Scott Farquhar on Going From Bootstrap to $60m. What I’ve learnt

Atlassian has been a successful software bootstrap, right up until they took $60m funding from Accel Partners in July 2010. Scott packs some of what he’s learnt about running a software company into thirty minutes. You’ll hear about how to pick a business model, how to get free marketing, how they hired 32 people in 6 months, and how they built a workplace that has won numerous HR awards.

Scott Farquhar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Atlassian, an innovative, award-winning enterprise software company. Atlassian produces tools that help technical and business teams collaborate, plan projects and build software. Based in Australia, Atlassian currently has over 17,000 enterprise customers around the globe and has been named one of the “Fastest Growing Companies” by both Deloitte and BRW Magazine.

Scott was awarded the ‘Australian IT Professional of the Year’ in 2004. In 2006 Scott was the youngest person to ever be awarded ‘Australian Entrepreneur of the Year’ by Ernst & Young.

Scott loves encouraging budding entrepreneurs as well as speaking to many university groups.

Find Scott’s talk video and more from Scott below.

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Video

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Scott Farquhar.

Scott is the one who started a multi billion dollar business mainly to avoid having to get a regular job. He co-founded Atlassian with Mike Cannon-Brookes in 2002.

Since then, it has grown to be one of Australia’s largest software exporters. Last year exporting over $AUD 20m of software to over 8,000 customers in more than 90 countries. Its customer base reads like a who’s who of global companies, and includes technology giants like Apple, Cisco, HP, Oracle, SAP; every major investment bank (BNP Paribas, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, World Bank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Merrill Linch), NASA and the European Space Agency; GE, 3M, BHP Billiton, BMW, the McLaren F1 team and so on.

In 2005, both Deloitte and BRW named Atlassian as Australia’s fastest growing software company. Scott has also been awarded the ‘Australian IT Professional of the Year’, and the ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ in both the young and overall categories, and went on to represent Australia at the July ‘World Entrepreneur of the Year’ in Monte Carlo.

More from Scott