and, you know, what, what I learned through that process was eventually like people started to grumble and moan about like, man, this place is going downhill. It's like, we don't get free lunch where the cliff bars are now 50 cents, you know, what, what's the point? And I remember the CEO at the time, uh, just, you know, got really agitated and was like, hey, what are you here for? Like we are, we're either gonna die with free lunches and subsidize, subsidize clipboard, cliff bars or we're gonna live. And like, like I want people that are, that are gonna grab a shovel and kind of like dig ditches with me.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  And not everybody did, which is fine, uh, but you know, it's sort of like put into stark focus, like what really matters in a company. Um, and you know, it's easy in the, in the good times to basically have those things come in the bad times, they go away. And like, you're either gonna fight the fight or not.

• 8:40Logan Bartlett?

  Tactically was, uh, did, did Plumtree have to do layoffs?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Did, a couple.

• 8:46Logan Bartlett?

  Did, uh, and I realize people. Maybe this is an important point is when you're selling on-prem with maintenance, you don't have the same visibility into your revenue that a SaaS company does. And so you don't know quarter to quarter. I mean, there's violent swings in terms of what your revenue actually is and therefore what your cash flow is. The good thing about SaaS is it's a little more smoothed out. And so you, you can at least predictably manage your layoffs a little bit better than you could for enterprise software way back when. But was there an element of like in retrospect, as it sort of shifted to that, the wartime CEO, to use the Ben Horowitz term, should, should one cut as deep as you could have

• 9:29Logan Bartlett?

  instead of doing all those little incremental things, just been like, hey, by the way, this is what we're going to do from the start. Was that like the retrospect rate answer? And it was just hard to know that that was how it was going to play out?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Probably, but you're also balancing, you know, trying to, trying to, to create the best environment that kind of motivates people. So I got, you know, I got the incrementalism of it.

• 9:48Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And sure, like in hindsight, it would have been, man, we should have just done that all at once, taken the lump and moved forward. But you're trying to like, you know, not move people's cheese as much or kind of not rattle people with a shaky foundation. And, you know, we, we managed to skate through all that, but, you know, it was hard. It was like over a period of a couple of years that it just felt like, you know, every couple of months, it was a little bit worse than a couple of months before.

• 10:10Logan Bartlett?

  So sold to BEA.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Sold to BEA.

• 10:13Logan Bartlett?

  After, what year was that?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  That was 2005, I think.

• 10:18Logan Bartlett?

  And, okay, so 2005 and then BEA ultimately ended up.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Getting acquired by Oracle.

• 10:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it was like the irony of.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Came full circle.

• 10:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And so were you, how long did you hang around BEA?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  So I was inside of BEA until the Oracle acquisition and then for the second time decided I didn't want to work for Oracle and kind of popped my head up and found Atlassian. So it kind of went through like a little bit of an overlap during the acquisition process.

• 10:41Logan Bartlett?

  You found Atlassian though, you actually tried to, did you try to acquire Atlassian while you were at BEA or while you were at Plumtree?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  No, before, before Plumtree got acquired by BEA. So the quick Plumtree story is like, we had kind of bumped up to the dot com crash and like in that intervening period in 2001, we were, I think on file to go public before just the market cratered. And in that year.

• 11:03Logan Bartlett?

  Like what, what revenue scale?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Like 80 million.

• 11:05Logan Bartlett?

  And what employee size?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Probably about 400, 350, 400 people. And in that intervening kind of 2001 period, Microsoft introduced a product called SharePoint and that people may be familiar with, and that just sucked a bunch of oxygen out of our market. That and the combination of like everybody, you know, PeopleSoft, SAP, Tibco, I mean, like every enterprise software company copied the concept and said, well, you know, we sell HR software, but we're also going to put sort of like a My PeopleSoft thing on top of it, and you can aggregate kind of other bits of enterprise technology into kind of your dashboard. So just the market became a lot harder. And, you know, we went public in 2002,

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Pluntree did, sputtered along for a couple of years. And, you know, in about 2003 or 2004, we kind of plucked the smartest people inside of the business, product and engineering teams, and said, hey, listen, no pressure, but we need to kind of pivot here. We need to reinvent the product strategy that will save the company. So we're going to form this team, go at it. And I went to check on that team, maybe, I don't know, three weeks in, just to see if they'd come up with any ideas. And they hadn't yet, but they gave me a demo of a product that they were using just to riff on stuff together. And that was a product that Atlassian had created called Confluence. And it was just thick irony, right? Because we were effectively a collaboration software company,

• 12:30Speaker 01

  using someone else's collaboration software to come up with better ideas for collaboration software. And so I'd sort of turned around, ran back to my desk, did a bunch of research on this company. It was like this rinky-dinky little Australian company in Sydney that was a year and a half old, that was selling a product that very smart product people loved for, you know, like, I don't know, 800 bucks. And I kind of ran to the CEO's office of Pluntree and said, we should buy this company. You know, we could charge 80 grand for it and distribute it through our sales organization. And this is maybe one way to solve the problem that we were in. And he said, yeah, go figure it out. And so I managed somehow to track down Mike Cannon-Brooks's cellphone number.

• 13:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. How do you actually do that?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  I can't remember, but I somehow I found someone that knew him, that knew someone. I got his cellphone, called him, and he answered and had this like really memorable conversation where I was, you know, I was on a butt sniffing exercise where I was, you know, asking him, you know, like, what's your revenue at? Like, what do you think you do next year? Like the questions you kind of ask. And we sort of talked for about 40 minutes and... He said, mate, it sounds like you're trying to figure out if you could buy us and we're not for sale. And I was like, at any price? And he said, not less than 30 million. And they had just done like, just maybe a million. So it was just a crazy price.

• 13:46Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  And, uh, and kind of just, you know, went back to grinding away at Plumtree after that. And, uh, you know, four years later, uh, they were looking for somebody to run sales and marketing.

• 13:56Logan Bartlett?

  So, so what was your, uh, what role did you end up having at the end at Plumtree?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  So I was president most of my time there. I mean, I, I started, uh, to run sales and marketing and then maybe a year in, uh, became president of the company. And that was, that was my role the entire time and various odds and ends that I, I managed and, and grew with like great people over the years. Outside of everything customer facing sales and marketing, customer success, support, things like that.

• 14:20Logan Bartlett?

  So at last thing, you joined around a hundred people and 20ish in revenue?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Something like that, yeah.

• 14:24Logan Bartlett?

  How did, how did they find you or how did you go after them after the BEA acquisition of Oracle?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  So, uh, an analyst, uh, that I knew at like the four, five, one group, uh, which is sort of like a Gartner kind of, kind of analyst.

• 14:40Logan Bartlett?

  I think they're still around.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're still around.

• 14:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Uh, she's not there anymore, but she, uh, knew I wasn't going to go to Oracle and sent me the job description for, you know, the head of sales and marketing. And she's like, I, I love this little company. Like, I don't know if you've ever heard of them and of course I've, I'd had, and then, you know, they kind of would blip on the radar after that first interaction. You know, where you'd hear about Atlassian and he's like, oh, that little company is still chugging along. And, um, and, you know, so I was like, oh yeah, like, let me reach back out to them and hope they, they won't hold it against me. And, and, you know, they remember the moment and it was, I think it was, it was, I was a good fit for what they needed because I had, uh, I, you know, both sides of my brain were wired around both sales and marketing. It was a unique, you know, business model that you could build, which is what attracted me to join and. Yeah, it was a great 12 years.

• 15:26Logan Bartlett?

  So they had Jerran Confluence at the time and the other products?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  They had Jerran Confluence and they had just made an acquisition of a company that gave them a bunch of more developer oriented tools. So things that now are kind of mostly lost, a history, history, FishEye and Crucible and Bamboo, which was a build server and things like that. But kind of the hardcore things around code collaboration.

• 15:47Logan Bartlett?

  And so you joined as VP of Marketing?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 15:49Logan Bartlett?

  And then what was your, you became president at one point, I guess, the person you reported into, it sounds like a really sad story.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  The original president was a guy named Jeffrey Walker. It was a fantastic guy and he was a cancer survivor and his cancer came back and came back really suddenly and he, maybe about, I don't know, nine months, nine months or a year into working with him, he passed.

• 16:14Logan Bartlett?

  And so, and then you assumed his job effectively after that happened?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Took, took over bits in the interim and did it well enough where they said, we just want you to do this and promoted me to president. And I think that was, yeah, it was like maybe a year into it and what I did kind of for the next 11 years.

• 16:35Logan Bartlett?

  So that was 2009 ish. When did the big Excel round happen?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  2010.

• 16:41Logan Bartlett?

  2010, okay. So shortly after, and the business at that point in time, when you joined 20 ish in revenue, a hundred ish people, what was it growing at? Because asking was always the right balance of, or a good balance of profitability and growth rate, right?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's probably about somewhere between like 50 and 60% probably.

• 17:05Logan Bartlett?

  And doing 20% EBITDA margins or whatever it was?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:09Logan Bartlett?

  Good free cash flow because it was an on-prem business, right? So you're getting stuff up front.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, profitable company, I think from year one.

• 17:16Logan Bartlett?

  And then the Excel round happened a year later and how much that was all secondary? How much went into the, how big was that secondary round?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  $60 million round that just went to Mike and Scott. They sold their shares.

• 17:30Logan Bartlett?

  Got it. Okay. And so did that, was that a big kind of like holy shit moment for people's knowledge of Atlassian or did, because you're selling to developers, like they didn't really give a shit?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  I think, I think both are true. I mean, it definitely put Atlassian more on the radar, certainly in the investor community, because I think for Excel, it was, I believe it was the single largest investment that they made, check they'd written into a software company. And even though, you know, the money didn't go to the company, you know, it was still an investment on, you know, it was a big investment for them. You know, by today's standards, not an incredible multiple, but by then, you know, kind of reasonable multiple on revenue. I think it was like, you know, six or eight X, you know, which was probably a

• 18:16Logan Bartlett?

  For an on-prem software business, growing

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Not purely recurring revenue.

• 18:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, not recurring, growing 50, 60%, right?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  So it sort of like blipped Atlassian on the radar. It's like, oh, wow. Like, we've heard about this company, but didn't realize it was, it was doing as well, or maybe as valuable to an investor is kind of that signal. And then the other side of that is, you know, people, our users largely didn't care.

