Mike Cannon-Brookes

Michael Cannon-Brookes was born on 17 November 1979 in Connecticut, US. The son of a British global banking executive, also named Mike, and his wife Helen, he is the youngest of three siblings, with two sisters. His family relocated to Taiwan when he was six months old, and to Hong Kong when he was three; he later attended boarding school in England. He attended Cranbrook School in Sydney, and graduated from the University of New South Wales with a bachelor's degree in information systems on a UNSW co-op scholarship.

Before founding Atlassian, Cannon-Brookes co-founded an internet bookmark management tool called The Bookmark Box with his university classmate Niki Scevak. The Bookmark Box was sold to Blink.com in 2000.

Cannon-Brookes co-founded Atlassian, a collaboration software company, of which he is CEO. He and Scott Farquhar started the company in 2002, shortly after graduating from university, funding it with credit cards. They have said they founded Atlassian with the aim of earning the then-typical graduate starting salary of A$48,000 at the big corporations without having to work for someone else.

Their first major Atlassian product was Jira, a bug tracking, issue tracking and project-tracking software. They decided to forgo the expense of hiring sales people, and instead spent their time and money on building a good product and selling it at a more affordable price via the Atlassian website. As of 2016, the company still did not have a traditional sales force, investing instead in research and development.

In 2005, they opened an office in New York, where most of their clients were. Later in 2005 they moved the U.S. office to San Francisco, which had a much larger pool of relevant technical talent.

Their first external funding for Atlassian was a US$60 million round from Accel in 2010. In 2014, they redomiciled the company to the UK, in advance of an initial public offering (IPO).

Atlassian made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in December 2015, with a market capitalisation of $4.37 billion. The IPO made Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar Australia's first tech startup billionaires and household names in Australia.

Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar redomiciled Atlassian to the United States in 2022. Since September 2024, Cannon-Brookes is the sole CEO of the company after Farquhar stepped down as co-CEO. As of 2024, he owns approximately 20% of Atlassian, with super-voting shares.

Cannon-Brookes married Annie Todd, an American fashion designer, in 2010; they have four children together. The couple first met at a Qantas lounge while flying from Sydney to San Francisco. Cannon-Brookes and Todd lived in Sydney's eastern suburbs in Centennial Park. In 2018 they bought Fairwater, Australia's most expensive house for approximately A$100 million, next door to Scott Farquhar's A$71 million Point Piper harbourside mansion, Elaine. Cannon-Brookes also acquired the 1923-built heritage residence Verona, designed by architect Leslie Wilkinson and located in Double Bay, for A$17 million. The house previously belonged to New Zealand philanthropist Pat Goodman. Prior to that, in 2016, Cannon-Brookes had bought the A$7.05 million SeaDragon house, built in 1936, also designed by Wilkinson and updated by architect Luigi Rosselli. His Centennial Park home sold for A$16.5 million. In 2019 he purchased a house near Fairwater for A$12 million. He owns a Bombardier Global 7500 jet. Cannon-Brookes separated from his wife Annie in July 2023.

Recognition

Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar were recognised as Ernst & Young's 2006 Australian Entrepreneur of the Year. He is a member of The Forum of Young Global Leaders. In 2023, he was recognised as a "Time100 climate person".