Atlassian billionaire boss, Mike Cannon-Brookes, faces his biggest test yet
Six weeks ago Mike Cannon-Brookes was the billionaire whose company had become the cautionary tale of Australian tech.
Atlassian’s shares have fallen 70 percent to $57 in 12 months as investors fear its products will be replaced by AI-generated alternatives and its end customers, software engineers, will be laid off en masse. The Sydney-based software giant has been removed from the Nasdaq 100 list of companies. He and co-founder Scott Farquhar had paused regular share sales. And in March, the man who once preached Atlassian’s welcoming, irreverent culture made headlines by firing 1,600 people in a video message.
Then came the quarter that, in the words of high-profile US tech industry analyst Dan Ives, “threw the software thesis out the window.” Atlassian’s cloud revenue increased 29 percent; Its stock rose 25 percent in a single after-hours session and 50 percent in three weeks, reaching nearly $90.
At Atlassian’s major annual conference in California this week, Cannon-Brookes will try to convince institutional buyers, skeptical investors and his own staff that this rebound is the beginning of a turnaround rather than the dead-cat bounce some critics still suspect.
“All you can do is keep a firm hand on the tiller,” Cannon-Brookes said in an interview before the conference. “On one hand, don’t get too excited… We have a lot of work to do. We have a great job and people will take advantage of it.”
The evaluation will begin in earnest this week as Cannon-Brookes embarks on the most significant product launch of his career as solo CEO.
The headline announcement is the unveiling of a tool Atlassian calls the Teamwork Graph, which allows companies to push data within Atlassian software and connected systems like Salesforce and Workday into AI agents and third-party tools. Created over eight years, the chart maps the relationships between people, projects, documents and decisions within an organization, giving AI a working picture of how a business runs.
Cannon-Brookes claims that customers who add graphing to their AI applications will see “30, 40, 45 percent better in quality” responses at up to half the cost of other processes.
Alongside Teamwork Graph’s expanded reach, the tech mogul will also announce that AI agents in project management app Jira are now out of testing and available to the public, allowing companies to assign them real tasks that used to be done by humans. There will also be expansions to Atlassian’s Rovo AI assistant and a new command-line interface for developers and, increasingly, the AI agents that work with them.
‘I personally am a believer in artificial intelligence, I am optimistic. I think we will see many more jobs created as a result. The ‘easy apocalypse’ narrative is quite premature.’
Mike Cannon-Brookes
It’s a wave of products designed to convince enterprise buyers that Atlassian, long derided as the Australian software company that hasn’t made an annual profit in a decade, is not only AI-proof but also AI-specific.
Lewis-Ethan Healey, chief design technologist who has been at Atlassian for three years, said the company feels sharper than at any point in his tenure. “From executive leadership to IC [individual contributor]we feel like we are working on the right things at the same time and delivering faster and faster,” Healy said.
Jade Jiang, Atlassian’s lead product designer for more than five years who sat down for an interview alongside Healy and Cannon-Brookes, said she felt the company was at the center of its AI ethos.
“Being in the tech industry feels like a defining moment, and it’s exciting to be at Atlassian while we’re at the heart of it,” he said. “There’s a real intensity and openness to the culture here… You’re surrounded by incredibly talented people who really want to collaborate and want to highlight each other’s ideas.”
But the layoffs in March still left fresh wounds. Some top artists were released; Some staff were cut without any warning, just four months into their duties. Former employees who spoke to this imprint before described a process that seemed arbitrary and incomprehensible.
“There was zero visibility into who was specifically excluded from calling individual people’s names,” one said. “A senior [colleague] People on my team who exceeded expectations in the last performance review have been laid off, but there are new team members with less than three months tenure who are unimpressed.”
Asked about the culture, Cannon-Brookes said her job was to “make the tough decisions.” “That doesn’t make decisions easier to make. That doesn’t mean decisions aren’t made. Too much empathy, too much difficulty about the impact on people.”
He stopped. “Our culture is always evolving. I would say our culture is pretty resilient. We want to be a winning company. We want to be a great company. To do that, you have to meet the bar of what a great market means as a software company.”
Pressed on whether AI agents will mean Atlassian’s headcount will continue to fall, Cannon-Brookes went to the Industrial Revolution.
“From the steam engine to the cotton gin to whatever it is, we’ve seen it all, right? … I’m personally an AI believer, an optimist. We’ll see a lot more jobs created as a result. The ‘easy doom’ narrative is pretty premature.”
Cannon-Brookes has been running Atlassian for almost two years without Scott Farquhar, the schoolmate he founded with 24 years ago. Anonymous sources have claimed in other media outlets that the relationship had soured (Cannon-Brookes denies these reports) and that the 46-year-old man was able to steer the ship on his own.
“Every time we hang out he’s so fit and tanned,” she said of Farquhar. “It’s been a crash year or two for everybody. You’re always going to get 80 percent of the time with these transitions. But inevitably there will be things like, ‘Man, this is the week I wish Scott was here.’ We’ve had a lot of those.”
Cannon-Brookes does not give a timeline for achieving GAAP profitability, an important benchmark for investors and the company.
“We continue to move towards this stage. We want to continue to be a growing company. We also need to be a profitable company,” Cannon-Brookes said.
“Managing the two together is part of the job.”
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David Swan is the technology editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor of The Australian newspaper.Connect with: X or email.