• 18:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I've heard the founders of Atlassian are like deeply first principled in their thinking and

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:44Logan Bartlett?

  approach things and like prioritized, yeah, first principles thinking. How, how did you actually come up with, or how did they come up with where to reinvent the wheel versus where to distrust precedent and history and hey, this is how everyone does stuff?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  I think part of that comes from, you know, they're just DNA. Part of it also comes from they never worked in another place. And, and so I think they were just generally curious about, about why, why a certain path was chosen or a certain way of doing things was the right way. And that was sort of the pressure test was, you couldn't say, we should do it this way because this is, this is the way it was done at my last company, or this is the way some other company They would say, well, why, like, why did they choose to do it that way? And I think what they were rooting out was if everybody was just, just like choosing, you know, a certain, certain way to do things because they'd just seen somebody else do it and they didn't understand kind of all the way back to the beginning where somebody was like, this is the best way because I've eliminated these other options.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  You know, or I understand kind of the context I'm applying it to, and it absolutely is kind of the best thing. That, that's sort of what they were trying to ferret out. And, you know, when I first got there, it was, you know, I, I, I confronted that, right? Or I was confronted by it where you'd say like, oh, man, there's just a bunch of patterns I can kind of rip out of the playbook that I've learned along the way and I'm just going to apply them. And they would say, well, why did you pick that one? And you couldn't answer, because I, I literally just did it in this other context this way and it worked. And they'd be like, well, how were the ingredients different in that particular context? They'd really sort of get down to the root. And it was clarifying, right? I mean, it was also like, oh, okay, this is an opportunity where we, we get to invent. Like, it's not just get me there faster if you know how. It's like, get me there best.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  And, you know, they're also very, like, they're very long-term oriented. And so they're like, you know, maybe the goals of a company that, that company that you were working, working at before were different than ours. Like, maybe they had really short-term oriented goals and the thing that you were doing was best for the short-term, not for the long-term. Let's test that. And, and I think the calibration for them was, was once they believed that, this is at a young age too, but once they believed that people in the business were thinking about problem solving with that kind of rubric in the way that they would, then there was less pressure testing. Then it was like, okay, I got you. You, you're actually doing the thing that I would do in that situation. And then you had a lot of autonomy and a lot of free range.

• 21:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And so I would say like, you know, my first six to nine months with, you know, Mike and Scott weren't rough, but I mean, they were, they weren't easy, right? It was like you come to, you, you, it could be a press release and they'd be like, why, why was it written this way? Why is it this kind of thing? And you're like, oh, man, you're going, we're going to spend a lot of time on this. And part of it also comes from, you know, founders have this like, part of a founder's superpower is, is they've birthed this thing into the world. They're the only ones that could have done that. And so their attachment to the whole of it is just impossible to replicate. As much as you try, like I got pretty close, but like even then, like you're just not going to feel it the same way they do. And so that was sort of like the, you know, the courtship

• 21:53Speaker 01

  that, that any leader in the business would have with them was, do you get it and you look at it the way that I do? And once they got that calibration point, you know, that was the right one, by the way, then you were kind of off to the races.

• 22:05Logan Bartlett?

  It's kind of hard to divorce the success of the, the company from the tactics they took, right? And no, the path not taken and all of these things, right? Like obviously it was such a wildly successful business. I remember one of my companies, we went to a very first principles conversation about why sales reps are, are compensated with incentive comp versus engineers. And it was like a, it was like a three month thing of me reading books about incentives and motivation and tactics for creative people versus not. And it was, it was mind numbing just to land in the exact same spot that like, hey, we'll probably pay salespeople OTEs, right? And quotas and all that. But it is, I feel like

• 22:49Logan Bartlett?

  the business was so successful, they were afforded opportunity to invent or take experiments around the edges of stuff that other people probably weren't afforded because they had VCs on their board, which, you know, these guys didn't have. And so they could say, hey, well, fuck it. We'll do it our way.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  It was all capital. I mean, it was a capital constraint too, right? Like, I mean, we, you know, the company was bootstrapped. It was started in 2000, late 2002, early 2003 in kind of nuclear winter for tech investing by, you know, two just out of college developers building tools for developers competing largely against open source. I mean, it was kind of an unfundable proposition in, in 2003 at the time. And so the capital constraint, you know, also gave birth to first principles business model building where it was like, is there another way to distribute this software? We'll probably talk about that, but that's also where it came from. And then, you know, once you sort of like get kind of the, the germ of that, it's like, well, could we scale it and grow it and fertilize it and do all the things that you just figure out how to do?

• 23:51Logan Bartlett?

  There's a two by two matrix that I've seen of equity value created by capital consumed in the public companies. And it's very interesting, the number of the biggest companies just never consume that much capital. And obviously, there's some survivorship bias of like enterprise software and the timing and all that. The only exception is kind of Snowflake on the graph. Snowflake's like the only ish company that consumed a huge amount of capital, day to dog a little bit. But you know, you look at Salesforce or Veeva or Atlassian or Workday or ServiceNow or like all the big Adobe, all the big like enterprise software companies never consume that much capital. It's hard to know how much of those constraints, at least in Atlassian or Veeva's case where like, or Qualtrics or whatever it was, like the constraints of capital actually led to a better business versus not.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:36Logan Bartlett?

  Now, there are a bunch of kind of first principle things that I think Atlassian did. And I'm going to, I want to tick through them. And I want you to say what you believe are over extrapolated by startups today versus under extrapolated from startups today as you see them. So PLG and no sales, is that overly extrapolated or under for startups today?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  I think it's still under. I mean, Atlassian really had product led selling and product led growth. I think there's a lot of PLG today that masquerades, which is fine, as product led lead generation. And there's a difference there. It's, you know, like, we actually generated demand, converted demand, almost entirely through product and marketing.

• 25:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, 2X, I mean, this is kind of related, but spent 2X on engineering versus sales, right?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we never spent more than 20% of revenue on sales. I mean, that's like, if you look at, if you look at Atlassian's operating model, like you understood, I mean, you could see kind of the merits of product led growth and actually like how it worked because we just didn't need to spend that much on sales and marketing.

• 25:40Logan Bartlett?

  What about full transparency around pricing?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  I think that's part of it. Yeah.

• 25:46Logan Bartlett?

  So are all these things, everything I'm going to ask is probably just fed into that. But full transparency around pricing, you think is tied into the PLG motion and all of that.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 25:55Logan Bartlett?

  One of the same.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Totally, because it is, you know, I think the, the reason that you want to be transparent with pricing is to remove friction. Like the goal in a product like a true product led growth model is to remove as much friction as possible. And so like, if you don't disclose pricing, it's friction by design, which by the way, in some cases can be good. You're like, I actually want to qualify your pain point and talk to you about the value I could provide before we have a pricing discussion. But in a high velocity acquisition model, you're like, nope, I don't want to speed bump there. I actually want to throw, throw as many people through the funnel as I possibly can.

• 26:26Logan Bartlett?

  What about, I mean, was the org actually fully distributed ish or how, how was that the headcount actually laid out?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  It was, uh, when I joined, um, two thirds in Australia, a third in San Francisco.

• 26:39Logan Bartlett?

  Going into offices in both?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:41Logan Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, like a very office bound culture and company in the early days. And then, uh, you know, I think Atlassian has also always been like a very distributed company. And so I think there is, it's sort of a distant cousin to remote. Uh, and then, you know, the nature of our products kind of meant that we, it was very easy for Atlassian just to become a, which it is today, a remote only or remote first, um, kind of culture. But, you know, we'd, we'd, we expanded to sort of like pockets of concentrated people all over the world. And so to work, you were just kind of online, you know?

• 27:14Logan Bartlett?

  Now, I've had to play mass at Atlassian for a generation of founders that think that they can operate without sales in some ways like, uh, and, uh, obviously was the grandfather or forefather of product led sales. Um, where do you think, do you think it makes sense across the board? I've seen a lot of founders just bang their heads against the wall over and over again, trying to get PLG to work, trying to get that motion to work. Or what is your heuristics or how you think about like where it does make sense? And maybe the answer is everywhere and you just need to keep banging your head against the wall versus where it doesn't. Are there, are there defining characteristics that you think?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  There's some, uh, I think it, it, it works best in a really big market, really big TAM where that TAM is comprised of lots of units, lots of customers. Like if my TAM is massive, but there's only a hundred customers for my software product. Not a good product led growth setup. If I could acquire a hundred thousand customers, that's a good product growth setup. Because if you just think about the rate limiter on acquiring them, if I'm going traditionally with just sellers, the rate limit is how quickly can I hire sellers? How effectively can I on-ramp? Like all that sort of stuff. And so you're kind of limiting your rate of growth into that TAM by a human capital constraint. I think there's some ingredients of the product

• 28:35Speaker 01

  that are a better fit for product led growth. If I'm selling kind of a general ledger or a single sort of like big HR management system, it's such a carefully considered system by a small group of decision makers that you don't really need product led growth for that. Now, you could kind of lower friction for consideration, get maybe a product led lead or a product led lead generator. But you're not going to really kind of land and acquire those customers for a really considered choice. I think we had the advantage early on of a very cynical user persona and a developer. And so you see a lot of product led growth kind of business model building around developer tools.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Because developers are self-sufficient. They kind of know what they want. They're skeptical of products that need to be explained to them. They can't kind of use it. Probably the salesperson is going to be less technical than they will. So what value do they really get? Just like, get me into the product. Let me use it if it does what I need to do. The product can do a good job of kind of explaining itself. But I don't need another human being to explain it to me. I'll figure it out on my own. And so that persona is sort of like naturally more wired for product led growth. I think products with built-in network effects, you know, some dimension of virality or collaborative capability, like Figma is an example. It's sort of like one person's going to bring it in, but I'm going to kind of light it up and turn it on

• 30:01Speaker 01

  for the next hundred to a thousand people in my organization. And that kind of product led expansion model feeds in maybe to an opportunity for sales to transact or convert a larger expansion opportunity because the product To sort of like earned it. Those are some of the ingredients. And then, you know, naturally, I think if you pricing, not just price transparency, but but absolute price is kind of a factor. I mean, we chose to price effectively just above free. I mean, and by design, we priced below the 10, you know, the 10K kind of purchase, formal purchase requisition workflow that exists in most companies where I've got to go get my boss's sign off and approval. And I got to think about sort of, is the budget here? Do I need to go argue for it?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Below 10K or probably 15K a day. Most people can just on a discretionary basis, just sign up for something and spend it. When you get above that, you, you know, there's just some, some, you know, human navigation that you need to do. And I think if you're priced at hundreds of thousands or several hundreds of thousands or millions, like you probably need some more solution selling. You need to explain like, is it really worth it? Like, can I translate the problems that you're experiencing with the value that my product is going to bring? That's actually like true value selling. And that is, you're not going to find a lot of that in product led growth. And so I think it's a combination of all of those things that sort of yields the ability to to build a model. But I will say, last thing is like, there are some trade offs, you know, like Atlassian.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Atlassian never was never really the the famous triple, triple, double, double, double grower, you know, where you're

• 31:36Logan Bartlett?

  You know, by the way, we, we, I'll interrupt you for a second. My first couple of months at Battery, Niraj Agarwal, who was my boss at the time, wrote this framework and we tried to come up with what we were going to call it. And and it's funny because now it's just like become triple, triple, double, double, double, T2D3.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:56Logan Bartlett?

