Story of Australia's 5th Richest Man - Mike Cannon-Brookes - Founder of Atlassian

According to Forbes, The fifth place or Australia’s wealthiest people goes to Mike Cannon. He has a net worth of 14.4 billion USD (2020).

let’s see how this 41-year-old entrepreneur became an aspiring pillar to all the tech enthusiasts over the globe.

Born as a son to a bank executive.

Mike was born on the 17th of November 1979. His father was a global banking executive, and His name was also Mike. 

Mike Cannon spent his youth in Sydney and attended Cranbrook School there.

Scott Farquhar(Other Cofounder of Atlassain) was also born on 1979.He was a pupil of James Ruse Agricultural High School at Carlingford, NSW.

After graduating from college, both registered at the University of New South Wales, in which they met each other for the very first moment. 

Both Mike And James were doing same course and became best buddies creating a powerful bond with each other.This bond later gave birth to a billion dollar business. Both obtained a Bachelors in Arts and a Bachelor’s degree in Science.

Atlassian – the 40 Billion USD brainchild of Mike and James.

Atlassian is a very famous internet collaboration tool.Millons of internet & software related professionals use their tools everyday.

Today,Atlassian serves some seriously high-profile clients, including Tesla, SpaceX, Spotify and every Ivy League university.

0n 2017,Atlassian acquired Trello,which is a very famous project management tool in modern days for Trello for $425 million.

10K$ Debt to a 40B$ business.

Both Mike and James were sharing the same vision to start their own venture on software business.After many sleepless nights and intensive research Mike and James came up with a revolutionary business model that could help many software professionals to work in collaboration. 

They were ready to go all in on this idea and rented a place in Sydney for 10,000$ which they took from their credit cards.

They named this business Atlassian.

Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneurs of the Year in just four years

just after 4 years of starting the company, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar were named Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneurs of the Year for Australia, in 2006. It also raised a funding worth $60 million in venture capital from Accel Partners in the year 2010. In the same year, the company acquired Bitbucket, a hosted service for code collaboration. Just after a year, the company announced a revenue of $102 million, followed by a $144 million revenue in 2013, and $215 million revenue in 2014. By November 2015, Atlassian had a revenue worth $320 million.

Global Company

Today, Atlassian has over 5000 employees.It serves more than 100,000 customers and millions of users across the world.It has its offices in five different countries. The headquarters still remains at Sydney.

Atlassian made its initial public offering (IPO), putting its market capitalization at $4.37 billion on the NASDAQ stock exchange, in December 2015. It has many programming-based products under its name, including Crucible, FishEye, Bamboo, and Clover. It has also tried its hands in the chat business by acquiring HipChat, an instant messenger and launching Stride, a web chat alternative to Slack, but soon quit their operations in the same. Atlassian biggest acquisitions include Trello for $425 million, in January 2017, and OpsGenie for $295m, in September 2018.

Personal Life

Mike is married to Annie Todd and has four children with her. Farquhar is married to Kim Jackson, and they have three children together. Mike and Farquhar are neighbours and live in Centennial Park, Sydney, in their lavish homes. Farquhar bought the Fairfax family’s former ancestral Sydney harbourside home worth A$75 million, in 2017, and in 2018, Mike also purchased Australia’s most expensive house for around $100million, the Fairwater, next to Farquhar’s.

The two were named among the richest Australians, aged under 40 on the BRW Young Rich list in 2007. In 2016, the two were also placed in the Forbes list of Australia’s 50 Richest people.

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