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Tech Bros
The extraordinary story of Atlassian - how two university friends with a billion-dollar idea created a global tech company.
In a cramped share house in inner-city Sydney, university classmates Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar started working together to create a $160 billion company from scratch and revolutionise the way the world works.
They couldn't have been more different - Cannon-Brookes the son of a wealthy banker and educated in one of Sydney's top private schools, while Farquhar's western suburbs parents worked multiple jobs to make ends meet - yet together, they rode the software boom to unimaginable success, creating tools that reshaped how teams collaborate worldwide.
Atlassian's Nasdaq debut shattered records, making its co-founders billionaires in the process, and its rise to the top was marked by bold investments, climate crusades and a relentless drive to innovate. Built on the very principle of teamwork, Atlassian's groundbreaking collaboration software would prove wildly popular in the world's biggest corporations including eBay, Cisco, Visa and Proctor & Gamble.
But as Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar's empire grew from a single email into a global powerhouse, so did the cracks in their partnership. Within 20 years the pressure of success would bring the co-founders into conflict. Disputes over strategy, property and ambition destroyed their friendship just as the rise of artificial intelligence threatened what they had created.
Expertly crafted by two of Australia's top business journalists, Tech Bros is the gripping story of Australia's first truly global tech company.
In a cramped share house in inner-city Sydney, university classmates Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar started working together to create a $160 billion company from scratch and revolutionise the way the world works.
They couldn't have been more different - Cannon-Brookes the son of a wealthy banker and educated in one of Sydney's top private schools, while Farquhar's western suburbs parents worked multiple jobs to make ends meet - yet together, they rode the software boom to unimaginable success, creating tools that reshaped how teams collaborate worldwide.
Atlassian's Nasdaq debut shattered records, making its co-founders billionaires in the process, and its rise to the top was marked by bold investments, climate crusades and a relentless drive to innovate. Built on the very principle of teamwork, Atlassian's groundbreaking collaboration software would prove wildly popular in the world's biggest corporations including eBay, Cisco, Visa and Proctor & Gamble.
But as Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar's empire grew from a single email into a global powerhouse, so did the cracks in their partnership. Within 20 years the pressure of success would bring the co-founders into conflict. Disputes over strategy, property and ambition destroyed their friendship just as the rise of artificial intelligence threatened what they had created.
Expertly crafted by two of Australia's top business journalists, Tech Bros is the gripping story of Australia's first truly global tech company.
315 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 11, 2026
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August 16, 2026
Tech Bros : The extraordinary story of Atlassian (2026) by John Stensholt and Perry Williams describes the rise of Atlassian. Atlassian was created by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar and is behind the Jira issue tracking system and the Confluence, which is a WYSIWYG wiki.
For the millions of people like myself who use Jira daily it is often found to be “The worst bug tracking system, except for all the others” to paraphrase Winston Churchill on Democracy. But, for many of us it’s interesting to find out the story behind its creation. This book covers that. The excellent podcast “How I Built This” with Guy Raz also has a very good episode on Atlassian that was used by the book.
The book first covers the background of Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar. Cannon-Brookes was born in the US, his father was a British senior Citibank executive who came to Australia. Cannon-Brookes at one point went to a very expensive British boarding school and flew back to Australia regularly. Farquhar grew up in much more modest circumstances but was very smart and went to the a selective state high school. The two met at the University of New South Wales. Cannon-Brookes had already started one company at University but then was keen to try another so he emailed other students and only one, Farquhar, replied. The two set up the company in Cannon-Brookes’s student house. The house was, mind you, owned by Cannon-Brookes’ parents.
Atlassian was set up with no Venture Capital money initially which has enabled Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes to hold a lot of the company. Jira was created at the right time. It was now viable for companies to buy relatively cheap software like Jira with a credit card and then they could just run it. Now expensive sales team was needed. Jira competed with Bugzilla, which was open source but not as good. It also competed with a raft of other, much more expensive system sold by IBM and many others. Initially the two were trying to create a company that could pay them as much as a graduate job at a big firm would. Soon, it would pay them far more than that.
Jira, and then Confluence, outcompeted their competitors. FogBugz, Redmine, Rational Clearquest and many others are far less used than Jira. Jira is often disliked by many of its users, but that is probably in the nature of any software that is used to track work. It is capable of being used well by large organisations, even if it is often poorly utilised.
The growth of the company, where Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar really built a better product is neglected by the book. Both are described as being very smart and technically able. Cannon-Brookes co-wrote a book on Java while working at Atlassian. Farquhar is described as being even more technical and extremely capable. Jira was carefully built on Java and Javascript and has been made to scale to hundreds of millions of users.
The book has quite a bit of the wives and families of Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar, which is of some interest but it’s not as interesting as why the two succeeded when hundreds of other Australian companies had nowhere near the same level of success. Farquhar married a literal rock star who had an engineering degree and became a merchant banker. Cannon-Brookes married a fashion designer. The two both had lots of kids and were going to live next to each other in houses worth ten of millions of dollars. Except they didn’t. This is where the drama starts. There were objections to renovations in one house and the two’s wives disliked each other. This led to the extremely expensive properties lying empty.
The book describes how the two and their wives bought multiple properties all over Australia. It’s gossip, admittedly somewhat interesting, but still. If you were a billionaire who wouldn’t buy a few houses that were extremely expensive?