  And it's like spread in the industry and no one really knows the root of it, but it was like my first month on the job and we were like, should it be 2T3D? And we were like debating the, and I feel like it's actually rotted some people's brains about like, this is the only way to grow a company. And I feel I was 1% like in it. I just helped come up with the moniker, but it's just funny. Everyone followed this like, this is the gold standard of how you have to build enterprise software companies is T2D3. And Atlassian is a perfect example of like, no, you don't.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  We didn't. And, you know, but and and by the way, it was by design. Like we had all these tense debates kind of internally around. You know, not intentionally constraining our growth, but like the way that we were designing our business model and the way we were designing how we were how we were acquiring market share and growing into our market made it almost impossible to grow faster than 60%. We were just like, we would have to do different things to do that. We understand what those are. Part of it would be, we could have earlier tilted our pricing curve and gone after like the Fortune 1000 or the Fortune 500 with, you know, with ASPs or ACVs in the, in the multi hundred thousands to millions. We chose not to do that. So we're like, without that, we're probably going to grow between 40 and 60%. And that's actually okay.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  And so I think, you know, in some cases, like you're choosing, you know, you're choosing slower growth at kind of a small base, potentially for a more durable, I mean, the, you know, what's remarkable about Atlassian is it grew between 35 and 50% for like 15 straight years. Which compounds a lot of value. Huge amount of value. And, you know, we always used to use, even though it may not be a fair example, but we we kind of polled 15 years of historical growth in, in Amazon. Like Amazon's growth for the first 15 years looked remarkably similar to Atlassian. So this is pre edited AWS where all of a sudden it was like just the adrenaline shot

• 33:54Speaker 01

  that just like, you know, like makes everything kind of look wonky. But, uh, you know, the, the argument that we were trying to make is like, you can be a durable compounder that just predictably grows every year between these bands. And like, how does that add up? And by the way, what are the, the other trade offs is like, we became, we were just such a capital efficient business, right? We were profitable. And so like, we were compounding, um, you know, like cash in our own bank account every year, like without sort of building, without dilution, you know? And, and, you know, like we could fund anything that we wanted to do eventually. And that's just a very different business. It's a very different way to build a business, but it also yields a very different.

• 34:35Logan Bartlett?

  There's a natural rate of absorption in a market for a lot of companies, right? And there's also like some elements of prisoner's dilemma of what your competitors are doing.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:44Logan Bartlett?

  And Uber versus Lyft, a great example of sometimes you have to play the game on the field with all of that. But like, if you don't, you can, you can control your own destiny at the pace of what the market's willing to take. And also, if there's someone out there trying to go after

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:59Logan Bartlett?

  this.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Although I'll tell you, I'll tell you, we zigged, we zigged where others zagged. And it's the hardest thing to do because like, I remember all this, this is sort of existential angst internally where there are companies now that are lost to history. Rally, Rally Software that went public, they ripped bias. You know, we were growing at 50%. They're doubling year over year because they're, you know, we're selling, uh, single digit tens of thousands of deals to big enterprise customers and they're doing, you know, single digit million dollar deals. And so you looked at it and you're like, man, are we making the wrong choice? Jive was another that kind of ripped bias and went public.

• 35:34Logan Bartlett?

  Jive, I remember for, I mean, lost to history, but at one point it was like the highest, uh, trading public SaaS company. It was trading at like 30 times revenue or something at a time that that was wild.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Fog Creek, Fog Creek was, I mean, there was a bunch. And you looked at all of them and they all had, they all had what would be very typical business models, right? Like high-priced software, enterprise sales reps that, you know, like you didn't, you didn't quote the price, you kind of went knocked on the door, you had these value discussions, you tried to sell top down, you tried to get as much, you know, you tried to, to get as much as you possibly could at that initial point of sale. And then, by the way, hope that adoption and customer success teams caught up, you know, with what you'd sold. So you didn't have kind of a renewal or retention problem the other side of that. And it was nerve wracking to see those companies grow at twice our rate. We went exactly the opposite way. We were like, we're going to do something very different. We're going to build a business

• 36:26Speaker 01

  model that we think over the long term, you know, will, will work against competition. Ended up in our particular category, working.

• 36:33Logan Bartlett?

  And I feel like a lot of that probably has to do with the founders having full control and the long-term perspective on that. Like, had you guys taken VC early on, I have to imagine the VCs on the board probably would have tried to...

• 36:45Speaker 01

  There would have been differences of opinion, I think. Yeah.

• 36:47Logan Bartlett?

  Maybe they wouldn't have listened.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  It was not just ownership, but just conviction. And again, you know, being really long-term oriented, being like, you know what, we're going to make a bunch of investments that are just going to take a long time to pay off. I mean, things that Lassian did around, you know, its channel and its ecosystem development in the marketplace, you know, with ISVs that are building extensions and plugins, like, those are all things that are, that are hard to create. They just take a long, long time. You plant those seeds, and it's like, you really don't see them grow for three years, four years, five years. And you have to be, you know, committed and disciplined around, nope, we're going to continue to garden that, fertilize it, add features to it, grow it. Eventually, it's going to swell into a moat that we think is pretty defensible and meaningful. And it did.

• 37:29Logan Bartlett?

  Tactics on PLG, I'm sure you get asked this type of stuff all the time, but if you're a company right now, enterprise software, maybe you have a mid-market sales motion where your ASP is 30, 40, 50K, or maybe you're an enterprise company trying to figure out how to go down-market, or maybe you're trying to be PLG and you actually have no go-to-market figure it out at all, but you're banging your head against the wall trying to make sure you can, you know, lay the groundwork. Because it is interesting. It's much easier going down from enterprise to product-led growth. We talked to Brian Halligan, sat in that seat, and he was able to do it with, like, going from an outbound motion to more of a bottoms-up motion, or at least a sales-led motion to more of a...

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:06Logan Bartlett?

  But like, that's hard. Not a lot of people do that. Generally, you're kind of beholden to the motion that you start with. If you go high, it's hard to go down. So if people are thinking about this, are there a handful of things, like tactically, that you would say, and I'm sure there's infinite permutations around it, and so the lessons learned are going to be bespoke to each market and each, you know, whatever, buyer type and all that. But... Just, just high level strategies that you would give to people that are like thinking about, how do I actually get PLG working? Either how to orient your team towards it, how to incentivize salespeople, how to orient your board around it, anything along those lines?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  I mean, the, the, the high level one is just like, it is, it is, it's head and not to say, it is far easier to expand an existing customer than it is to acquire and land a new one. And so like part of the virtue of PLG, if you get it right, and it's, if you get it right around, kind of like, you know, the, the acquisition motion, like what's in the product and how you onboard users into the product, how the product's priced, how you actually get people to sort of like buy and go all the way through the customer journey to land, and then actually get engaged and activated and sort of like have that aha moment with the product. If, if you put all the investment into landing that, right? And you can acquire customers, even by the way, if you're leaving money on the table and you're gaining market share against competition, you're, you're,

• 39:27Speaker 01

  what you're winning is a future opportunity for yourself to expand it and grow your business that is way easier, I believe, than the alternative. And that's what we did. And so like, just, that was the sort of the design is we're going to leave a bunch of money on the table now. We're going to make sure that the, the equation with customers favors value on their side. They feel like they're going to look at what they get and how much they spent and feel like, man, I'm getting the better end of the deal. Like, that's what we wanted. And we're going to do that for as long, for as long as we possibly can. It's like Alaskan still does that. Like, you want customers that begin with a, with a product and be like, I can't believe I'm only spending this amount of money on

• 40:06Speaker 01

  the product that, that does this for me. And, and then with that, we just pursued winning market share. And then we could expand like that war chest of customers that were engaged and happy with high NPS at a, at a different rate without competition.

• 40:22Logan Bartlett?

  How do you orient the team towards this? Like, is it just the CEO needs to lead it and then go talk to the VP of Marketing and go talk to the VP of Venge, VP Product, VP Sales and say, hey, we're going to do this?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  I think it's a business model design. Yeah. I mean, you're like, you're choosing explicitly, this is the business model we want to build and how we want to build it. And, you know, what gets hard is like, you know, we, we, what made it a little bit easier for us is we constrained the enterprise opportunity. And so we just didn't allow ourselves to design an opportunity that actually needed salespeople really early on. We just didn't, we're like, We could build a product that we sell for, and we've eventually we did, for hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. We're not going to do that right now. We're going to wait. And we didn't actually like do that until 2013. The last thing went public in 2015. So in 2013, we're like, now we're ready to sort of like go get that enterprise opportunity. By the way, we chose to do it after we kind of already won. We were, you know, we were, you know, we'd impregnated

• 41:15Speaker 01

  5,000 companies with more than 1,000 active users of Jira that needed us to do more enterprisy things. And it was an opportunity for us to charge for more enterprising things, enterprising things that we would build. And then because we were willing, willing to charge more and they were willing to pay more, there was an opportunity to augment our business model with sellers, to sort of knock on the door of existing customers and say, hey, listen, you've got 5,000 people that use this thing every day. You're only spending 30 grand. We've built a thing that's going to support that a lot better and it's 300 grand. And I want to, I want to take you on that kind of upgrade, upgrade expansion journey. And that was the evolution of selling inside of Atlassian, you know, at the point that it was 12 years old, 12 year old company.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  And, you know, it like, I mean, you mentioned this is kind of tough to play the hypothetical where it's like, well, what if you would have done that in 2007 or 2006? Like, wouldn't you have taken that 30% growth and made it 90% growth? Probably. But the business would have looked different. We would have been full of a bunch of other things that, that we would have needed to make that work that we just didn't have, like people in finance and people in collections.

• 42:17Logan Bartlett?

  They just call it like one-way doors versus two-way doors. And that's a one-way door. Once you start going down that path, you're not going back the other way.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  And all of those, all of those investments would have, would have pulled away from our ability to, to build some of the other things that became huge defensive modes. Like our channel, our ecosystem, our customer community, just a bunch of things that a focus on, you know, we, we talk a lot about still Atlassian that says this today, we're, we are focused on. You know, the Fortune 500,000 was, was, was, that was our customer segment. And, and you know, that's a bit of evocative because there kind of isn't such a thing. But like internally, we said it for a long time before we extended, you know, talked about it externally, because that was the mission. It was like, we're going after ubiquity here. Like we want, we believe every company on the planet should use one or more of our products every single day. That's what we're, we're going after.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  And even though there might be a shiny, massive company that could be worth, by the way, and this is the hard part, one company could be worth 500, one big company could be worth 500 small ones or, or 5,000 small ones. And so you're like, man, if I just spent a year chasing the one big one, I don't have to worry about the 5,000 small ones. And we're like, no, the 5,000 small ones are going to make it a lot easier to get the one big one in the future, which is true in our particular case. So.

