How To Scale an Open Culture. What We've Learned at Atlassian (Sometimes The Hard Way)

Please welcome back Sasser founder and CEO Jason Lemkin. Good morning. Hope everybody had fun. So today should be a good day. We sort of have two themes today. And just to give you maybe 120 seconds on the plan today, and then we'll bring out Jay Simons from Atlassen, which will be great. There's really two themes today. The morning is about the journey on our third day. So we've got some great content. We've got Jay Simons from Atlassian coming. We're going to talk about openness and a bunch of other issues. We've got Matt Mullenweg from WordPress and Automatic, which is something I'd love to hear. We've got Claire Hughes Johnson from Stripe and a bunch of others. And then in the afternoon we'll have a topic that I always find very boring, but everybody loves, which is money raising money, how to raise money, the secrets from VCs. We've got maybe 60 venture pitches coming, others. And those sessions tend to be packed. Some are here and some are downstage, but I think some are still open. So that's the goal. And then just as a reminder, we stay late. So the expo will be open. We'll modulate the music on the forest art car, but I'll stay until they kick us out 8 or 9 or 12 or midnight whenever they kick us out of Hall 2. So I'll be there. And it's actually probably the most fun time to connect with people. And then finally, in terms of content, our number one goal is mentoring. So hopefully this is day three, you've had a chance. But if you haven't done any great brain dates, just go to the Twilio brain date session in the middle of the Expo hall. Just grab them. Find a great mentor to meet with or go meet with the Brella in Sasser Square park and meet a friend. Because that's what we really most want you to take out of here, is get mentored and learn how to do better. So with that just a minute, we'll bring out Jay, but this is great because remember, we had two sort of themes or sub themes this year, generational companies and equality. And Atlassian is one of these generational companies that I want to talk about, Jay. And one vector for equality is openness and how openness works. And Jay is going to talk about how Atlassian. We'll talk a little bit about generational company, but also how Atlassian has been pretty radical in openness and what's worked and what hasn't. So we'll do a little intro video and then we'll bring Jay out and dig in on these topics.

I invited Jay Simons into the studio to list off three things that he's most proud of from 2014.

Welcome, Jay.

Thanks, Mark. Number one for me, all things Hipchat. We added video, audio, screen sharing. We made all the clients updated. We made it faster. We added emoticon, autocomplete. And then not to be outdone, we made hipchat free so everybody can enjoy the fun with hipchat. But I thought this was supposed to be fun Fridays. This doesn't feel very fun.

You know, you're right.

Our products are bought, not sold. In place of a traditional sales organization, we've invested in easy to use products.

Barbra Streisand.

An online commerce experience that helps customers get started in minutes. Our goal is to make the customer's entire experience dead simple and delightful. And as a result, we see a very high volume of customer activity on a daily basis. We believe there's no single company that offers the range of products and capabilities we do with a combination of product quality and affordability.

Barbra Streisand. Woo. Let's welcome Jay Simons back to Saster. All right. Thanks, my friend. Thanks for coming.

Thanks, man.

So just a quick anecdote that in terms of how great Jay is and actually how great the community is. Jay spoke here at the second annual. I think this is the fifth, so 2016, 2016. Atlassian had recently IPO'd. We'll talk about it in a minute. Was worth 4 billion, then an amazing $5 billion. It was an iconic company, but that's not really the story. We'll get into it. Actually, what happened was we were about five weeks ahead of annual, and I just needed one more iconic company, one more great person. And actually, I think it might have even been over Christmas holiday. I'm like, boy. And I DM Jay, who I didn't know, but he was kind enough to follow us on Saster. And I said, could you please do all these founders a favor and come speak at Sasser in like 60 seconds? He said, I'm in. And you came. It was one of our top rated sessions and it was terrific. And so thanks for coming back a second time.

Thanks for having us.

