\n<\/p>\n
Growing up in a working-class suburb of Sydney, Scott says he always had an interest in computers. <\/p>\n
“I remember crying myself to sleep one night because my friend had a computer and I wanted one too,” he says.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Their goals were simple: don’t wear suits, and earn more than 48,500 Australian dollars ($35,000; \u00a326,000) a year. That was roughly the salary other graduates had been offered by big banks and accounting firms. <\/p>\n
“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.” <\/p>\n
A brief spell as a “terrible” tech support company was followed by a shift to business software.<\/p>\n
Orders were hard won at first, coming mainly from people they knew.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It was the end of what he describes as “hand-to-hand combat” to find customers. Now they were coming straight to Atlassian. <\/p>\n
“That was the turning point when we knew we’d make it,” he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n