• 43:32Logan Bartlett?

  What about, what about a singular KPI? Or I'm sure there's tons of things that, that people orient around time to value or time to sign up or time to inviting the next user. Facebook's one back in the day was like, I forget, uh, once you got five friends on the platform. Was there any KPI that you guys looked at or that you would tell an entrepreneur that's trying to build a, a PLG kind of bottoms up sales motion? Hey, this is, was our North Star. Is it just getting the customer to take out their credit card? Is it getting someone to, you know, use the product as, as.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it's going to be different by product, but for us, you know, like we cared a lot about driving, considered traffic to the website. Like, what are the things in marketing that we could do to just get more people to come, learn what we're doing and what the products that we're building could do for them? That's sort of point one. And, you know, the goal of the website, and you have to get really good at, you know, like there's a discipline here and a technique, but the goal of the website was, how do we get them as quickly into the product as possible? And we don't want to skip some intermediary, intermediary steps, maybe that might like help them stick in the product. But there's an art there and a science of, you know, I just don't want you to hit the just try button because you could go in there and be like, what, what am I doing here? I don't, you know, I don't belong here. Um, versus some people that, you know, like those journeys, you have to be, you have to constantly iterate and kind of design.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  But getting people into the product was sort of like the next big trigger. And removing as much. Natural friction from that without getting people confused. And then investing a lot of effort is one in once you're there, like exactly what you're mentioning. What are the the paths that increase the probability for people to engage? And like engagement was a really meaningful metric and there's lots of different ways to define that in the product. But you know, what is a user that's engaged and activated? That has the highest propensity to not just stick around, but to invite other people to be an evangelist inside of their company and then ideally, once they're kind of really activated outside of the company around what we do. And lots of different things, you know, that we would do, but that was it. And by the way, it's a little bit like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  It's not like you, I could say, if you just do these five things, you're done. Like they evolve and change as you get deeper into your market. And you know, the customers that you're trying to acquire harder and the customers you're trying to engage and stick and get activated are harder. And the customer you're trying to like, you know, to expand and renew and and retain are harder. All that stuff gets harder. You have to look for new things, sort of like, oh, the the logical path, you know, for Facebook used to be, I just upload five photos and add five friends. Now it's like, you know, I don't know what it is because of Facebook, but you know, it's it becomes like different. There's different dimensions of how do I keep this cohort there? And you've got to figure that out for every kind of future cohort that becomes a little bit trickier.

• 46:09Logan Bartlett?

  Facebook today is rage bait on a political.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go.

• 46:12Logan Bartlett?

  It's like that. Yeah, it's a it's a political video that makes you very angry. So Alaskan famously had two products very early on, Jura and Confluence. And I think at IPO, you know, whatever I think time, time well gone, but it was 60, 30 or 70, 20% or something. Yeah. In terms of the revenue split, so pretty meaningful. And the the cross sell between the two products, I think Confluence was, I don't know, 80% of.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Yep. Co-ownership.

• 46:38Logan Bartlett?

  Co, yeah, exactly. People having both.

• 46:42Logan Bartlett?

  Confluence was built early on.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:45Logan Bartlett?

  When did that come as a product? And what would you say about having two products early on? Because the stereotypical wisdom in Silicon Valley, so to speak, is like, just get one right before you start doing another because it's going to distract and different resources and all that.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, before I, I mean, it was before I got there because the second product, I think, came in the second year or the early part of the third year. And, you know, it really was like they were, they were mostly trying to just scratch their own itch. They were like, we have a need for, you know, Confluence, you know, was first, first just an enterprise wiki. It was like wikis existed and open source, you know, but there weren't really good enterprise ones that provided sort of security permission sharing, kind of a bunch of, you know, table stakes things for, you know, collaborative content platforms. And, and I think the team had used a bunch of open source ones and said, like, these all suck. We just want to build a better one and did. And, and again, didn't have maybe, you know, maybe guidance that would, that would dissuade them from that.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  It's like, no, you're going to take energy, you're going to rob energy away from a thing that's ripping right now. Like Jira's, you found product market fit. People need a bunch more things in that box. Like just focus on that for now would have been conventional wisdom. I think that, you know, naturally the company would be a very different company if it were just Jira. So, you know, it was the right call. I, I think, you know, I wouldn't necessarily give this, give this guidance writ large to like, you absolutely work on a second product when you're just an infant.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  I think you need to be thoughtful about it. But what it did for us, that I think are kind of the intangibles that were really valuable, is it is always hard for a company when you, when you work on that second act or the second product to diversify. It's just tough because it's not just that you've got another thing that you need to add features to and you need to talk to, talk to customers about. Your marketing department has to think, what are the, what are the sort of priorities of how a message, what does a homepage look like? You know, all the parts of the business need to think, I've got two things that I need to care and feed. You know, like, how do I determine where I, where I invest more or less across those things? And it just becomes really difficult. So those are muscles that, that you will always, as a business, have to develop.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  I believe the longer you wait, the harder, actually, the harder it is. If you're a thousand person company, or a 2,000 person company, or a 5,000 person company, you're like, great. First act is running out of gas, let's pick up the second act. On one dimension, you could say it's like easy because I just, you know, park a bunch of people in the garage and I'm like, go, go work on something. We needed to integrate that into the fold. You've got 5,000 people that you need to calibrate on. It's just tough. And so I think for Atlassian, you know, we benefited from, from building kind of that musculature in the company at a really early age. And so then when, when we had acquired our first company and you took the products from two to six, it, it kind of was natural. Like you're like, oh, we know how to do this. Like, we know how to, how to think about like product launch priorities, or we know how to think about messaging priorities, and we know how to think about, you know,

• 49:43Speaker 01

  how we stack rank our cross-flow messaging, how it works. Like, we get that. We know how to think about rationalizing pricing and packaging. So it's not this, you know, like weird menu of a bunch of things that cognitively, you know, impair the customer. It's like, we know how to kind of like harmonize it. And so the customer's like, oh, I get this company's thinking about that. And that requires a bunch of work. So I think hugely beneficial to the kind of company that we were building to do it earlier rather than later. But also there's trade-offs. Like, you know, potentially, you know, you could argue like Jira's feature velocity maybe suffered a little bit. There are other things that we could have done, kind of in that product to advantage it, worked out in the end just fine, but those are the trade-offs you make.

• 50:28Logan Bartlett?

  We touched on pricing and how, one, the pricing was flat for, for a long, long time. Two, kind of staying under a certain level so that it could just be added to a credit card. I get the feeling it was also kind of a competitive advantage because your cost structure and sales motion and all this stuff was such that you didn't need to extract a ton of dollars out of each individual contract. I, I spent a ton of time in boards. I feel like every, to be on a board is to be rethinking pricing of enterprise software companies in perpetuity. What, what were the, the strategic inputs into it? Was it that? Hey, was it the Amazon philosophy of, hey, let's just make it cheaper and easier for customers?

• 51:12Logan Bartlett?

  And over time, we'll accumulate the value and we know we'll have the right to go expand as we have a bigger product set or more enterprise feature sets or whatever it is.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  It was, it was, as part of the business model, we wanted pricing not to be, not to provide any friction. In fact, we wanted it to kind of lubricate the rest of how it worked. And so it was so affordable, people like, this is just ridiculously cheap. Like, I almost want to just figure out if I can use this product because it's so affordable. And so it aided the business model, it aided expansion. And, and so, you know, we had at the time, like unlimited license, unlimited versions, you know, we licensed by seed or by user or by kind of in, at the time, because it was, it was on prem by kind of user bands. And there was like an unlimited user band that again was so affordable that even if you were considering this for a hundred people, you'd be like, man, the unlimited user version is, is just, it's like less than, it's 3,500 bucks or it's like eight grand.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  I'm just going to buy it for everybody. And what happened was it just meant that, that it got planted in an organization and everybody got invited into it. It was like, I've already paid for it. Like, I don't need to think about the nine bucks a month per user that's sort of common in SaaS now or whatever it is. It's like, nope, already bought and paid for it. Just like, come on in. And what happened was, was, you know, a big company like Boeing would have like 50 of those unlimited users, users license all over the place because like a big company like Boeing is effectively a collection of, you know, thousands of little small companies that may be interconnected or may not be. They may be kind of siloed and isolated. And so people just sort of pop it up and it just, you know, that pricing really was a lubricant, you know, to kind of expand usage and adoption. It just meant that the, the roots got planted deeper.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  And then we wanted it to also be a competitive barrier to entry. And so still today, like at last seen as like very affordable at the bottom end. It is tough to just, to get any grip in that market because you're like, how do I, like, it's free basically at the bottom, super affordable at the kind of entry point. When you get up into the enterprise level, it can become more expensive, but that's not where you're going to start and win. And so it's just a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a moat, you know, a competitive moat. And you know, and then the business model, like the point you made is important because in the global financial crisis, when things kind of sputtered out, we, we looked at, did a bunch of cohort analysis and the, the customer segment that, that effectively was hurting the most naturally was the

• 53:32Speaker 01

  kind of small businesses or small teams. It's sort of like, you know, teams or companies under 10, it basically just dried up. And that at the time was, I don't know, maybe 10% of our top line. And we did this like radically courageous thing. We're like, you know what? Let's, let's just make that tier, which was like a thousand bucks. Let's just make it free. We made it 10. We called it a starter license. And then we donated the $10 to charity. So there was like a little bit of a marketing campaign around. We called it Cosium, you know, for cause. We're like, you spend 10 bucks on a license, we'll, we'll donate to a room to read charity and kind of fund, you know, girls' educations in Vietnam and things like that. But what was interesting is, is no one in our market could match that move because of their sales models. Like, we didn't actually have commissions to pay. We didn't have salespeople's

• 54:15Speaker 01

  whose quotas were on the line at a thousand dollar products or $10,000 product. And all the companies that I mentioned that compete with us just watched us do that. And we just rode away with the market, like it, you know, widened the aperture of who would consider us. Then we were a safe harbor in kind of rough economic times for people that may not have wanted to spend a thousand bucks, but definitely would spend 10. And, you know, there's a bunch of things that we, that I think we did over the years that mattered to the company that last year became. That was definitely one of them. And it was like, at the time, I remember we were wiping, we were wiping off 10% of our top line. Like, we just put it back out in the market. We're like, you know what? We'll just erase that. And because effectively you're saying, hey, when you renew, guess what? It's now free. So we're going

• 54:58Speaker 01

  to wipe that off in favor of widening the aperture on who's going to consider us and just go after share. And we could only do that because of our business model.

• 55:07Logan Bartlett?

  You guys did a great job of building an offline community, online and offline community of users and around the product and all that. How did you go about seeding the community? When people started having random meetups to talk about Atlassian and, you know, what did you encourage that, foster that? Did you guys pay that?

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:32Logan Bartlett?

  Did you start suggesting it on your own or did it just happen purely organically? How did that come to be?

• 55:37Speaker 01

  So we, we'd been building over time, you know, a pretty strong word of mouth business. And, you know, we thought about this word of mouth, I will, it's sort of like the thing, the thing that we're trying to earn is just more happy people. And the quantum of happy people makes sort of the magnophone, megaphone that that happy, happy, you know, community will, will create louder. And that was sort of the goal. And, you know, what's tough about word of mouth businesses, you're like, where do I spend money to go get more of it? And, you know, the logical place is you spend it on, on, you know, the persona, you spend it on the people. And, and so that sort of, you know, that kind of birthed the idea around, around really funding and coordinating a broad customer community program. And part

• 56:20Speaker 01

  of it was just like, you looked for customers like in market that were your champions that were animated. And you'd be like, hey, would you like to be, you know, the, the, you know, the, the head of the user group in Boston or the head of the user group in Kansas City? And usually somebody would be like, what is that? Well, like, we'll give you, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll fund or reimburse you for just organizing kind of birds of a feather in an office or at a, you know, pizza parlor or at a bar or whatever. So we'll fund, you know, some, some beers and drinks and, and pizza and whatever. And it's just a chance for all of you to talk about, I think what you care about, which is, you know, what our products do for your company. And you're going to get a whole bunch of ideas, which

• 57:05Speaker 01

  is by the way, what you want. And you know, this predated a lot of like online communities that, that, that kind of create something similar, but there is no, you know, there's no alternative for real human connection. And so I think we found these happy sponsors to be like, yep, I'll do that. And then our job was, we're going to help drive people there. You know, just put up the flag. We've got a user group leader. We're going to help kind of form that user group and then we're going to help, you know, maintain it and manage it and grow it. And then, you know, we're going to cover the costs for it. And, you know, that requires like people inside of our business to think about it and design it and to add features to it and all the other things that you do, but it was an intentional effort. And then the way we used that was like really clever. When we had a big product launch, you know, we would go to all those user groups and we would say,

• 57:47Speaker 01

  like, we want you to hold a, you know, hold a user group meeting on this particular day. And we're going to, we'd send like boxes of, you know, secret coveted schwag and a bunch of things. We were like, do not open until this moment. And it was just a really smart way for us to say on this, this big cloud launch, we're going to kind of like unravel it, but we want you at the same time live to unravel it with us and then just shout it from the mountaintops. And so like you were always trying to figure out like that word of mouth exists. Like, how can you kind of put a lasso on it? And, and, you know, and kind of drive it around with you. And did lots of things that way, but that's sort of where it came from and it worked. And then in later years sort of said, hey, you can amplify more with online. And instead of hundreds of thousands of people around the world,

• 58:31Speaker 01

  you get millions of people that kind of do the same thing.

• 58:33Logan Bartlett?

  I get the feeling the, uh, the company at Lassian, we talked about the charity and giving away, or donating to charity. Also, I know the founders now have different missions. Saving the climate, I think, is, is why.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  The planet.

• 58:49Logan Bartlett?

  The planet, like making sure we don't all die. I think that that is one for, is that Mike or Scott or both?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  I mean, they both care about it, but yeah, like Mike.

• 58:56Logan Bartlett?

  I care about it too.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mike is, Mike is maybe more public and kind of all the things that he's, he's doing there.

• 59:02Logan Bartlett?

  Were there certain things, I mean, now there's, uh, there's this whole, bring your whole self to work, bring your work self to work, like elements of social causes and where the lines of demarcation exists between social issues and not. I get the feeling Atlassian probably was much more, stood for some of the, the social causes that they, that the founders cared about. Can you describe what that was like within the company and how you guys kind of thought about it?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  I mean, it certainly evolved. You know, maybe one of the earliest, actually, one of the earliest places that we became animated around it was like Prop 8. It was Prop 8 in San Francisco. Around LGBTQ wasn't the full acronym then at the time, but it was around.

• 59:53Logan Bartlett?

  What year was this?

• 59:53Speaker 01

  I think 2009, 2008, 2009, kind of when I joined. And that was sort of like the first kind of earliest incarnation of it, like here in San Francisco, because it was like a pretty electric moment in the city. We were here. But actually, taking a step back from that, I think, you know, Mike and Scott, having never worked at a place, again, from first principles, just wanted, like, they wouldn't call it diversity inclusion, but they wanted to create a place that they were happy working at and going to, and that everybody that was in the building was happy at working at and going to. And so that, sort of like the cultural bedrock, came from that.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  It's just like, I don't want a place where, you know, you feel like you need to kind of tiptoe across glass, or it's like, you, they're creating an environment that they wanted to work in. And I think that, I mean, it's head nodding to say, you know, but attracted people that wanted to contribute to the same environment and, you know, built a culture where you could advocate for things that you thought were, you know, were fair and reasonable to advocate for.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  So, yeah, and I think the company kind of evolved from there. And then, you know, it's taken public positions and, you know, internally, culturally, it has a lot of private ones, too, that we talk about, where they, royally.

• 1:01:15Logan Bartlett?

  The royally, yeah. It's hard, it's hard to drop the, even though you're no longer, you're still.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Quarter of my life, yeah. It's like tough.

• 1:01:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, it's hard to stop the "we" on that. You all made a decision. So HipChat was a very successful product. Ultimately, it became Stride, when Slack was really taking off. Ultimately, shut down, sold to Slack, and no longer existed. What was the inputs into that? And obviously, you had super successful other products. Like, how did you decide to, because HipChat was growing really quickly for a long time, right? But how did you think about cutting your losses and moving on there?

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Very hard thing, but you know, actually like, you know, I think a moment that I'm certainly proud of that I imagine everyone at the time was proud of, and you don't see many companies do it. Like, the easier thing to do is, is just sort of like quietly push it to the corner of the building, and you focus on different things, and maybe you're like, yep, it's still kind of doing fine. And, you know, I can name a lot of products that are like that.

• 1:02:15Logan Bartlett?

  I actually can't even think of another company that very publicly, outside of maybe Google and Microsoft, like a handful of the big ones that you almost need to announce. Like, I can't think of too many companies of this scale just publicly announcing, like, oh yeah, we're moving on.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  And it's tough because you feel, you feel responsibility to customers. Remember, like, this was, you know, this was sort of, you know, pitched, you know, kind of pitched competition. And there were lots of customers that had chosen HipChat over Slack.

• 1:02:42Logan Bartlett?

  HipChat was beloved by a lot of people.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  That had said, I'm making, I've looked at everything, I'm making this choice at last, you know, and I'm choosing you. And so, you know, the thing that we, that we, that was, I think hardest, is like, you've got to go back to those customers and say, kind of, we respect that choice, we're making a different one now, and here's why. And that kind of hurts, right? Because, you know, customers are not just, you know, they're choosing you, and then they're sort of, you know, there's people that basically may have argued for HipChat in a room with their colleagues, and put their neck on the line and said, this is the right thing. And then, you know,

• 1:03:15Logan Bartlett?

  The best thing you want as a software is the company is to get your champion promoted. I think the worst thing is probably to say, yeah, never mind.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  So that goes all in the balance. And I, you know, I think we, you know, we look really carefully at the market, what we, what we thought our opportunity in, and what that, what that would chasing that opportunity would cost, what investing in that particular opportunity would rob other opportunities, sort of all of those things in the balance. And then just came, you know, to the hard, like, the really hard decision that there were other things that were more important for us to invest in, for our customers, even the ones that, you know, that had chosen HipChat over Slack. And it was, it was the right thing to do. And then to also just be honest about it, and to not kind of park it in a corner and say, like, yeah, yeah, it's doing fine, but you know, now we're

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  all about IT service management or something else. It was like, you know, if this is something that we're going to do, we're just going to go out to the market and say, this is what we're going to do. And You know, the Slack story, I think, is also interesting because we were, you know, we were very, a very competitive company. But, uh, you know, the, you just took a bunch of good human beings at Atlassian. I mean, it's still true in the early days. Like, we were just really good people. And where that showed up is like, even though we competed fiercely, we were very respectful. Like, every time Slack had a, had a product launch, like, we would send them, genuinely, we'd send them a congrats note and a, you know, like, big box of cupcakes for the office. And we'd be like, you know, these features are pretty sweet. Like, this is cool. Even though, like, we're trying to build a better

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  product, and we want to win, and we think we're gonna win. Kudos. Like, we know how hard it is to do what you guys are doing, and so, respect.

• 1:04:53Logan Bartlett?

  Was Slack cheering on Fluent's customers?

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Uh, they weren't at the time. I don't think. They became customers later.

• 1:05:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So this was just, just, just being nice?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and by the way, uh, you know, GitHub was-

• 1:05:06Logan Bartlett?

  I would have fucking hated that if I were Slack, just, just killing them with kindness. I just-

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  But they would do the same thing, I think. It's like, they were, they were a similarly cultured company. And, you know, we had a fierce competition with GitHub too. Very similar thing. Like, we used to, like, do these karaoke nights at GitHub when they were super small. And we'd sort of, like, go over and just hang out and, like, sing karaoke. And, you know, like, they had at the time, in the city, they had this, uh, God, I forgot who put it together, but it was like a dodgeball tournament, where a bunch of, um, technology companies would dress up like, you know, the dodgeball folks in the movie, and just sling balls at each other. And, um, it may have been GitHub that actually sponsored that. And would have been an easy thing for them not to invite us to, I think, because, like, because they were like, those, those guys are just, they're good people. And so, like, we want them around. Like, they would invite us to the dodgeball

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  competition. Um, and, and the Slack story is like, you know, when we wanted to find an outlet for it, uh, that's an easy, it would have been an easy thing for Slack to say, like, no way. I'll just, like, you know, I could just foresee to sort of park it in a corner and just be uncomfortable with, like, our market growth or our, you know, our winning in this market. And I think part of the reason that, I mean, I think it was, it was a good deal for them, and it was, it was, uh, you know, it was a good, I mean, there was a bunch of customers that they could sort of bring along. So, just the mechanics of the deal, I think, were good for both sides. But, um, the fact that we were a respectful, honorable competitor- I think made it possible, certainly easy to say like, yeah, I'll consider that. And I think about that a lot because I think, you know, you want to win.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Sometimes on the field of battle, you're just like, nah, I like hate those other guys. And we just weren't wired that way. And I think over the course of our history that we benefited from that.

• 1:06:49Logan Bartlett?

  When you look back at lasting today's $40 billion, I think ish doing what two and a half, $3 billion in revenue, something like that?

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59Logan Bartlett?

  What moments just stand out in your memory of it could be the hip chat Slack thing. It could be, I don't know, the Excel round, like what are sort of the things you look back on as the crucible moments? Or the just things that as you remember your time there, and it could be the dodgeball tournaments or whatever it is. But like, what are the ones that sort of stand out in your mind, either because they were super important to the business trajectory? Or they were super meaningful to the culture?

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  I mentioned one, but I mentioned in the global financial crisis, that starter license program that we launched, I think was a crucible moment. And, you know, it just kind of widened the aperture, you know, on the consideration part of our funnel. And but it was tough, you know, it's like, that was not an easy decision, the right one. I think divesting hip chat, you know, was a big one. By the way, one of my favorite, maybe I've told this story before, but you know, one of Alaskan's values is open company, no bullshit. And everybody in the company, we made an insider post going public because of the way that we are transparent in the company. And, you know, there's always sort of tension where, you know, you're worried that you may break. Like the thing that you're entrusting the population with might be too much for them.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  And, you know, when we divested hip chat, three weeks before we shared that news on an earnings call, we told 3,500 employees and with a high probability that that would leak. Like intentional decision leadership were like, this could be the thing that actually breaks the value. And, and we're always going to pressure test it. We want to see like, we'll do it until it breaks and then we'll figure out what we need to do afterwards.

• 1:08:41Logan Bartlett?

  You didn't send out fake ones, like telling some people you sold it to Microsoft, telling some people you sold it to...

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, it was packaged with, hey, there's people that are affected here that, you know, we can't necessarily guarantee they're going to have jobs on the other side of that. There are customers that are affected here that we want to hear, that we want them to hear in a coordinated way. There are Slack employees that deserve to hear this in a coordinated way. We're giving you all of that and we're reminding you that open company know bullshit.

• 1:09:09Logan Bartlett?

  How many people were the company?

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Thirty-five hundred. Yeah.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  So that was one. You know, maybe, I don't know, there's lots, lots of things that we did kind of on, on product along the way. I mean, certainly the IPO was, was a pretty meaningful moment. You know, one of my favorite, kind of, one of my favorite marketing moments was we, we sponsored, we do all these sort of really quirky things when we were young from a marketing perspective that I think mattered a lot. You know, not any one thing was like, oh, that was the one that did it, but it was like the sum total of all of them. Like, we did this, sponsored this like startup day with Michael Arrington, kind of at the height of TechCrunch, where we hired a Tom Cruise impersonator and had Michael interview Tom Cruise, which I think there's a YouTube video that was just a riot. It was such a weird thing. But one of my favorites is we bought, we bought a booth at the Game Developer Conference.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  It's a big show for video game developers in San Francisco, at Moscone. And kind of didn't belong there, but we had a lot of game studios that used Jiren. So we're like, I might as well go there. And then we're like, well, instead of going there, like what's, what's like, how do we just, how do we show up and actually like have some sort of difference that amplifies who we are and why we're there? So the one that we did was, was still such a riot. There's a documentary called King of Kong about like these Donkey Kong enthusiasts, the stand-up arcade game, where they competed for high, for high score and they'd buy these machines and like, put them in their garage and basically just play it over and over and over again, where you knew you could memorize basically in, I don't know, hours of gameplay,

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  like every single little joystick move to get to the highest score. And the movie, by the way, is fantastic because it pits this, I think he was like a school teacher that lived in the Midwest. Um, against, they wore like Dockers and kind of a, you know, light blue button down against this, this guy that wore like leather trench coats and awesome movie. Anyway, so the, the guy that eventually, not to give him away, but what, you know, the, the guy in the Dockers and blue shirts, um, really well known, that movie at the time was like, went all over the place. So we hired him, uh, to, to try to break his record with a stand-up Donkey Kong machine at our booth at GDC. And, and then the one funny thing is like, he's, he's deeply into Christian music. I think he made

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  his own Christian rock band. He can't make this stuff up. And so the deal was like, I'll do it as long as I can sell my newly released Christian rock album called The King of Song, because the movie was King of Kong. But, uh, we just had like, I mean, line around the block for people to basically get his autograph and just stand in front of the Donkey Kong machine and watch him work. I don't know how many units of Jira moved, but like, you know, that's, uh, we've got lots of

• 1:11:50Logan Bartlett?

  King of Song though, it probably sold a couple of those along the way.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  King of Song, could be on Spotify.

• 1:11:55Logan Bartlett?

  That's, that's incredible. Um, one of the things I have in quotes here, and I'm not sure if I, if you said it, or if, I assume you did, because I put it in quotes, but managing people isn't something everybody loves. So I think you have to figure out really early on if it's something that you love doing. Uh, do you remember something?

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I probably said something like that.

• 1:12:14Logan Bartlett?

  Okay. Uh, do you love managing people?

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't, I don't love managing people. I, I love leading people. And I think there's a, there's, there's a difference. Uh, you know, when I think about kind of managing people, there's lots of parts of, of, you know, being a manager that aren't awesome. And I learned how to do them really well, giving critical feedback, right? Like telling people that it's, it's not working, giving them a chance to adjust. And when they don't, trying to, to convince them that they need to find a spot that's better for them.

• 1:12:43Logan Bartlett?

  Can we talk tactics around that? Actually, that's something that, that, uh, I always get positive feedback on when people can actually give actionable insights on like, what, what did you learn about, about how to go about doing that? Giving critical feedback or telling people it's time to move on?

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Like, people appreciate, uh, honesty and candor with concrete examples and action.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  So like what happens to, I think, a lot of inexperienced managers is A, most of us are conflict avoiders. And so you're just uncomfortable saying what you want to say. You're worried about hurting people's feelings. And so inevitably, like, you either soften it too much, or you don't give it at all. And then people get surprised. They're like, wait, you've been telling me I'm doing a good job. Like, the back slapping, or sort of like, the positive reinforcement is a lot easier to give than than what can feel like kind of negative course correction or critical feedback. But feedback is a gift. And actually, like, when people hear it, like, most people don't don't want to get sucker punched, or don't want blind spots. They want to know them. And then they want the ability, kind of with guidance, to sort of adjust. And by the way, some of those adjustments might not be possible. And, you know, I think, you know, I think I did a good job of

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  framing that, too, which is like, I'm rooting for you. But based on what I've seen, and based on what we've talked about, the things that you need to do to sort of get on right track may not be possible. But let's figure that out. And but, you know, that's what I sort of learned early on, is it's sort of the the combination of feedback early, feedback honest, like, don't don't kind of hold back and sort of shape it in a constructive way. But then really give examples, and then give concrete actions. Like, this is what wasn't working. This is what needed to happen. And and what could produce that outcome?

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  And, you know, the other thing is, like, you don't want to tell people, this is, this is how I think you should do it. Because, you know, my job as a manager is to find people, as a leader, is to find people that can do things without a lot of guidance or coaching. Like, I can tell you kind of the what, not the how. I shouldn't tell you the how. And maybe, you know, in people that you're trying to sort of like, coach, or or, you know, work on some some performance improvement, you could say, I'm going to give you some suggestions for how. But there's a, you know, there's, there's a, there's a time limit on how much time that that we spend with me giving you the the map exactly. Because what I need you to do is design the map. I'm going to tell you where the destination is. Like, the journey there is up to you. But it's, but

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  that's tough. You know, that that requires, by the way, I would say, just, you know, the difference between kind of leading and managing, managing requires a lot of emotion. It just does, so does leading. But actually, like, when you're leading, there's a dimension of leading that you actually, you can get more emotional deposits than withdrawals, withdrawals. Like, being a really good manager, I think you are, you're getting more Oftentimes, you can get more withdrawals than deposits.

• 1:15:36Logan Bartlett?

  You're giving more than you're getting back emotionally.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  You are. And, you know, and it is a learned, it is a learned skill, right? I think the more you do it.

• 1:15:47Logan Bartlett?

  Managing is.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it absolutely is. The more you do it and the more you kind of practice it, the better you are. And you know what? Back to the, maybe the quote, like I discovered, not everybody's going to be good at it. Not everybody actually will, will, will want to spend the time kind of banging their head around it. And they may be, it may be better served as being individual contributor. They might be happier. And, and you know, the, the business might be better. I think there's like this false, sometimes sort of like this false career progression of like, I'm only going to grow if I get people underneath me. And, and it's, it's, you know, it kind of sucks. I mean, I think good companies have, have this sort of inspired program of like an IC track where it's like you, your skills are not motivating people,

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  leading people, guiding people, course correcting people. Your skills are kind of applied individually to a thing that we need doing. And you can level that up along the way and let's figure out like how to do that. Lassian had a program like that. I think Google does, Google does too. But I think it's important because like, it shouldn't be, man, the only way I'm going to grow professionally is to become a manager and a director and a senior director and a VP, and then I've got orgs underneath me and people. And there's a lot of people that go on that track, on that track to pursue growth, but actually don't really belong on that track. They're not good at it. And we've all had bad managers, right? And a bad manager is like, somebody that either shouldn't be there in the first place, or like wasn't taught by a good manager to begin with. And so like, they're not trying to figure out, how can I be a good manager?

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  The other thing too, by the way, I could go, go on this topic forever is like, like I, another, another thing a good manager does is, is should be open to critical feedback of them. Like we, early on at Lassian, kind of had adopted this performance management system that was bi-directional. And it was like, it was, again, from first principles. I think it was kind of a breakthrough for us where it was like, it was, there was a software product still around, I think called Small Improvements. That did this thing where it was like kind of a Y X axis and blindly without the manager seeing the the user would kind of draw a dot. The axis was maybe like, you know,

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  execution against, you know, objectives in the quarter, like how you did. And then kind of how you stretch beyond that, or how you some other thing, like how you contribute to the culture. And so like way over here to the top right is I'm just killing it on all dimensions. I'm doing everything. I'm above and beyond what you need me to do. And I'm like contributing to culture and team and like everything else. Doing things you don't ask me. Way down here is like we've got a big problem. And what I loved about the system is,

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  you know, the employee would drag the drop or drag the dot, and then the manager would drag the dot. And then you'd do a reveal and you'd see the difference between the dots. And it was just a perfect way to say, we've got to disconnect. Let's talk about why you're way up here, which usually happened, and I'm down here. And what what I what I would have wanted to see to get you up there. The cool thing about it is we inverted the system where it was like, how about me as a leader? How would I draw the dimensions of how I give you critical feedback? How I give you coaching? How I give you positive reinforcement? How clear am I on communicating expectation? And then as an employee, you rate me, you drop the dot, you're shit. Like, you know, I don't, you never talk to me, you never tell me I do a good job. Like, I never hear anything about what I could be doing better versus like the manager was like,

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  and so like, let's talk about that gap. And it was such a beautiful way to to trigger what can be an awkward and really hard conversation, just discussing that gap.

• 1:19:16Logan Bartlett?

  And so you enjoyed, you enjoyed the leading aspect of it, maybe not as much the managing because of elements of that. What was the path, talking about a job that doesn't really require much managing? What was the path into venture for you after a dozen years at Atlassian? Like, why pursue this?

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  A couple of things, like one, I felt like after 25 years, I've learned and seen a bunch of things that that I believe can be useful to lots of businesses at different shapes and sizes. And I've seen hard times, I've seen tailwinds, I've seen, you know, how as a leader and as a culture and organization, you need to reinvent yourself at different points of inflection. I've done a lot of really hard, I've like, I've just done a lot. And by the way, it's not all gonna be applicable and my advice always isn't gonna be good. But my choice, when I have time, I'm young enough where I wanted to do something different. Been, you know, at it lasting for 12 years, kind of doing the same thing, reinventing myself, you know, every 18 months is sort of I needed to at

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  different inflection points, always kind of in the biggest, not always, but after kind of the first handful of years and the biggest job I've ever had. So just first principles, like, God, what do I have to do here? I've never seen this before. I have to figure it out. And my choice was like, I could take all that accumulated set of experiences and apply it to one thing again, where it's like, man, I just go find a company that I want to help build and grow or start one and just rewind the tape and hit play and I'll be a lot smarter, faster, you know, to do that. Or what attracted me was like, let me take that and figure out, you know, I joined HubSpot's board. And I just got a lot of energy from, you know, being in the room with a company that was like three years or four years behind what I'd just seen. And I felt like when I had something to give, I'm like,

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  I think this is useful. Like, I know the problems. I know what's going on inside here, even though I'm not in the room with you. I've been in that room. I kind of know what it's like. And so I feel like I can be constructive and helpful. And that's what drew me to investing is on the other side of, of, you know, winning an opportunity to work with a company. You know, you're paired with a company for five, six, seven years. It's a long journey. There's a lot to figure out. And I just wanted to surround myself with, you know, a portfolio of companies and founders and management teams where, where I could do that. And part of the leading thing, like, I'm not leading, but, you know, there's mentorship there that's a part of leadership that I get a lot of energy from. And, and then, you know, there's business building that kind of on the sidelines I like to contribute to.

• 1:21:47Logan Bartlett?

  You could have picked a path to advising though, right? Where I don't, 40 billion times 12 years, I don't want to do the the math, but I think you probably didn't need the economics only of being a venture capitalist and done the HubSpot board, and I'm sure a bunch of other people would have had you on their board. Why, why the investing, the pursuit of, of all of this specifically?

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  Uh, one, um, I, I, I wanted exposure kind of inside of a firm and inside of investing. You just get exposure to also just a lot of different things that you're going to learn. And I'm a lifelong learner. And so I just, I love, part of the job that is a gift is, you know, every day is sort of a new adventure around a category or technology or a product or a team or a market. And, and, you know, you could do that on your own, but sort of the job is a forcing function to, to, to do that. And so I wanted that. I wanted to see a bunch of different things that I may not get exposed to, or I may not naturally kind of draw myself to or get drawn into based on my experience. And that's true. Um, I felt that, uh, I felt that

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  kind of the, the, the combination of, of my operating experience, and then I'd done a bunch of personal investing, I think professionally would, would, would make me, I mean, we'll see, would, would make me maybe a better investor. And, um, and, you know, I, I do like the discipline of, uh, of, um, both investing, because my money's invested alongside, you know, LP money, but I like the discipline of being a steward and responsible for other people's money.

• 1:23:20Logan Bartlett?

  There's a scoreboard at the end of the day.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  There's a scoreboard. And, and by the way, it's, and it is at the, I mean, you know this, it's a sales job. I mean, I started my career in sales. Like I joked, I joke with my wife, you know, because I, I joined Bond, uh, you know, I left Atlassian in June and joined Bond effectively November, December of 2020. And so it was sort of like prime pandemic years. And I joked that I'd come full circle to inside sales. It was just sitting in front of a Zoom.

• 1:23:43Logan Bartlett?

  Well, I remember us getting together and, uh, and, uh, it was the peak of just like go, go selling our souls to get in front of companies. And I could tell you were like, this, I thought we would do investing and it turns out I'm just doing sales, right?

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's sales, which is okay. I mean, there's like,

• 1:23:59Logan Bartlett?

  It's definitely shifted back. The power dynamic. You were at the peak of weirdness, I think, at that point in time. You were sort of exacerbated by what was going on.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  But there's, there's also a little nerve ending in me that, that enjoys that part of the job. You have to.

• 1:24:12Logan Bartlett?

  You're selling yourself too, which is nice. It's not like the engineers built the product and I'm going to try to polish it up, right? For you. And it like, you're selling, hey, you get to work with me at the end of the day. And there is something nice to that being the product.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  I think to, to be an investor and, and I think to be a good investor, you, you have to have that nerve ending.

• 1:24:31Logan Bartlett?

  You grew up in product marketing once upon a time and there's a weird number of people in the VC industry, yourself included, but also Eric Vischer from Benchmark, Mike Spicer from Sutter Hill, among I'm sure others that I'm forgetting. What do you think about product marketing itself leads to elements of potentially being great VCs?

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  I think it sort of sits, you know, sits at this sort of interconnected web of, you know, products, like the role describes, product, marketing, sales, commercialization, pricing and packaging, kind of messaging and narrative, you know, in product-led growth, like inside of Atlassian, you know, the product marketers, you know, really were the main, like the main person around like a huge chunk of the customer journey and kind of acquisition and engagement funnel. And so, and by the way, and so like you had to sit as a product marketer inside of Atlassian, you really called shots around how does demand gen work? How much does it make sense to spend on, on SEM or SEO versus kind of, you know, brand

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  advertising and kind of like display advertising or community development or event marketing in the field or, you know, whatever the other things were. Like you had to sit there and say, I'm actually responsible for what comes through that system. So I really need to be connected and in part because like I'm providing the messages that make those systems work around my product, but I really need to be connected around that. And so it's just, you know, just to sit at that kind of pivot point, pivot point around all of the different functions, both in product and in customer-facing teams and just gives you a really well-rounded perspective. Not all product marketing is kind of built that way, but you know, I think when it's built right, that's how it works.

• 1:26:16Logan Bartlett?

  My fiance is a product VP of Product Marketing at Maven, one of your portfolio companies. And I think she's gonna, I don't know if she'll ever go into VC, but she'll make a much better VC than I am because she has that purview and all of that stuff. How did you, how did you land on BOND? Why didn't you call me?

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Uh, so, yeah, so Bond, Bond kinda had a bunch of things that, that just were really attractive to me. I mean, for, for one, uh, and you know, you would, you would have ticked this bucket too, but just like really great people.

• 1:26:47Logan Bartlett?

  We didn't know each other at the time.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  Really, really great people, you know, I wanted to find a place where I would just enjoy doing the job with people that I would enjoy doing the job with. That was, that was important to me. And, uh, so really good people. It was, um, you know, it was a new firm. I mean, the, the heritage of the firm dates back to kind of, uh, you know, Marion team, starting the digital growth fund inside of Kleiner and they, they.

• 1:27:08Logan Bartlett?

  Mary Meeker, who's famed internet, uh, research analyst into Kleiner Perkins growth investor.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Yep. And so they had been, um, they'd been kind of rowing that boat for three funds inside of Kleiner and then came out. And so the firm was actually like a clean sheet of paper and that mattered to me because I wanted, like, I was, I was going to sign up, you know, to do this for a decade plus. And it was new to me. So I was diving in the deep end and, you know, I wanted, I was going to swim furiously. I'm like, I'm, I'm, I'm in the hole of a bunch of mixed metaphors. I'm in the hole like digging furiously. And I wanted to know that the partners that I was going to join would dig as furiously as, as me. And because it was new, they had to, right? Like it was, you know, it's just a brand new firm. It's like sink or swim. You're going to build it from scratch. Like you can trade a little bit off, maybe kind of personal reputation and things that, that, uh, they'd done at the digital growth fund.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  But to make Bond a thing, it's like, we're all in, we're making this a thing that mattered.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  I, you know, they, they had done some enterprise investing, but kind of the heritage of the firm was more consumer oriented. And, uh, and so it was an opportunity as a builder to kind of build from whole cloth and enterprise practice. And that's a unique rare opportunity. Like I could have, that would have come to Red Point as an example, would have been like, uh, maybe I would have added some pixie dust, but you guys would have been fine without me and it would have been a great enterprise practice.

• 1:28:30Logan Bartlett?

  We can talk about this.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh huh. But, uh, but, um, but the chance to kind of like, you know, mold clay.

• 1:28:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. There was definitely a Tetris, Tetris block that was open that you fit into.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  And those don't come along very often. Like I've been, you know, blessed with, with, with timing professionally and kind of more. More ways than one. And that was another one. I like looked around and it's like if any one of those ingredients weren't there, it it wouldn't, it wasn't any one, but it was a sort of the combination of all three. I was like, this is just really unique.

• 1:28:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  And in growth stage, by the way, it's like growth is I I I'm really animated by the the stage that I invest in. If like you're trying to find product market fit, I'm a less animated by it and I probably you could use me less. When you've got it and you're trying to figure out, you know, all of the dimensions of the business and how it needs to change as you go from 10 to 50 to 100 to a billion, I've I've seen and done that.

• 1:29:21Logan Bartlett?

  What surprised you most about being on the side of the table?

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  What surprised me most? Uh, well, I mean, I came like you mentioned this, but I came at kind of a really odd time. Like, so there was a bunch of frenetic energy in 2021 that I was surprised by.

• 1:29:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  And, uh, and, and, you know, I, in that period, um, you know, this is a, this is a courtship, you know, there should be a lot more data. In my opinion, there should be a lot more dating than there was in 2021 because like you are, you know, ideally, you are not just getting a wire transfer into a bank account. Um, in some cases, that may be all you want. And if that's all you want, declare it and just go get it. And by the way, I don't begrudge anyone that just wants that. If they got everything else figured out, it's like, you know, I just, I just want the money.

• 1:30:04Logan Bartlett?

  There was a good animal firm that would give them that stuff once upon a time.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I I do think I do think there's and for in what I see at least, repeat founders, people that have been in it before, value this a lot more than first time founders, um, which makes sense because I think they've just got some scar tissue and war wounds. But, um, but I, you know, I wanted to to spend a lot of time trying to to to give founders that I was courting or I was, I was trying to get to know as much as I possibly could where they were like, man, I actually want a lot of that and or I want a lot of it after the fact. And as long as like the color of money is similar.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  There are other things that I could advantage my company with that I should care about. And it's a self-serving pitch, but, but it's, you know, for me, for me, like, that matters. Like, it's genuine. And what surprised me is, like, in that period, there just was a lot less of that. It was like very transactional. It was like, I just care about kind of the color money. And if I need anything else, I'll just go figure out how to get that later.

• 1:31:04Logan Bartlett?

  They're saying that. Do you imagine what they're saying to me? You know, you have your Atlassian experience. I'm like, yeah, you know, I did this enterprise software investing before.

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. It wasn't universal. I mean, the companies that I managed to invest in, I think, cared about the same things I did and recognized that, you know, it's a long journey. It's not just sort of a series B or a series C. It's, you know, five to seven years of hard company building.

• 1:31:25Logan Bartlett?

  Are you enjoying it now more than you were in 2021?

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I enjoy different aspects of it. I mean, there's more of that. And so I enjoy that more. You know, the market, market is still coming back. You know, I think there's the activity kind of cadences increasing, but I also like more activity. I like kind of more, more, you know, companies to be raising. And there's so much war chested capital from 21 and 22 that it might be a little bit wild, a little wild, but.

• 1:31:52Logan Bartlett?

  What gets you excited about an investment?

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Maybe no surprise, some of the same things that, that I, I, I love and had a chance to build at Atlassian. Like, if you've got an opportunity to be ubiquitous, like, if you've just got a big market. I'm way more excited about kind of big markets and quantum of, of customers and the ability to build differentiated business models to acquire them. I really love, I love that. I'm a little bit less excited about,

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  you know, I've got 500 customers that I'm going after. And, and even though like the, you know, Pluntery was that, like Pluntery only served the Fortune 500 and did it really well and built a great business. But just personally, I'm a little less animated about that than I am about just doing things different, differently and, and unique. And, and then, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm excited about kind of the, just the modal shifts, you know, that we're in the midst of, you know, right now that are, that are very early. But I kind of went into this with an AI ML. Thesis around how it had the potential to reshape categories, which I believed. And, uh, and I think, you know, that belief is, is, is anything but accelerated. Or, you know, accelerated.

• 1:33:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. Has it been weird to no longer have direct influence over decision making and said soft diplomacy as a means of action? Like, see, once upon a time, you could direct thousands of people and you owned the decision one way or the other. And now it's kind of like you give soft advice around stuff and counsel. But.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  No, I, I'm, you know, I'm comfortable with that because, um, a couple of things like one, I know how hard it is, like in the foxhole. And, uh, and, you know, it kind of, you know, when we had people that advised the company, um, it did irritate me sometimes when, you know, you'd come and they'd be, what about, what about accents? Like, yeah, we, come on.

• 1:33:51Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, thought about that. Yeah.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and not to dismiss, but it's sort of like, we've spent so much time, like we have covered, we've covered sort of like so many angles.

• 1:33:59Logan Bartlett?

  You can say Excel.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  We've covered so many angles and, uh, and so like part of it just comes from, um, knowing what I don't know about what goes on kind of in the trenches and how hard that is nose to grindstone and, and, and being able to sort of say like, I just want to contribute a couple of things or thoughts or pressure test some stuff. But in the context of appreciating all that goes into it, part of it comes from that. Part of it also just comes from the experience of, of being on the board, you know, being on the board of, of HubSpot and, and kind of growing through that process of being able to contribute in, in a different way than just calling shots or sort of saying, man, if only it were me and my team that kind of went in there and did it,

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  we do it this way and we do it faster. Um, and then again, circles back to, I don't have all of the, the data and circumstances to know. Like maybe I would end up at the same spot, you know, given the same set of ingredients. And so I'm actually comfortable with that. I think it's sort of mentorship and idea and pressure testing and have you thought about where I really try to to challenge myself to supply the have you thought abouts if I think they're really out there. Like they're not the the low hanging fruit have you thought abouts. They're like high up on the tree and still kind of productive and useful. And that's and by the way, if they're too far up on the

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  tree or if they're like, I don't know, crazy or kind of rotten fruit that have already dropped to the ground, I'm okay. Yeah, it's okay.

• 1:35:31Logan Bartlett?

  How do you guys make decisions at Bond? How do you come to an investment decision?

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Pretty collaboratively. We're small, you know, like most firms are. You know, I think we try to try to kind of lean on everybody's individual strengths and superpowers, sort of like the Voltron effect of everybody's got kind of like a different thing that they could particularly spike on. And can you bring that into kind of the situation into the context and kind of apply it and challenge, you know, challenge an investment decision or a company that we're considering through that rubric. Like, we don't all need to, you know, to plow over the same ground that's kind of rotative that's obvious. It's sort of like, and sort of my thing would be naturally around sales and marketing. Like, you know,

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  even though I've never worked for a consumer business, like, I understand how sales and marketing works kind of at large and a bunch of the same tactics. And so I can kind of, I can put a lens sort of on a particular kind of business, maybe in a unique way that I think would be valuable. And then it's, there's always going to be an element of, of, you know, kind of just pressure testing and challenging. And we thought about this. Have we looked at that? Have you looked at this way? You know, stand and defend this particular bear case or this particular argument. And mostly, that's just that pressure, you know, I think either highlights a crack that we hadn't considered, it just makes the diamond kind of a little bit, you know, shinier with less defects at the end of it. And then, then there's conviction, you know, like, I think it's like, you want to, you want

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  to make sure that you're deeply convicted. Because at the end of the day, you know, the firm, the firm is making the investment, but there's like a partner that is going to be connected to that investment personally for a long time. So you have to like really say.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  You know, I'm convicted about this, not emotionally, objectively. It's always going to be a little bit emotional and that stands for something. And so they're sort of testing all that.

• 1:37:22Logan Bartlett?

  What's the underwriting or framework of like a bond company? Like when you guys say you're looking around the table and saying, okay, we're going to do this. Is it really an iconic founder? Is this really a longstanding IPO, public business or something? Like, is there a heuristic or framework at which you guys assess these things?

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  I think we look for, we look for generational businesses. Does this, does this business have the ability to be generational? To be a truly generational business? And does it have kind of the raw ingredients? All of the things that, you know, that we could both list that go into that. Is the market big enough? Does the team have the ability to execute or to find people that can? You know, does a competitive landscape? Is it disruptable in some way that, that either the business may be blind to? Or we, we're not thinking about like, all of those things go into it. But at the end of it, it's like, you know, can this company actually like be generational? You know, be a 10 to 20 to 30 year company along that way. You know, and by the way, if the answer to that question is yes, higher probability that you are going to go public.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  You are going to like, you know, build something meaningful from, from an early age.

• 1:38:28Logan Bartlett?

  You've been in venture now for coming up on two and a half years.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  Two and a half years, yeah.

• 1:38:33Logan Bartlett?

  What have you learned most from Mary Meeker?

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Man, a lot. Uh, Mary, uh, a couple of things like Mary asks a really good question. So Mary has like this uncanny ability to snap, almost better than anyone else I've seen. Just snap into kind of a different reality and occupy it, like almost the reality of the company. And then the questions that she asks occupying that reality are just always, always in tune and insightful and challenging. And like, she's just like, that is her gift. And she can, she, part of it is like, she can also pattern match like nobody else, which is useful where she's seen a song that, you know, might have similar notes, played by a different band, and you can kind of like bring that into the context.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  That's sort of one thing, you know, she's also has like, has an eagle, I mean, we, we, you know, we do kind of a lot of like, deep financial modeling and part of this probably is her kind of early day analyst training from Morgan Stanley, but she has like an eagle eye for, you know, uncanny detail inside of like, a very complex spreadsheet. You know, which again, is an acquired skill, but it's, it's amazing, you know, it's like, you can kind of look at something, and by the way, I've looked at lots of P and P and L's over the years and sort of lots of big gnarly, complicated spreadsheet, but she has the ability to kind of zero in on a spot and also understand the right question

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  that contextualizes why that spot looks funky. It's like, let's talk about that spot. And like, and, and by the way, like, zooming back from that spot, how does the, the rest of this spreadsheet, how does, how does the rest of this model or, or kind of like, what, what should we be asking that that kind of spot eliminated?

• 1:40:22Logan Bartlett?

  It's often much more important in consumer investing because there's a lot more stuff going on and the acquisition and the COGS and the SaaS, fairly simple, but clearly she's made, she's done both, but been an iconic consumer investor.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  And, and it's sort of like the, you know, that kind of marriage of deeply effective quant, qual is, is, you know, is a superpower, is a superpower.

• 1:40:46Logan Bartlett?

  Any other investor or operator influences that you really internalized a point or two that you, you bring to work every day or that, that's super helpful?

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, part of, part of what, what drew me to investing was, you know, my experience with Rich Wong at Excel and actually, you know, the Excel team who, who I know really well, they were really-

• 1:41:11Logan Bartlett?

  If you're gonna say something nice, I'm gonna bleep this out.

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  They were a really important part of, of, of, you know, our journey and, and, you know, in a way that, you know, I would say- Like, there's not one thing that I'm like, man, if Excel hadn't done that one thing, Atlassian wouldn't be Atlassian. But there were sort of lots of, lots of, of, of significant things, maybe small, but significant, small and mighty.

• 1:41:34Logan Bartlett?

  Just guiding hand type stuff.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, I don't know if this story's been told, but, you know, Rich was, Rich had such kinship, I think, to the company that, you know, he, you know, I think naturally was looking forward to the IPO. I mean, the funny thing is like, Rich would always just say like, hey, you know, the, the funny joke inside of Atlassian is like, the answer to when will we go public was always 12 to 18 months for maybe like four and a half years. And it always felt true at the time and eventually it was true. But Rich, I imagine at times was like, ah, man, can you know, like, when, when will it happen? And so when it finally happened, like, you know, this is a guy that had been super excited about this outcome. And a week, a weekend before he got into a small skiing accident, I think, chasing his

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  young son and blew out his knee. And so couldn't go to New York. And this is, you know, five years after being with this company, through trials and tribulations and all sorts of stuff, and here we were in our moment, he couldn't make it. And we knew how important it was to him. And he was so important to us that we, we, we organized, you know, kind of a town hall and brought him in on a wheelchair and thanked him in front of, you know, all the employees for, for his contribution to the journey that we didn't want to go unnoticed. And it was like, it just sort of, you know, like,

• 1:42:51Logan Bartlett?

  Super cool.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  Super cool. And, and by the way, he's still on the board. You know, he's still on the board of Atlassian, you know, I don't even how many, how many years later, it's like, you know, certainly 13 years after he made an investment, he's still on the board. And I think it's testament to him as a human being, but also just the relationship that an investor can build with a company over a long period of time is what drew me to invest in. Alex Bard, your partner is kind of another one. Like, he's an operator that had crossed the chasm. And, and I've known Alex for a long time and spent a bunch of time. Asking him question after question after question like, what is this like? What do you like? What do you don't like? You know, spent hours and hours.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  And the positive, you know, experience that he's had in Red Point as an investor and what he was able to do meant a lot to me because I think we're like similarly wired. And so it's sort of like a validation, a deeply personal validation point where you're like, yeah, this is different. I understand the ways that are different, that it'll be different. I actually think I'll be able to navigate them in the way that, that a good operator like Alex has to become a good investor.

• 1:43:55Logan Bartlett?

  Jay, thanks for doing this.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you bet.