Technology Pioneer 2011 - Scott farquhar - Atlassian

What makes Atlassian so special is that we empower so many software development teams around the world Atlassian's products power 20,000 development teams in 150 countries around the world Development teams that build the Sony Playstation or are building Formula One cars or Microsoft or a dozen other large companies that you would have heard of, as well as small consulting companies and start ups. So what makes us so special is that we're powering software development and engineering around the world So I think the best country in the world if I had a choice about where to start a tech company in the world it would be Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley has the perfect mix of entrepreneurs and a history of entrepreneurship. The investment and capital required, they have a large number of Venture Capitalists and a great number of contacts and people who have done it before. So, if I had to start again, it would be the perfect place to do it. However, we're an Australian-based company and we're proud of that and we want to inspire other Australian companies to also start Start-Up companies, to not go work for Corporate, not go work for a big bank but to start up from scratch, so we really want to inspire other Australian companies. So there are a lot of models of Innovation. Some models are where you have the "Lone Genius" or "The Boss as a Genius". Some models require you cluster all your geniuses together in a Lab. I think the model that's most sustainable is the model where you "Make every employee a genius". Every employee gets a chance to innovate. At Atlassian we run quite a few programs to help facilitate that. We have a program called "FedEx Day" where you get 24 hours to build and ship a product and that gets a lot of the creative juices flowing in our engineering. A second program, as a result of the success of FedEx Day, we implemented "20% Time", something that 3M and Google have done previously. We've been quite successful at giving developers one day a week to create, innovate, come up with new ideas and get them shipped in a product and that's been a really successful. Atlassian gets an opportunity to give back through our "Four 1s" model. Four 1s for us is that we give 1% of our products, we donate open-source licenses and licenses to non-profits so they can use our products free of charge. We give 1% of the equity in the company so the Atlassian Foundation owns 1% of Atlassian which gives it a long-term future. We donate 1% of employee time so up to 5 days a year employees can spend on charities of their choice, something that they choose. And you can also spend 1% of our revenue, so we give away 1% of our revenue to the Atlassian Foundation. And so, through all these programs, Atlassian gives a chance to give back to the world for everything it has given us.