The two also started to invest their billions and they diversified out of Atlassian. Also, to both their credit they have invested a lot in other startups in Australia. This includes the unicorn company Canva among others. Both have also invested substantially in renewable energy companies in Australia. Both care a great deal about climate change and have also funded politicians in Australia. Amusingly and hypocritically Cannon-Brookes also bought himself a private jet and got Atlassian to sponsor a Formula-1 team. Presumably it’s hard to go to a COP Summit and be taken seriously unless you have your own flying private turbine driven transport.
Cannon-Brookes also wound up getting divorced which is covered in the book. This has meant that Atlassian now has three ownership groups, Farquhar, Cannon-Brookes and his ex-wife. This may change the future of the company.
The last parts of the book describe how Atlassian will fare in the AI age. There are questions about whether perhaps an AI assisted and coded open source tracking system might replace Jira. Atlassian’s share price has falled by well over a third since ChatGPT has arrived. However there are also rumours that a large AI company such as Anthropic might buy Atlassian for it’s very valuable customer base.
Tech Bros isn’t a great book. There is too much about the personal lives of the founders and not enough about how they actually built a software company worth tens of billions of dollars in Australia. Why did they succeed when thousands of others failed? The book says basically that they were extremely smart, driven and perhaps lucky. Perhaps this is as far as you can capture this kind of success.
For the millions of people like myself who use Jira daily it is often found to be “The worst bug tracking system, except for all the others” to paraphrase Winston Churchill on Democracy. But, for many of us it’s interesting to find out the story behind its creation. This book covers that. The excellent podcast “How I Built This” with Guy Raz also has a very good episode on Atlassian that was used by the book.
The book first covers the background of Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar. Cannon-Brookes was born in the US, his father was a British senior Citibank executive who came to Australia. Cannon-Brookes at one point went to a very expensive British boarding school and flew back to Australia regularly. Farquhar grew up in much more modest circumstances but was very smart and went to the a selective state high school. The two met at the University of New South Wales. Cannon-Brookes had already started one company at University but then was keen to try another so he emailed other students and only one, Farquhar, replied. The two set up the company in Cannon-Brookes’s student house. The house was, mind you, owned by Cannon-Brookes’ parents.
Atlassian was set up with no Venture Capital money initially which has enabled Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes to hold a lot of the company. Jira was created at the right time. It was now viable for companies to buy relatively cheap software like Jira with a credit card and then they could just run it. Now expensive sales team was needed. Jira competed with Bugzilla, which was open source but not as good. It also competed with a raft of other, much more expensive system sold by IBM and many others. Initially the two were trying to create a company that could pay them as much as a graduate job at a big firm would. Soon, it would pay them far more than that.
Jira, and then Confluence, outcompeted their competitors. FogBugz, Redmine, Rational Clearquest and many others are far less used than Jira. Jira is often disliked by many of its users, but that is probably in the nature of any software that is used to track work. It is capable of being used well by large organisations, even if it is often poorly utilised.
The growth of the company, where Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar really built a better product is neglected by the book. Both are described as being very smart and technically able. Cannon-Brookes co-wrote a book on Java while working at Atlassian. Farquhar is described as being even more technical and extremely capable. Jira was carefully built on Java and Javascript and has been made to scale to hundreds of millions of users.
The book has quite a bit of the wives and families of Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar, which is of some interest but it’s not as interesting as why the two succeeded when hundreds of other Australian companies had nowhere near the same level of success. Farquhar married a literal rock star who had an engineering degree and became a merchant banker. Cannon-Brookes married a fashion designer. The two both had lots of kids and were going to live next to each other in houses worth ten of millions of dollars. Except they didn’t. This is where the drama starts. There were objections to renovations in one house and the two’s wives disliked each other. This led to the extremely expensive properties lying empty.
The book describes how the two and their wives bought multiple properties all over Australia. It’s gossip, admittedly somewhat interesting, but still. If you were a billionaire who wouldn’t buy a few houses that were extremely expensive?
The two also started to invest their billions and they diversified out of Atlassian. Also, to both their credit they have invested a lot in other startups in Australia. This includes the unicorn company Canva among others. Both have also invested substantially in renewable energy companies in Australia. Both care a great deal about climate change and have also funded politicians in Australia. Amusingly and hypocritically Cannon-Brookes also bought himself a private jet and got Atlassian to sponsor a Formula-1 team. Presumably it’s hard to go to a COP Summit and be taken seriously unless you have your own flying private turbine driven transport.
Cannon-Brookes also wound up getting divorced which is covered in the book. This has meant that Atlassian now has three ownership groups, Farquhar, Cannon-Brookes and his ex-wife. This may change the future of the company.
The last parts of the book describe how Atlassian will fare in the AI age. There are questions about whether perhaps an AI assisted and coded open source tracking system might replace Jira. Atlassian’s share price has falled by well over a third since ChatGPT has arrived. However there are also rumours that a large AI company such as Anthropic might buy Atlassian for it’s very valuable customer base.
Tech Bros isn’t a great book. There is too much about the personal lives of the founders and not enough about how they actually built a software company worth tens of billions of dollars in Australia. Why did they succeed when thousands of others failed? The book says basically that they were extremely smart, driven and perhaps lucky. Perhaps this is as far as you can capture this kind of success.
August 15, 2026
a kinda crappy repackaging of columns from the australian. ai could do a better job of repackaging existing materials into a book. almost no focus on how they ran the business, just gossip and focus on extra curriculars.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews