In this interview, Jason Lemkin talks with an Atlassian executive about the role of company values in the acquisition of Trello and how those values are lived day‑to‑day. The conversation begins with a recollection of a lunch where the focus was on people and shared values, highlighting Atlassian’s “be the change you seek” and “build with heart and balance” principles and their parallels at Trello. The executive explains how Atlassian’s values are deliberately axiomatic—thought‑provoking lenses rather than prescriptive rules—and how they guide hard decisions such as layoffs and a major product relocation, emphasizing transparency, balance, passion, and caring for people. The discussion then shifts to lessons learned from Atlassian’s many acquisitions: the critical importance of cultural fit, clear vision alignment, open communication, and honest expectations for both sides. Practical steps include extensive cross‑team introductions, candid discussions about the difficulty of integration, and a commitment to treat employees as adults with full information. Overall, the interview showcases how deeply embedded values can shape strategic moves, improve decision quality, and increase the likelihood of successful acquisitions.
Chapters
One of the interesting things when we first started talking about the acquisition— so it's been about, actually, it's almost exactly a year since we closed the acquisition. And when we first met for lunch that one day downtown New York at that Mexican restaurant, I gave them a great review. I said, this is a great place to get acquired on Google.
On Yelp.
I remember that conversation because the staff The stuff that we were talking about was about the people and the values. I think a lot of times when you think about companies and their values, it's like this thing that they put on the website. Something that was very important and eye-opening to me was the way that Atlassian's values are just woven throughout the company and actually practiced on a daily basis. You had talked to me about— In fact, we were talking about things that were similar between Trello and Atlassian and trying to find alignment of those values. One of the Alaskan values is, be the change you seek. And we at Trello, we had one called, don't do nothing, which was a very similar intent, which is to give people autonomy and responsibility and let them act. Another one of our values at Alaskan is, build with heart and balance. Can you talk a little bit about that and tell us how you do that?
[SPEAKING ALASKAN] I guess first I'd say, when you talk about the evolution, 15 years and stuff, and we started building products, right? We were two engineers and we wanted to build things. We didn't really want to build a company, we wanted to build things. And then as the things that we built got a little bit successful and we built another thing and we were very focused on customers and products and features and it sort of, we evolved into realizing that the company challenge of building was more exciting and interesting than the product challenge of building, right? We still build products. We're a product company through and through. And then what didn't scale in that model was the founders, right? We could no longer go and talk to every single person individually. We didn't, you know, we stopped interviewing every hire. And you start thinking, shit, okay, how do I scale this? You know, what we've been doing. And one of the things we came to was the values, right? So when I try to explain them to founders, I say, look, Think of it as an engineering scale issue. If you have to write down what it is that you never want to lose about the company, don't write down anything you aspire to be in the future. That's not the way it works. You can't say, "I really want to do this." So firstly, don't write down anything you aspire to be. Secondly, don't write down any basic human values. Right? You'll notice our values, there's no honesty, there's no integrity. That stuff you get hired or fired for. That's simple, basic human values. That's not unique company values of how you want the company to be. I want the company to feel. And then we wrote them down, and they've worked really well. They've lasted the test of time. How long have we written them down for? 13 years, 12 years, something like this, and everything else. So anyway, build with heart and balance is, how would I explain it? It's one of my favorite values. The other thing I should say about the values, lasting values, they're designed to be axiomatic. They're not a set of equations that you answer problems with. They're thought-provoking lenses to look at questions or decisions that you have to make. And you want people to kind of consider how they are affected by these things rather than, you know, it's not a weapon. You should never say, we are doing this because of value X. We've had plenty of people try to do that internally. It's supposed to be axiomatic. So built with heart and balance, we're building things, what we do as a company, And when we build the company, there is— the way I explain it is there's a lot of really hard decisions we have to make. My job is making hard decisions on a regular basis, right? And when I make those decisions, or when anyone's making a decision in the company, I want them to consider both the hard aspect and the balance. Balance is easy. You want to consider the options. You don't want to just head right because you happen to prefer that. You want to think about left, think about right. Have we considered, you know, have we taken a balanced approach to the problem, considered the customer, the shareholder, the staff, that, you know, whatever the balance of the decision is, bit hard and abstract. And then secondly, you wanna do it with heart. And what does that mean? Well, it means two things to me. One is you wanna do it with passion. Like you're making a decision, you wanna lean into it and actually do it and like show people why it's exciting or the good way to go. And secondly, you wanna do it with some form of caring, right? Because these hard decisions have impacts on people, on customers, on someone. and you should think through the impact of that. Doesn't mean the decision is wrong, but the impact of that decision needs to be thought through. And too many times I think people take this sort of abstract, a company is a legal entity, right? You know, we always say we don't solve technology problems, we solve people problems. That's what we do as a company. That's what we build. That's what we do internally. And when you're solving people problems, you have to care about people. You have to care about how they feel and think and are impacted by a decision. But you still have to make the right decision by the company, by the rest of the staff. And that's what that's trying to be informative on. And that's what it's trying to help people at least think about the different aspects when they're making a decision.
Do you have a time when that was difficult to do or hard to do?
We have lots of examples where we've had to employ that, I suppose, if you want to think about it. Whenever we're letting people go is a good time. Whenever any manager has to say, "Look, this job is not a fit for this person at this particular time," you want them to do that in a constructive and caring way, but you also want to do it with the rest of the team in mind and all the different bits and pieces. We know this. We've recently moved a product from one office to another office. Classical business problem, really hard to do. The way I think most businesses approach this problem is to sort of move a little bit of it. We're going to start a second team over here. We're going to do this, we're going to do that. And then after a while, they're like, yeah, we're going to move the Nexus, and then eventually they shut down. And they never really give employees the full story of what's going on. When we moved that product, we told people a year ahead, this product is moving from Office A to Office B. Here's why, and we're very open. About why it was moving and explained all the reasons. And I think that when you're open as a company, that leads to better decision-making, 'cause you have to be able to explain stuff, hard decisions and easy ones. And, you know, but we told people what was happening a year ahead of it happening internally, but we tried really hard to think about how that would impact employees. We had people been working for 10 years on a product and being told that product is moving to another country, and that's hard.
[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yes.
But it didn't mean it wasn't the right decision for us to do. And I think we got through it pretty well. And the employees, at the end of the day, I think really valued that we were very open with them and treated them as adults and gave them the full story and gave them time and all the things.
So I think back on that, and that was one of the big reasons why I thought this was the right move for Trello, was because those values were so important to the company. Um, when we were going through that acquisition, you know, Atlassian had done, I don't know, 18, 19 acquisitions before that. Um, and one of the things I also noticed was that, you know, there's this constant sense of learning and perfecting and getting better at doing everything, including acquisitions. Um, can you talk a little bit about, you know, maybe for people that are thinking about acquiring companies or Like what things have you learned? What's important during that process?
Yeah, I mean, I think with acquisitions, they're hard. They're really hard to do successfully. Any business literature will tell you that most of them fail, et cetera. We've had a pretty good track record. I think you gotta think of this, no pun intended, you gotta think about both sides of the table and be very open about how it's gonna work, right? We've always tried to get cultural alignment, number one. If a culture's not going to fit, it's just not going to— it doesn't matter how strategic it is. I think it's just going to end badly. The second one is there's really vision alignment. I don't know if that's the technical business term, but you got to explain why you're doing this and what you want to achieve out of it from both sides and be able to see that it's a good deal for everybody. Because otherwise you're going to hit some rocky period down the line. We were very clear, we want to invest in Trello. We think it's a great business. We want to continue its momentum. We can provide staff and help and all these things. I think largely we've done that, right? If we had wanted to shut it down and use the talent for something else, we should have said this is the reason we're doing the acquisition, right? I think a lot of them fail because there's an internal agenda and then the deal agenda, and it kind of is different. When they come together, it doesn't really work very well. And other than that, it's people problems. We spent a lot of time talking to the Trello team. We were very honest about how difficult the process is going to be. We tried to get as many people on the Atlassian side of the fence to meet as many people on the Trello side of the fence.
Yeah, that was super helpful.
Well, one of the things we've noticed is you get this like us and them phenomenon, and you have to move everybody to a we. And it sounds kind of like bullshit, but it's really important because you start having people saying, well, at Atlassian they do it that way, but at Trello we do it this way. And you're like, we're all doing it the same way. Like we're all on the same team now. And get people to kind of see that through a series of, I don't know, exercises and meetings and projects and putting them together and having Trello people run parts of Atlassian. Having the acquirer not talk down to the acquiree, I think that's really important at all levels. Generally, a bigger company acquiring a smaller company, you have this thing where people go in and be like, "Hey man, son, let me tell you how this is done. We know how to do this." That just pisses people off. No one wants to feel like that. There are things that we did better, there are things that you guys did better, and we tried to tell our staff, We can learn a lot from these, remote work being one, a lot of things on the technology side. We can learn a lot about how freemium businesses work. We're spending a lot of money to buy something. Let's learn a lot and treat people as adults. I don't know.
