I’m a big fan of Atlassian. I first got to know the company through a couple of channels — I had developer friends who used their various tools and I’d heard much of the “Aussie co-founders take their company state-side” theme.
It was a year or so later that I bumped into Atlassian’s U.S. president, Jay Simons, at some event or another. Simons and I hit it off immediately — helped by the fact that he, like myself, is a runner. We went on a bunch of early morning San Francisco runs, he introduced me to this tiny little fitness startup, Strava (who would have thought!) and we talked lots about Atlassian.
And there was much to talk about — here was a company that had been started on a credit card in Sydney, had scaled to real size without having a sales team and had this incredibly passionate user base. The fact that they’d also managed to gain marketshare in the U.S., without losing their Aussie style, was an added advantage.
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