In this Atlassian for Startups interview, Cloudflare co‑founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn recounts how the company moved from managing work with post‑it notes to adopting Atlassian’s suite over a decade ago. She explains that Atlassian was chosen because it was the "gold standard" – easy to use, transparent pricing, and immediately scalable for a team of about 30. The tools quickly became the engine of Cloudflare’s operations, improving team collaboration and efficiency. Ten years later, Atlassian remains central: Cloudflare runs 537 Jira projects (roughly one per employee) and uses Confluence and Jira for onboarding, incident management, customer support, and the entire corporate‑blog publishing pipeline. Zatlyn emphasizes the value of a platform that grows with the company, eliminating the pain of switching tools as the business expands.
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Now you've been Atlassian customer for a very long time and when you think about it, you're a small startup, you've got a lot of things going on and you chose to standardize Atlassian tools very early on. Why did you choose Atlassian back then?
You know, it's been so great listening to you and Anu and Mike today. And I have two hats. Like I was a startup founder and then now today I run quite a large organization that's much more modern and mature and so. And we've been using atlassian for over 10 years. So for a long time. And before Atlassian we used post it notes. That's how we ran our business.
I'm going to stop you here actually, because I love this photo. Firstly, Michelle looks Exactly the same 10 years ago as she did today. So that's like impressive. We asked Michelle for a high resolution picture and she reminded me that there were no megapixels in cameras back then. This is a long time ago. So anyway, you started with stickies.
Yeah, this is how we used to run our startup and this worked really well when there was eight of us. It was actually super efficient and got us all organized. But it broke after 20 people. We were looking around, we needed something to run our business on. One of my colleagues said, hey, we should look at Atlassian suite of services. I didn't know much about Atlassian back then and he's like, hey, trust me, trust me. And we picked it because it was the gold standard. So easy to use and accessible as a startup. We could just like get going immediately. And you had great pricing that helped us make it very clear about what we were going to pay. There was no hidden surprises. And so we made the choice. We were about 30 people at the time and instantly it made our business better overnight, it made teams work better. Everything got better at Cloudflare once we started to use atlassian. And now 10 years later, we continue to choose to use it because it's still the gold standard. It allows us to keep working together and everything. It's become the engine that we run our business off of.
When you're small, you could have chosen a lot of different products. You know, you could, I'm sure there's a lot of small things that you work for 20 people. Why would you choose Atlassian back then?
You know, at the time you were the gold standard and we were like, hey, if we get bigger, it'll, we could scale with Atlassian. Atlassian will scale with us. It'll allow us to scale we won't have to do a switch out. And the there's nothing that founders dislike more than switching out partners that you've chosen. You want to pick the technology that you're going to grow with because you've got so many other things to do in your company. And so for us it was, there were a lot of choices, but you were the gold standard and it was so easy to use and get started. And so really it became one of these things where it's like, well, and if we become successful, which turns out we were, it would scale with us. And so it really became the top choice and a no brainer.
And today we did the numbers, we looked at how you use Atlassian and there are 537 different Jira projects inside Cloudflare, which approximates one Jira project per employee. I think it's not that far off. Far off that. So can you talk me through how you have 537 projects and what, what you do with that?
Well, as I said, it's the engine that makes our business work. Or maybe like the central nervous system, use the analogy you want, but every team has access to JIRA and Confluence at Cloudflare. We all have licenses, every team is using it. And I think that you can just really speak to how important it is to how we run our business. And so all the things you just went through, incident management, customer support, all of our teams are using that and it makes everything we do more efficient and easier. But some things that maybe aren't so obvious, anytime we hire a new employee or a new hire orientation, we all is managed through Confluence and jira. Everything, everything about what the checklist did, they get access to these systems. Everything is done through those, through your services. Our corporate blog, we are pretty prolific. We write a lot of content on our corporate blog. We have a lot of different authors, a lot of technical content. And so we run all of that process, the pipeline, the topics, the reviews, the approvals, the change management, all through the Alaskan suite of services. And so it really is the engine that keeps our business chugging along.
Wow. Okay. Well, I will say a huge thank you for coming today and telling your story. I'm excited. It makes me really proud that we get to work with startups like Cloudflare and then we get to watch you grow and become successful over the last decade. And so huge thank you for Michelle for turning up. Appreciate it.