That's, that's, that's. Those are the great moments. And so I want to get into openness and talk about some of these things. But let's step back for a minute. Let's talk about some numbers in generational companies, but when you came before, we were talking about backstage. So much has changed in the cloud in the last couple years, hasn't it? So you came three years ago. I was writing the title for the presentation. It was how to build a $4 billion rocket ship. By the time you got here, it was a five billion dollar rocket ship, which seemed crazy. It seemed crazy. And today market cap is just a number. But Atlassian's $24 billion market cap, plus or minus, that's a lot of growth, isn't it? Crossed a billion in revenue, but actually more interestingly, at least historically, has grown at about 40%. Right. And that's a jaw dropping number, isn't it? Based on our history, it is, yeah. So what's going. So I know some of that's execution and having world class products, but what's happening on the Internet, in cloud, in business software? What's driving this 40% growth at a billion? What's really happening?

Well, I mean for us it's, you know, the nature of work is changing for a lot of companies. And so I think the kind of macro theme that drives a lot of Atlassian's growth is, you know, teams are basically the currency of productivity inside of companies. We tend to celebrate kind of a single idea or a lone genius. But any great idea, including in all of your companies, is only realized through the hard work of people that are trying to accomplish something together. And you know, Atlassian's mission is to unleash the potential of every team. And so I think we've focused on a ripening market. Nature of work is changing, people are looking for technologies and practices and basically better ways to move forward faster. And you know, in addition to sort of like the secular shift towards cloud. And you know, a lot of you have heard every company is becoming a software company or software is eating the world. Companies need to operate like SaaS companies effectively and I think that's fueled a lot of our growth and or more.

Are you on this sort of early adopter to late adopter phrase? Where are we with Atlassian's customers? Are you getting the late adopters? Are you getting folks that are just leaving the air gapped world? Where are we on this continuum?

I think we're still early. I mean, I think there's just still a lot of change. If you take the roof off of a lot of buildings and look at the way that people work, it's still pretty antiquated. I think there's a lot of collaborative workflow that is trapped inside of EBITDA email inboxes that are kind of these atomic blobs of documents or spreadsheets that people attach to an email and fling to 50 or five people. And that's just a broken way of working. And so I think as more and more people shift to kind of dynamic real time ways of managing projects and creating content and communicating, there's just a huge ripening audience, I think, to move them from the past to the future.

Yeah. And when we, when we kicked off the event, we talked about crossing a billion not in valuation on unicorns, which is 100 SAS unicorns, but a billionaire. Are you building a generational company? How far out do you guys talk about today? How far out in the future are you planning? Are you planning 5, 10, 20 years out? How can you see Atlassian in 2039 and 2059?

So we do an exercise, we do an exercise every couple of years. We update that we call a painted picture. And the painted picture is, and it's kind of crowd sourced within the company. But the idea is if you close your eyes and you're to open them 10 years into the future, what do you see? And we try to think about things like how big would our customer base be or what kind of revenue or what would our product portfolio look like, but in sort of other things like we would imagine, boy, in the next 10 years Atlassian would have delivered a TED talk or sort of the shape of kind of the economy around us that's related to what we're doing might look this way. And you know, we get probably remarkably about 60% of the things that we kind of imagine we've been able to kind of realize. And so that's sort of like the long term horizon thinking. And then I think, you know, like most of you, there's things that are in front of us that are two to three years out that we're trying to build an architecture for kind of make investments to sort of like, you know, get a flywheel around a particular market or product moving. And then we are obsessed about execution over the next year. And so the key strategies and objectives that we lay out for the company that we need to make sure that we nail. There's a lot of energy and attention on making sure that we're measuring the right things and we're moving at the velocity that's going to set us up for the 2 and 3 and then eventually the 10 year goals.

Yeah, and is there any. There may not be. Part of this underlying theme is we probably thought some of the, some of us were talking about this backstage, probably in 2011, 2012, a lot of us thought these paradigms were kind of set. One of them was collaboration. But collaboration is much bigger than we thought, even five. What's the next phase of collaboration? Do you guys have a vision to help all of us? Think about it. Can you see things we can't see? How will we be collaborating that'll help other founders out there?

Well, I mean, back to sort of like the, you know, the keyword and the title of the presentation is on openness. And I think, you know, openness, you know, we believe is a way that we can better unlock the potential of teams. And a lot of the way that most businesses are structured is sort of trapped in some of the antiquated organizational structures of the 1950s and that sort of command and control. And we compartmentalize and we have one group that does one thing in isolation of its connection to the rest of the company. And as a company, in part because we started in Australia and we were sort of a distributed company from day one, we actually had to be open. We had to level the playing field for people to contribute to our ideas and, you know, kind of the work product and the things that were in progress because they were everywhere around the globe. And I think when we now you fast forward 16 years later as a company with, you know, 3,500 employees, like, the way that we work in the open is. Is a force multiplier in everything that we do. You know, the fact that our ideas and our strategies and our objectives and all of our key projects are basically in systems that are accessible to everyone, not just where they can read and learn about them, but, you know, where they can challenge them and contribute to them. You know, I think is a very different style of working. And when I think about collaboration, like, that's actually what we see as we look inside of ourselves. And, you know, there are other companies that both use our products and practices that work that way. There's, you know, we're just sort of at the tip of the iceberg. And I think there's pretty significant changes that comes from kind of working in that style.

Yeah, maybe hyper collaboration instead of little moments during the day or the week, everything shared, which is what Atlassian's doing.

Yeah, you imagine just the, you know, the concept of beginning with a, you know, a page that is open, everybody in the company as you draft it, you know, pick on Google Docs for a second. Google Docs is a page that only you can see unless you actually open it to everybody. And typically, most of us, because we, you know, we might not be comfortable with the vulnerability, begin to share that and sort of progressively disclose it to more and more people because we're a little nervous, like, what if people don't like it? What if they've got a different idea? What if they want to challenge it? And I'm, like, trying to get over the hurdle and I just want to get there. And sort of all of our products begin kind of inverted. You begin with a page that everybody can see, and you have to sort of like, claw it back a little bit. But if you really lean into that vulnerability, some pretty awesome things can happen.

So let's. I want to talk about some of these stories. We talked about how fairly radically open Atlassian is. But let me step back to a metric I had. We did a spring soiree and Owen McCabe came from Intercom. We were talking about transparency and we tried to make up a metric. Like everyone today wants to be more transparent. I love to be transparent. Saster is pretty darn transparent. But how much can you share? And two thoughts I came up with one, for me, 90% is about the right amount to share. There are some things that I'm not comfortable sharing. And then Owen had a different point, which I want to tease in this question. What he said at Intercom is that Intercom now at nine figures in revenue, there are so many issues and so many problems. If everything was shared with him, he couldn't get through a day. Like, there are too many bombs, too much drama. He couldn't physically, mentally process too much. And Atlassian's pretty crazy. Everyone's an insider, right? You can tell us about the hipchat Slack transaction. Everyone knew, right, at Atlassian. So we want to share more. Where's the line? Is there a line? Is it lasting? Crossing the line and enjoying crossing the line. But where is too much information?

Well, I think it depends on sort of the topic. And so, like, you know, if you do, you would think. And yeah, everybody is an insider in the company. If we were to work on kind of M and A, you know, M and A, you know, begins sort of with a small group of people and kind of the circles widen as more people kind of become involved in acquiring. Yeah, I mean, like, there's going to be ideas that could be, you know, could be potentially disruptive, you know, to a wider group of people until they, you know, they become more fulsome. But I think broadly what we think about in terms of openness is, you know, think about culture. I think two of the most important things for great cultures are empathy and trust. And both of those two things, you know, are hard earned. Like even think about society today and kind of the state of politics. I think if empathy and trust were stronger, we wouldn't have sort of the same tension and dynamic. And I think those empathy and trust are easier to acquire inside of a company because we all know each other and we might have a shared mission, but they're still hard earned. And the architecture to generate empathy and trust needs to include shared understanding. And openness, again is a force multiplier for shared understanding. So what we think a lot about are kind of the directions that we're heading and sort of key strategies and key, key objectives. Those things actually should be constructed and collaborated and changed and dynamic where everybody can see them. And you know, Simon Sinek, probably everyone in the room has seen his video about how important why is. And you know, we think that why in the context of a decision that we made is equally important. So, you know, when you think about the HipChat decision, like part of, you know, we had 3,000 Atlassians that all knew well in advance of disclosing that to the public. And you know what's remarkable about that is it didn't leak. I mean, there were 3,000 people, many of whose, whose jobs and sort of emotions and energy had gone into building a product that we were discontinuing. Kept that private, I think, because, you know, trust is a really important thing at Atlassian and it's earned. And they kind of recognize that, you know, we're treating people with respect. But the other important part is they had weeks to kind of understand the why. And so when we were communicating the what, everybody was deeply connected around why we made that decision. And I think that's really important along the way. So when we think about where are you open? And sort of the benefit of it, I think people are really connected to the why of a strategy or an idea or a product or a change or direction or a color. And the last thing I'll say is technology, like the products that you use, I think to fulfill this promise of openness, aren't necessarily as important as the culture that you build around them. But the posterity of the things that you do are really important for companies that are multi generational. Like in our company, when we hire someone that joins today, they actually get a look back through 16 years of why. And they might not have the capacity to read it all, but they can actually transport themselves to the moment. In time inside of Confluence, which is the product that we use to kind of collaborate on content.

And.

And they can see the discourse that we had as a company and the tension and the joy and anxiety.

Oh, yeah, that's pretty cool.

They can see it way back in the future. They can relive it. And so when those things are sort of trapped in email inboxes, it's the opposite of openness. When somebody leaves the company, all that Wayback Machine leaves with them.

Well, let's just talk about. Because some of this may be that folks that haven't worked at public companies may not get it. This hipchat. There's a couple interesting things about hipchat, but you've decided that you're going to focus on other. On other core products. You're going to spin hipchat IP out to Slack and invest in Slack. I don't know what Wall street thinks, but that's potentially a material decision, right? It is. People are going to be interested. It could influence the stock price. You trust 3,000 employees to hold that information confidential for a month, for two months, or how long before it gets announced?

It was three weeks.

Three weeks. But that's a lot of time.

It was a lot of time.

What about you? Don't worry about employee number 2998, the one they gave you a one star on, glass Door. How do you make that trust circle work with the edge of trust? Because that is fairly bold.

Yeah. I mean, you invest in it like, I think you invested in it with that exact example. You say it could be employee number 3001, or sort of somebody that is disgruntled for whatever reason that decides to. To kind of challenge the system. But I think that's a great example of where the 3,000 people, what they're seeing and the company do is walk the talk. And we can say, hey, we're all insiders and we make decisions that are going to impact all of us and we're going to share them and we're going to explain why. We wait until the last minute and we say, hey, here's this decision, and now you get to deal with it with the rest of the market and our customer base and everything else. I think we're not investing in what we really believe, which is trust is a core advantage and strength in our culture. And, you know, we'll lead by example.

So I guess maybe the learning, which is. Which I still think about is that that trust scale, you literally had 3,000 people keep a piece of confidential information from public for Three weeks, Correct. Yeah, it's pretty crazy, I think.

Yeah. And by the way, on our side, like, you know, I don't know if it was all of Slack, but a huge, huge contingent of Slack. I mean, I think the cultures between Slack and Atlassian are really similar in that regard. And I think they're equally a company that, that invests in building, building trust, you know, because we're all part of the same organization trying to do the same thing.

So I want to dig into openness. But just one before we leave that that fun. I think it'd be fun for folks. So you, as you as the senior team made a decision. Hey, a lot of folks love hipchat, but it's not going to be where we're going to focus in the future. Right. We're billion dollar company and we gotta get to 10. And at the same time you buy something. We all love Trello. So you take one beloved product and sort of sunset in some sense and take another one that's beloved but early in the revenue cycle and go all in on it. So what's the thought process there? How do you decide how many core projects can you sustain, how many is too many and how do you load balance when both. Maybe one's growing more slowly, but both have a lot of positive attributes.

Yeah, I mean, some of it is just going to be the dynamics of the market, the competitive landscape, sort of the, you know, momentum and velocity in each of those products and what it will take, I think, to continue to grow them and carve out a really unique winning position.

Is it as simple as that, the decision?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot that goes into it. It's sort of the dynamic of what an individual product gives to both the customer base and sort of the rest of the portfolio and the things that sort of around them. But I think, you know, in Hipchat's case, you know, that it was a very, very competitive market with a product that, you know, in order to fully fulfill the promise of what we would need to chase as an individual company, there's opportunity costs there. And so there's other things that we could invest in to make Trello better as an example, or to go deeper into another market category where we've got more advantages that we can lean into.

Because how many just. This is interesting for founders and let's rough and tough like you might have for Atlassian scale, you could have 400 engineers working on Hipchat. Right. I don't know what it is, could be, but it's probably triple digits. Right.

It was over 100.

Over 100. Right. They're good engineers.

Yeah.

So you have to decide at some point, where should those. Could those hundred people work on Trello?

What else could they be doing all.

Of a sudden with Trello? When you bought Trello with Mike, they probably had 40 engineers. Right. I don't know. I'm sure it's double digits. You had 100 great engineers. Which one do you go? Even at lasting scale, resources are finite. Yeah.

And so it's about the opportunity cost. Like what opportunities are we not investing in that we're not seeing? And you know, stopping something is really hard. You know, it's really hard. It's doubly hard when customers have made commitments to that and they're relying on that and they paid you money for it. I mean, that's. It's a really hard thing to do. But you know, when you're thinking also long term and like back to the generational, like the short term thing to the easy short term thing to do would be just to continue to plow forward.

Yeah. Revenue.

The harder long term thing to do is what are the things that we could be creating that'll have more material value to us and to the customers that we either have or we're trying to win over the long term? And that's what we prioritized.

Yeah. I want to make sure we've got plenty of time, but I want to make sure we hit two things on openness, no matter what. One is ideas, and the second one is inclusion.

Yeah.

So when we're small, it's really easy. 20 employees, 50 even 100 for everyone to contribute ideas. Right. And the best ones go to the top sometimes when you have thousand, when you cross the line, how do you process ideas from how many employees does Austin have today? I should know exactly.

3,500.

3,500. How do you process, especially in an open culture, how do you surface the best ideas out of 3500?

So lots of different ways. I mean, one thing that we think a lot about is. Is I think just this notion that when you think about scaling culture and scaling, kind of the way that teams come together and create Ideas, when you're five people, you're 10 people. Of course it's easy. You're all in the same room and you're like, what about that? And everybody can contribute to that. And we think a lot about how does that particular capability scale. And it's going to be different when you're 3,500 people, there's going to be different mechanisms, but I think if the underpinning of that is again, back to openness, like a culture where people feel the courage to contribute, where people feel, even when a new Atlassian joins, I think the first thing they hear is, and by the way, this is hard when things are going well, but the first thing they hear is, don't be shy, Come in here and tell us what you think is screwed up, what you think could be better. Challenge something that we're doing that you don't understand. That's what we need for. If we wanted to hire you just to sort of like, incrementally make us a little bit better, we probably, you know, we could have saved the effort. And so I think, you know, it takes a lot of work, but scaling the kind of collaborative culture that you have in the Same room with five or 10 or 15 people up to 3,000 takes a lot of work. You know, the mechanisms for us are going to be a lot of our products. Like, you know, we build products that I think lean into kind of open contribution and collaboration. And so, you know, a version of JIRA that is that we call Project Central, where basically every key project is described and, you know, the key teams that are working on that have a regular cadence of updating, whether it's on track, off track and what's happening. And that is sort of an open system that everybody can access anything. And so when you get to, hey, like, this thing bugs me, I'm a user of this thing and I'm not necessarily working on this particular product, but what if. And they have a way to kind of like insert that into the flow. And then I think, you know, we have a culture that's receptive to that, that sort of insertion that says, oh, shit, that's not a bad idea. Maybe we should prioritize that.

Yeah. And do you use any sort of point system or karma or anything to bubble up the best ideas at scale, or is it qualitative?

Yeah, not really. I think it's not really. It's. I mean, sure, like, there's going to be things that we prioritize, sort of specific features inside of products. And, like, there's a lot of customer feedback mechanisms and there's sort of a lot of looking through actual usage data of sort of, like, features that we're kind of trying. There's sort of a lot of that mechanism. But I think the, you know, what about this particular thing? You know, there's going to be sort of like a cultural energy that spins up over something that I think is a pretty strong signal. And then we'll do the things that you would expect that all of you do, which is, you know, study the crap out of it, analyze it, talk to customers. Like, make sure that you get kind of validation that that's actually going to be something worth doing.

Yeah. So let's. The other thing besides generational is equality here. So we've got two white males of privilege on stage. So let's talk about inclusion and how openness has or hasn't helped. And we had, we had. Yesterday we heard the story of building the first inclusion program at Salesforce and how it took Molly Ford two years to get up the courage to bring up her idea to build the first inclusion program even in a relatively open culture. Right. So openness doesn't cure all ills. Does, helps. It doesn't cure all. So what have you learned at Lassen in terms of equality and inclusion? How has openness helped? And are there things that maybe it hasn't helped as much as you thought?

Well, so a couple things. Like, one, I think it levels the playing field. It'll sound like a broken record, but, you know, I think the. There's just danger in sort of closed systems where kind of the idea or kind of the, you know, the work product or the progress around something is compartmentalized and people can't see it or contribute to it. And so then potentially, like, you've got, you know, parts of an organization or parts of a company that, you know, that aren't diverse and aren't inclusive, that are sort of driving part of the company forward. And so I think when everything is out in the open, it's just a level playing field. And you can see the participation people feel the freedom and courage to challenge something or to contribute an idea. The other thing that we've worked really hard on with D and I is we believe. And if you believe that diversity is a strength, that the best ideas will come from the most diverse contribution in teams, then you would focus your D and I efforts at a team level, not just a company level. And I think one thing that's broken around the conversation is it's easy to sort of project big numbers where you're like, hey, look at our percentage of X or our percentage of. Yeah, but that could be again, in some function in a company or some part of a company or some geo of a company. And so we've worked really hard to say, like, at the most atomic part of our organization, the team, a group of Five or six or seven or eight people that have to work together every day on a particular thing. How diverse are they? And if they're not, that's something that we need to fix and improve. And so we, you know, we analyze and study and share diversity at the team level, not just kind of like the aggregated level.

There was, I tried to be a student of this and I went to one pretty great talk on next generation thoughts on inclusion. And one of the speakers was asked by a bunch, by a white male attendee, how should I talk about a certain thing? And what the panelists said was, you know, you don't have to talk about everything. It was, it was, it was a slightly, it was a troublesome topic that maybe shouldn't be discussed. Does openness sometimes? Has it created some discussions that you have to bound or has it accidentally created any issues that you wouldn't expect? Nothing.

Not really. I mean, no, not really. I think the culture itself does speak up on things.

Do they speak to much? Do they speak too far?

No, I don't think so. I mean the culture does a good job of kind of balancing that so far. And again, I think it's a strength. But you know, back to the thing I mentioned earlier, that shared understanding, you know, shared understanding inside of a company, whether it's 5 or 5,000, that's sort of key. And when we think about D and I like again the way that we, we have a very active blogging culture. And so, you know, I think every company should have something like Confluence. If it's not confluence, Confluence is sort of like the slide, lack of long form content. And you know, when all of our.

Blogging'S back, isn't it? It's 2019.

I mean, it ever went whether like blogging is just another way of saying like I've got something that I can't communicate in quick form text, in a channel, I actually need to describe my thoughts. And so we'll have pages inside of the company that talk about, you know, the most recent one that I read that was really, you know, really impactful was just the notion of pronouns inside of the company. And there's, you know, a growing contingent of transgender inside of Atlassian who understand that, hey, you might not understand sort of like how this makes me feel or, you know, what the issues are. And so from my own voice, I want to tell you like, I want to tell you like when I've gone, when I've changed my own pronoun or there's a different pronoun that would make me happier. And actually I get it that it might take you a while to change. There's all of this long form content and then what you see in our culture is 3,000 people that read that and then have a discussion about it. And again, that discussion is sort of a living, breathing thing that isn't lost inside of a channel, it's on a page. It's sort of like. And that's, it's just a huge part of our culture that I think in addition to having a real time mechanism for, for people to connect with in the moment, I think these long living, long form discussions about something like that or about strategy, like, you know, where is your strategy written down? Is it written down somewhere where everybody in your company can challenge it or can voice support for it or can just say, heck yeah, this is what we need to do. And is that a reference document that is a living, breathing expression of what you're trying to accomplish that everybody can contribute to? If not, you need that. It can't be an email, can't be a word document, God forbid, It can't be something that's just lost.

Yeah. Okay, and last one because we'll run over. We could talk forever. But I know you wanted to. If you have some, what are for folks that want to be more open, what are a couple learnings, what are a couple things that are actionable that folks can take to their companies?

So I would start there, you know, I would sort of feel like you don't have a system where you can, some technology that you can use to sort of like extend, you know, have, have everyone contribute to what you're trying to express. And I think you need something like that, you know, and, and I don't think it's Google Docs because again, like, you know, I think the technology is an enabler here. Like technology doesn't solve the problem because a huge part of it is culture. Like if you have a system, even if you take a product like ours, like Confluence, and your culture doesn't embrace or use it, it doesn't matter. Like the product isn't going to get you there. And then I would start small, I would say like, you know, pick a topic and again, as a, as leaders of the organization, I assume a lot of you are leaders here of your companies. Start with something that's hard, like whether it's. Here's where we're trying to go, right? Here's our 12 month plan, our 15 month plan. And then by the way, invite challenge to that be vulnerable, whether Again, there's a period where it's gonna take shape but be vulnerable to have that critically challenged inside of the company and get over that hurdle of where. Where you've resolved the challenges or you've agreed to disagree and commit to them, but you've got a plan. And I think the plan on the other side of that process, that open, collaborative process, is much stronger, and I think people are more emotionally committed to helping achieve it.

All right, last one real quick, because I never go over, but maybe there isn't something looking back on openness. Is there one thing that stands out that you wish you'd done earlier or faster, different?

That's a good question. I don't know. It's been a birthright for us. And so I think it's the way we started and it's the way we've scaled. I think the thing that we work a lot on now, maybe we should have done this earlier. I'll pick this one is new Atlassians that join kind of get indoctrinated really quickly, but it takes a lot of courage to participate. And the thing that we work on really hard now is if you've come to from a company where you're not used to that style of working that you know everything that you do is in draft, and you wait until it's perfected before you share it, and then you share it with a small group of people that you think are really going to be supportive. And so you get those positive signals early on, and you're sort of building consensus along the way. That is not the way we do things. And so I think what we try really hard is we try to get people to come in and say, man, you're going to have to let your guard down and just be yourself.

And.

And you'll rock it. But you've got to switch into a completely different mode. And I think that we need to still do that, because in 3,500 people, especially where there's a big consensus that do work a certain way, it can be hard for new people to come in and be like, here I am. And I'm like, I'm going to do it this way. And it takes some change. So I'd probably do that earlier.

That's good. All right, let's thank Jay for coming again.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you.