Mike Cannon-Brookes

Mike Cannon-Brookes co-founded Atlassian in 2002 in Sydney, Australia, alongside Scott Farquhar, building it into one of the world's most important enterprise software companies. Atlassian's tools — Jira (project and issue tracking), Confluence (team wiki and documentation), Trello (visual project management), and Bitbucket (code repository) — are deeply embedded in the workflows of over 300,000 organizations worldwide, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. The company pioneered the product-led growth model in enterprise software, growing primarily through self-service adoption rather than traditional enterprise sales forces. Cannon-Brookes (alongside Farquhar, who transitioned to a special advisor role) has been driving Atlassian's most important strategic transition: migrating customers from server-based deployments to Atlassian Cloud. This forced migration, while initially controversial with some customers, dramatically improves Atlassian's revenue predictability, customer lifetime value, and ability to deliver AI-powered features. Atlassian Intelligence, the company's AI assistant, is being embedded across all products. His key decisions involve cloud migration completion, AI product development and monetization, enterprise market expansion (moving upmarket to larger organizations), pricing strategy, and platform ecosystem growth.