Growing up in a working-class suburb of Sydney, Scott says he always had an interest in computers.

“I remember crying myself to sleep one night because my friend had a computer and I wanted one too,” he says.

His parents ended up buying him a second-hand machine and he spent about a year trying to make it work. Computer programming came later.

Scott met Mike while both were doing a degree in computers and business at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The two friends finished the course and wanted to work for themselves.

Their goals were simple: don’t wear suits, and earn more than 48,500 Australian dollars ($35,000; £26,000) a year. That was roughly the salary other graduates had been offered by big banks and accounting firms.

“At that stage I was living in a shared house at university and eating ramen noodles every day,” says Scott. “We didn’t have much to lose.”

A brief spell as a “terrible” tech support company was followed by a shift to business software.

Orders were hard won at first, coming mainly from people they knew.

Then one day in 2003, a fax arrived. It was a purchase order from American Airlines. That fax still hangs outside Scott’s office at the company’s headquarters in Sydney.

It was the end of what he describes as “hand-to-hand combat” to find customers. Now they were coming straight to Atlassian.

“That was the turning point when we knew we’d make it,” he says.