Technology History | UNSW Kensington — The Goal Was a $48,500 Graduate Salary

The number that produced Atlassian was a graduate salary: $48,500 a year, the offer Scott Farquhar turned down from PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2002.

He and Mike Cannon-Brookes had met as students at the University of New South Wales, on this campus at Kensington.

In 2001 Cannon-Brookes emailed his classmates asking whether anyone wanted to start a technology company after graduation, and Farquhar was the only one who replied.

Writing on the company blog years later, Farquhar set the ambition out plainly: earn more than the salary he had declined, and do it without wearing a suit to work.

He described the ground they were standing on as having "no technology industry in Australia at the time, nor a start-up industry."

The business they actually started was unglamorous. The two of them sold technical support to other companies' customer-service teams, taking calls at all hours from their bedrooms, which is why the earliest Atlassian has no address anyone can stand in front of.

The pivot came out of their own tooling. Bugzilla did not fit the way they worked, so they wrote a tracker for themselves, then worked out that the tracker was the better business.

Atlassian's own account of its first twenty years explains the name: Jira is a play on Gojira, the Japanese title of the 1954 Godzilla film, and Bugzilla was the tool it was written to replace.

Jira shipped in 2002 and paid for everything that followed — no outside investor for eight years, and 1,259 employees by the time the company filed to go public in 2015.

The campus is public and the main walkway runs straight through it. Farquhar has since come back here to lecture.

Photo: J Bar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons