How to Scale a Platform and Ecosystem to $10B | @Atlassian CRO Cameron Deatsch

Thank you everyone. I'm Cameron, um, CRO of Atlassian. Basically run sales, marketing, customer success, and support. Most of the go-to-market functions, they run me. Uh, I've been there for about 10 years, seen a ton of growth over the time. And here I'm gonna talk about largely how we became the organization we are today and how we plan to scale our business going forward. Leveraging this amazing ecosystem that we've been able to build over the 20 years we've been in business. So when I started the company, literally almost exactly 10 years ago, we were already a successful business. We really did about $100 million in revenue, had about 20,000 customers. For all intents and purposes, we were a very established, well-known organization at that time. But now, 10 years later, we've been able to grow our business to over $3 billion in revenue and over 240,000 paid customers. Which I have to pinch myself every day when we start to see this scale. But we're not stopping there. What we're here to talk about today is actually our future goal of how we're going to get to $10 billion and beyond in revenue. And how we're going to do that is hand in hand, not by ourselves, but with our ecosystem, our broad set of partners, technology partners, solution partners. And I'm going to go through today and talk about largely how those scale— how that broader ecosystem came to be. You know, and I'd love to say it was a clear strategy from day one that we executed flawlessly, but that is absolutely not the truth. Which leads me to my next point here. I love this quote from Mark Twain. I'm about to simplify 20 years of complex business partnerships and relationships supported by a technology platform into a 30-minute presentation. So if it seems like overly simplified, it is. If it seems too good to be true, it's because I made it that way. The reality is a whole lot of pain and frustration, tears, challenges. I'm even sure I'll get an email today by someone like, hey, Cameron, you weren't right in the presentation on slide 8. Like, these programs are never done. They're never complete. You have to continually iterate and work on them for them to be successful. So, but if you'll bear with me, let's dive in with a little bit of background. Now, AU is actually supposed to be an Australian flag, but that's cool. AU stands for Australia. Listen, our company was founded by these two fine-looking young gentlemen in 2002 in Australia. And what's important is both the time, 2002 recession, and Australia, far away from everywhere else. Okay, and they started and they built a product called Jira. Many companies use that today for tracking a lot of their software development process issues, work in general. Two years later, they built another product called Confluence. And now, 20 years later, the company has massively grown. We have over 20 products in our portfolio, and they are still co-CEOs of the business, drive much of our strategy, important decisions today as we have 10,000+ employees. And for you budding entrepreneurs out there who want to know what success really looks like, there you go. Bubba Gump hat and a giant beard. I did ask permission, so I will not get fired for using these. They are good sports. So thanks, Mike and Scott, if you watch this video. Okay. Obviously, our portfolio has grown from 2 products to now 20 different products in our portfolio of different sizes, different markets. We compete in 3 separate markets: Agile and DevOps, largely helping software development teams build and ship software; IT Service Management and IT Operations, helping IT organizations become more productive; and of course, broader Work Management for All, helping teams of all types manage and track their work. And align that to their strategic goals and outcomes. But one of our core beliefs from day one, this is core to our ecosystem, is that it's not just going to be Atlassian applications that help power businesses. The reality is, I think you see it today, the amount of new applications coming out into the market every day is immense. The amount of like, I just kind of believe that if any business user or team has a problem, a unique problem, there's going to be a technology solution in the future to solve that. And it's a fool's errand to think one vendor or one company is going to be able to solve all those use cases. We actually think there's going to be hundreds. There already is hundreds, probably thousands of apps in the future that we'll have to use. And we take an open— we take an open view of this from a platform and ecosystem perspective from day one. We want our products to work well with all the other products out there in the market. Now, very quickly, I do want to talk about our business model because this does drive much of our ecosystem thinking and strategy. Now, the big thing with the Atlassian business model, and we can do a whole 30-minute presentation on this alone, is we are unique. We've been able to grow to over $3 billion in revenue while keeping sales and marketing spend under 15% of revenue for all 20 years we've been in business. Now, the reason for this is from day one, we took very much a product-led, self-service e-commerce approach to enterprise software. Which I'm sure for many of you out there who are starting newer SaaS companies, you're like, of course you're doing that. 2002 out of Australia, not many companies selling software over the web, right? And that— but the goal, goal here was try to make it as easy and simple as possible for our customers to get from having a problem to into the product and solving their problem with as few barriers as possible. Web forms, get rid of them. You know, talk, talk to it, fill out a lead form, Get rid of it. Talk to a sales rep, get rid of it. We tried to make sure that that customer could get to value as quick as possible and let the product— and next step, very low pricing— allow the product to effectively sell itself. And that's our next step here. Once we could bring those customers in, we attacked with growth teams, funnel teams, data scientists, marketers, content marketers. We tried to expand and show that— give— basically answer any question that a prospect would have that they would need to get answered before they actually gave us their credit card information. Was openly available on our website, including pricing. And to this day, 20 years later, and we have some of the biggest companies in the world, we have one set list price and it's all on our website. We do not negotiate pricing with any single customer. Every customer gets the best price. It's a hard thing to hold to, but it's part of what makes this flywheel work. Of course, once we actually transact to get those customers, we try and do everything we can to turn those customers into champions. And a lot of this makes sure that our customers not only come to us, when they need help, but they actually go to other customers. And that's the amazing thing that we've been able to build is we have this enormous community, both online and in person, of honestly power users, champions that just simply have changed their careers with the use of our products. And they're out there actively promoting our products. So when they change jobs, they bring our products with them, or when they're working with others, they're helping others use our products to solve their own business problems. This virtuous cycle is what really keeps our flywheel business going. It helps us land thousands of net new customers with zero human interaction. Now, that's it. We do have sales teams now. I have technical account managers. We do all this crazy serious enterprise stuff, but I'm telling you, we will land thousands of net new customers this quarter with zero sales interaction. And that's something we still— drives our overall business. But of course, what we're here to talk about today, none of this would happen without our broad, what we call, ecosystem. And I want to define this ecosystem. It's good to say we do partnerships, and then that sounds very broad and hand-wavy. But when we think partnerships, we think 3 big categories: solution partners, marketplace partners, and strategic technology partners. Let me dive into each one and how each came to be. Each are at different levels of maturity with our organization. Now, I think I already, already called out 2 dudes in Australia, no capital, cool solution and a website. Yeah, and the reality is they started selling some products and they realized they were really good at selling products, building products, putting on the website, and the business was largely coming in fairly organically. But of course, as you can imagine, most of their customers were not in Australia. Most of their customers are in Europe, North America, South America, coming around the globe largely where there's technology centers where our applications could be used. Now, I would love to say that they could go raise capital and start building teams in Europe and building offices around the world and having market teams and support teams and all of that. But one, they couldn't raise capital. Remember, this is 2002, 2003. It's a bad time to raise capital. But also, at the prices they had in the market, it's like, wait a minute, this takes us away from our core— what we want to go do, build great software. So instead, they started bringing on partners. Now, once again, I think this happened a little bit organically. What happened is some customers out there were largely kind of small consulting firms that ended up using our products to track their work for their clients, then quickly realized that all of their clients have the same problem and they could actually help their customers implement our products to help them track their work. So very organic. So they would come to us and say, hey, do you have anyone that wants to do some consulting implementation work? Or, hey, we could actually know a client that could actually sell these products for you. You know, and what often happens, these very small IT consulting firms, very small boutiques, started— we just sign them up. Sure, you know, sign up, you're an official partner now. We'll put your logo on the website, we'll give your Give me your email address and your phone. We'll give you a little bit of margin if you sell our licenses, and off you go. Now, once again, this sounds very simple, much more complex than this. But over the time we built, we got more customers, and in line we brought on more partners. Now, one decision we made very, very early on is we started basically decided from a go-to-market perspective that Atlassian was going to be the best at an automated self-service product-driven funnel. We're going to do this. We're going to do content. We're going to do online marketing. We're going to do performance marketing. We're going to optimize through growth funnels. And if customers want in-person support, they want someone in their office doing demos, filling out RFPs, security questionnaires, in-person implementation services, in-person training, in person, you know, in the time zone they want, in the language they want. We were going to largely hand that to our partners, largely make that the role of our partners. And what ended up happening is we'd have hundreds of customers coming in every single week asking for that handholding. And what we largely try and do is say, well, listen, we have all that information you need online. Here you go, self-service. But if you would still like to speak with one of your partners, here's 3 in your region, your country, your city, you name it, right? And we largely hand that customer off to the partner. Sounds sort of crazy, but it's worked. Today we have over 700 certified solution partners in 84 countries worldwide. Worldwide. And on top of that, we have a massive program within our own organization built to enable, train, certify, do deal registration, co-sell with our partners. We largely have built an entire machine to keep this virtuous cycle of customers and partners being successful going. And it's worked. Through solution partners last year alone, we did over a billion dollars in sales. I didn't know I was going to be in a tent today. Sorry. The, uh, over $1 billion in sales. And on top of that, that doesn't include all their own services and training, what have you. That's another big benefit of this ecosystem is that there's the huge investment outside of Atlassian going into making our customers successful on top of our solution partners. So what do we learn? A few things along the way to make this successful. First and foremost, when you bring on partners, many of you will probably start figuring out like, hey, we should bring on a bunch of partners because then we'll get more customers. And it's actually the other way around. You have to be thinking about if you want to bring on new partners, how do we actually get their business growing? How do we get them addicted to the Atlassian business? You know, by introducing them to our customers, you have to open up your customer portfolio and introduce them so that they can get their ball rolling and get their own investments. And that will allow them to pursue their own more investments going forward. And that's largely backwards with many companies. Many think of this as we're going to open a channel to get new customers. It's like, no, get them into your customer base first. The second is you have to be exceedingly clear on the role you want your channel to play. Okay? Now, I'm not saying that what Atlassian did, which is largely hand off the entire customer relationship directly to a partner, is the right one. You have to pick for you, but you have to be very clear what you want from your partners and be very clear with your customers the value your partners provide. If it's on the sales and marketing side, fine, focus on that. If it's on customer service and training, fine, focus on that because that leads to the next thing. You have to avoid channel conflict at all costs. And what's happened over the time is as organization, well obviously we handed off many of these capabilities, that customer relationship to our partners. But of course internally we've grown and we've hired our own teams. What happens, we start to overlap doing some of the same things, whether that's training, whether that's technical account management, whether that's sales. You know, and you can start confusing your partners and start confusing your customers. So we build lots of programs to ensure that those roles and responsibilities between us and our channel are crystal clear. And my general rule is we never want to give a customer any reason not to work with a partner. If there's any incentive for a customer to come directly to Atlassian for a service, okay, instead of working with a partner, then we have failed. And with that general rule, we've been able to establish and maintain and grow this massive channel with our solution partners. So let's go on to the next. Let's get a little more advanced here and talk about our marketplace. Okay, anyone here in the Atlassian Marketplace? Okay, I get a few hands. Cool. Okay, now let's go way back. This is jira.atlassian.com. Bask in its glory. Okay, this is well before we hired anything called a designer at Atlassian, but this was a public site run on Jira, where we tracked all of the work. Our entire backlog in our entire development organization was tracked on this public Jira site. But more importantly, this is also where customers could and still can today submit feature requests. But like any successful company, and I'm sure many of you will run into this, we immediately ran into this core dilemma. Our customer demands the amount of features going into jira.atlassian.com always outpaced our ability to deliver on those features. Right? That's just the inherent nature of building successful product in a growing customer base. So how do we solve this? And also from Atlassian lore, thank you, Mike. When he was 22 years old, Mike got on a plane and on a flight back from the US to Australia, and technically you go the other way. We just couldn't find a map that looked that way. But yeah, Mike was really disturbed by this. He's like, God, like, this is going to be a problem forever. How do we get ahead of this? And he came up with a simple solution. If we're not going to build all the features that our customers want, simple, we'll let them build their own damn features. And on that plane ride, he built the first evolution of what is called our plugin framework, which effectively was a customization layer on top of our applications that was exceedingly powerful. You know, you basically change workflows, change the UX, change your APIs. Superpower, allowing a developer to really get in there and mess around with the guts of our products. But being a developer, Mike kind of loved that. He was like, you know what, if we have really smart customers, let them solve their own problems. If I wanted this, this is how I would build this for myself. So he largely built it with incredible flexibility. The result is it took off. Our customers, largely very technical audiences, as well as our solution partners, started building tons of plugins. And our solution partners would build plugins and then charge for them as part of their services engagements. So we knew that was happening. We also realized that all these plugins were out there, and that we talked to customers and they talked about these cool plugins they built. But we realized, like, man, other customers would benefit from this. So we took the next step and we built the Plugin Exchange, another beautifully designed— with a 2006, you know, website— which was a free website where our customers could simply post, plug, post these plugins and share them with each other, no cost. It was basically a branding marketing effort. But it may immediately happened is our customers, every single one of our customers automatically got like 1,000 new features, 1,000 new integrations, right? All of a sudden they weren't just waiting around for our roadmap. We had this broad set, the rest of our customers solving their own needs, opened up the aperture of the use cases that we could solve. Now remember, this is late 2000s, so Apple App Store started taking off. Enterprise software companies were all starting to build their own marketplaces, and of course we were no exception. 2012, we decided to change the plugin exchange into the Atlassian Marketplace, and we allowed to turn this free, this free experience where people were just sharing plugins into a commercial enterprise. I allowed our customers to very easily discover these new capabilities. We rebranded them apps from plugins so they could find new capabilities, but also to have more trust through this commercial relationship to ensure that they get support and SLAs and security reviews and a variety of certifications. On top of that, we allowed all of these plugin creators, whether they're independent software vendors or simple single developers, to, you know, make some money selling these plugins or these apps to their peers in the industry. And I cannot tell you how many individuals I've met that turned into millionaires just in a couple years. They built a few cool, like, dashboard boards in Jira and put them up in the marketplace, you know, and 2 years later they've retired, right? They're like, don't ever have to work again. It was just amazing that we were able to marketplace. And today, this is a critical part of our overall go-to-market experience. When you sign up for an Atlassian product, you're not just getting the use cases and features that Atlassian built, you are getting access to thousands, literally thousands of apps that can solve use cases that Atlassian product managers would never even think of. Industry-specific use cases, say, uh, reporting-specific use cases, workflows, automations, you name it. There's rarely a feature you can think of where there's probably not 2 or 3 potential answers in our Marketplace. And if there isn't, we have a variety of Marketplace vendors out there looking to build new stuff all the time. Or if you're your own development team, you can build your own apps, solve your own problems. Once again, took a long time, but over the last 10 years we've done over 2 $2 billion in lifetime sales through our marketplace. So the scope of what the type of business we've done here. More importantly, we've taken $1.5 billion of that and given it back to our marketplace vendors. Okay. That's $1.5 billion in investment into our ecosystem that has allowed them to raise more capital, allowed them to hire more developers, allowed them to build more apps, thus expand our use cases that we can support and thus bring in more customers. Into our ecosystem itself. So great. This is a wonderful revenue line item for our business, but that's not the primary value prop. The primary value prop is all those use cases that we basically get on top of the Atlassian ecosystem. Now, a few key learnings for all of you. Once again, this didn't happen overnight, and that's my biggest piece of advice here. Patience. As you can imagine just from this story, everything I just mentioned here was not like, hey, we're going to go build a marketplace from day one. When Mike got on that plane and built the plugin framework, there was no concept of this will be a multibillion-dollar enterprise. This was— we're trying to solve a customer problem and we were exceedingly patient to monetize this opportunity over a long period of time. And that leads to my second— having an ecosystem like this, there are other business benefits beyond monetizing the transaction. For example, We know if a Jira customer installs more than 2 apps into their Jira instance, their retention rates go through the roof. And that makes perfect sense. They're largely customizing our products to a specific business use case, to their specific workflows. It gets exceedingly sticky at that time, and that customer retention is worth way more than any dollars we can make off the marketplace itself. Okay, and lastly, the power. And this is— I'm not going to tell you how to build plug-in framework, not my game. But one thing that Mike made that decision early on, and the rest of our R&D team does to today, was to ensure that these pow— that we give a lot of power through our extensibility capabilities, through our plug-in and connect, and now our Forge frameworks, to ensure that customers have a lot of flexibility in what they can build. And if you're a product manager, a designer in this room, that might scare you, because effectively what we decided was to hand off much of that core to trust our customers and partners to manipulate it in a way that makes most sense for them. And that's giving up keys to the kingdom here. The user experience is in your hands. You have control, customer. Okay? But that had worked out drastically in our case. Now lastly, wanna probably say our most nascent, the less programmatic of our partnerships, what we call our strategic technology partnerships. And why the strategic technology partnerships is that each and every one of these relationships is one-off. It's not something you just repeat again. That's very specific to the customer value we're trying to drive, the opportunity we have from a development and integration perspective, and of course our individual business models. So we do these very selectively with key vendors that we know we can work with. Now, does anyone remember HipChat? Anyone? We got a few hardcore old folks around here. Atlassian was in the messaging market for quite some time. We had HipChat, was a great messaging application. We later replaced it with Stride, which is an updated modern platform that could scale and was highly competitive in the market for messaging. But of course, at that time, as we continue to grow this business, we started to see Slack on its meteoric rise. Remember those days? We saw it going through, and increasingly in our customer base, while we saw plenty adoption of Stride and HipChat, we were increasingly seeing adoption of Slack and Slack customers coming to us and say, God, it would be great if Confluence could integrate with this, or I would love to be able to interact with a Jira ticket through Slack. These great, very useful use cases, and our customers wanted it. So we took a step back, made a hard decision, and decided to sell our Stride business to Slack. We took our— we stepped out of the messaging market. We took an investment in Slack and we agreed to a joint partnership where we would build deep integrations between our two platforms, deeper than either of us would have been able to do outside of this partnership, and we also established a business relationship, allowing us to promote Slack to our customers and vice versa. To date, this has driven over 50,000 joint customers, over 50,000 teams out there integrating Slack with Atlassian products and vice versa, making both of our products stickier and delivering more value for our customers. Customers, and of course driving more customers across the board for both of our businesses. That was not an easy decision, but it was also one of the most strategic that we have made and has been extremely successful for us. Now we have a similar relation with relationship with Snyk. Many of you might know Snyk as a security development platform. As part of the Atlassian Ventures arm, which is our investment side of our house, we took an investment in Snyk, and as part of that relationship We also realize that we have code hosting and code collaboration capabilities in our Bitbucket products, but we do not have security capabilities. We do not build any security tools, and we know most of our customers need a security capability or security tool. We simply made it easier for them to try, use, discover it natively inside of Bitbucket. So we actually have a Snyk tab directly in the Bitbucket interface. This allows us to provide a great capability that most of our customers need but more importantly, drive thousands of new signups for this great new vendor in our ecosystem, supporting that relationship going forward. Now, these are harder. Of course, we can drive much behavior, but you can see the relationships are different. So 3 pieces of advice coming out of this is, one, understand when to partner and understand when to compete. Build by partner is a hard thing. You can simplify it, but I tell you, that's a very, very hard decision. Decision. Understand the math, understand your strategy, understand your position in the market. But sometimes a partnership is the best thing to drive your business going forward. Second, if you're going to establish a partnership like this, be crystal clear on your goals for both sides. It's very easy when you're doing business development to go like this, and you use big words like partnership and success and happy customers, and you're like, great, what the fuck are we doing? Pardon my language. Yeah, you have to have clear metrics and goals on each side of the partnership that are equitable and that you can measure and hold both teams accountable to, because the second one of those partners doesn't feel like they're— that they're getting the short end of that stick, that partnership will end very, very quickly. Establish the goals, hold your teams accountable to the goals, get out if you're not hitting the goals. You can waste everyone's time. Okay, lastly, culture. I always make the joke here, man, It's hard enough getting stuff done within our business, you know, and they work for us. You know how much harder it is to get someone outside of our business to do something as well? And the only way we've seen that work on top of goals is to have that right culture and values fit. Make sure that that organization you are partnering with is an organization that know— that, you know, that effectively can collaborate well with your teams and work through those hard times. Exceedingly important. So those are our 3 big categories of what we consider that are our partners in our broader ecosystem. But I'd be remiss to say that there's a big technology component that supports all of this. And this largely came down to Atlassian has dozens, you know, 20 different products in the portfolio, and all of them were built independently. So as we went out and tried to build all these partnerships, when our partners started actually working with our products, it felt like working with 20 different companies. You gotta imagine that was really complex. It made it nearly impossible to scale. Okay, yeah, sorry for the wind. So how do we solve for this? And we had this own internal problem at Atlassian. We continually saw our product teams doing the same work across— they're repeating the same work. You know, Confluence had to build a search capability, Jira built a search capability. We wanted sharing capabilities, @mentions, likes, core infrastructure, you name it. So we went over a multi- multier hundreds of millions of dollars in investment to build the Atlassian Cloud Platform. The Atlassian Cloud Platform became our common platform on which all of our products and by extension our ecosystem relies upon. The idea here was build the common capabilities that every, every product and every, every app needs once and allow them to reuse those platform components across, across their different deployments. This of course starts with the simple things like where do you host the application and infrastructure and compliance requirements, like the basic sets. That's very important when you're talking about enterprise. So when you buy one Atlassian product and we check all your compliance requirements, you automatically get all the other product compliance requirements with it. Makes it very easy for customers to expand their use cases. But we went beyond infrastructure. And we talked about extensibility. Historically, we asked app vendors to build their own apps and their code and hosting somewhere— host it somewhere and then integrate with Atlassian. We expected them to be these little small SaaS companies and handle all the compliance requirements of our biggest customers. Nearly impossible. With Forge, we have an app development infrastructure where our partners can now, and our customers, build their own apps and deploy them within Atlassian's infrastructure. We support that with also features and capabilities, analytics, automation, collaboration capabilities like sharing and @mentions in our teamwork directory are all components our products reuse, but also by extension our marketplace partners can reuse to build really rich custom bespoke solutions tied directly to the use cases that our customers demand. And that's really what the platform truly enables and our broader ecosystem enables. When you buy an Atlassian product, yes, you get a set of features and a roadmap and a set of use cases that out of the box we spend all of our time thinking about. But because this is powered by an extensible platform and our broader ecosystem, you get optionality and flexibility. Thus, when we have a competitive bake-off between Atlassian product and competitors, we're not going down a feature checklist. We're going down to what features can't we actually build eventually, or workflows we can't enable. There's rarely a use case that a customer customer can come up with that there isn't a solution in the marketplace or a capability via our automation analytics workflow capabilities that the customer can customize because of the platform itself. This, of course, allows our entire business to thrive because we continue to extend our use cases, extend that openness, that capability, and of course extend the value that our customers see from the Atlassian platform. And that's truly what's helped us drive our business to the success we've met today and success that we to go as we get to $10 billion. Now, I think as I've gone through, like, the few key learnings along the way, I have 3 big ones that are the common threads that, like, honestly, as I built this deck, I was taking away. The first is patience. None of this is easy. None of this is fast. So if you were thinking about, we're going to build a big cloud platform and build an ecosystem, start partnerships, and money will start coming out of the, out the other inside in 12 months or 18 months, you're fooling yourselves. These things are never done. It will take a long time to build them, but it is worth that investment. And you need to balance that. The second is trust. Much of what made our ecosystem successful is that we trusted our partners. We trusted our customers. We trusted them with a lot of power over their overall experience and how they used our products. And that kind of fights at odds when it's like, hey, this is our product. We, we own this experience. We built it perfectly. The idea was no, give them control in the ecosystem. Let them decide what is best for them and allow them to thrive and empower that. And then lastly, know that you're never done. Goals, metrics, continuous improvement. I'll tell you today, if you're in the Atlassian ecosystem today, you're probably like, I know there's like 16 things wrong that we need to go fix. Don't worry, we're working on it. It's one of those you will never be done. So keep this— if this is actually a strategy as a company you want to implement, know that it's something that will continue to work in the background of your business in perpetuity, and that you will always continue to have to improve to make sure that business value continues to grow for your customers.