Scott Farquhar

“I really think if we had grown up in Silicon Valley and had venture capital around us that we would have built a very different company that wouldn't have been as disruptive as ours has been because we didn't have venture capital. We didn't have people that had done it before to sort of drag us back to the mean. And we...”

— From Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, DeepSignal Studios (July 01, 2026)

“We had venture capitalists telling us that we couldn't build the company. You know, we we're at a million dollars of revenue, they said, 'Oh, that's really nice, you you've built a tiny little tiny company, you can never build a million of revenue.' And we went back with $10 million of revenue and they're like, 'Yeah,...”

— From Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, DeepSignal Studios (July 01, 2026)

“I think we've done about $3 billion in donations or pledges. Depends on what the stock market's doing any given day. But you know and that's over 10 years. So I think that works out to be 3,000 days. So about a million dollars a day you know for 10 years has been done under this program.”

— From Pledge 1% AMA with Scott Farquhar, Pledge 1% (March 01, 2026)

“My goal and PJ John Present's goal is to bake giving back into the DNA of every company that's out there. I do think that we're going to need empathy for people going through this AI disruption. We're going to need to give back. We're going to need to provide safety nets for employees.”

— From Pledge 1% AMA with Scott Farquhar, Pledge 1% (March 01, 2026)

“I think it's going to be pretty disruptive to what value and where we as humans, you know, create value in the future. And uh I do think that the skills my kids need to learn are going to be very different from the skills that, you know, I needed to learn, you know, at school or university. Like I think there's a whole...”

— From Pledge 1% AMA with Scott Farquhar, Pledge 1% (March 01, 2026)

“Atlassian does about eight billion dollars in revenue. And we sell our products to pretty much every country on the planet. And when I think about Atlassian, it's not just the revenue impact. Atlassian is the keystone species in the entire Australian tech ecosystem.”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)

“Australia has an opportunity to host data centers for the entire Southeast Asian region and potentially beyond. We should be powering the entire region. We should be exporting megawatts as megabytes and in return getting paid mega bucks to promote Australianism. I believe this is a multi-billion dollar multi-decade opp...”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)

“Australia's copyright laws are out of sync with the rest of the world. While the USA and Europe have exemptions for fair use for text and data mining, Australia remains an outlier. Fixing this one thing could unlock billions of dollars of foreign investment in Australia.”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)

“I'm calling on support and partnership with the unions to create tech trades, digital apprenticeships, short practical qualifications that could be completed in six or 12 months to get people ready for high demand industries like data center construction and battery installation.”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)

“I propose a bold and novel plan. Just like we host embassies from around the world on Australian soil, Australia should host digital embassies, secure sovereign cloud vaults that host country's most important data operating under the laws of that country.”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)

“Research by the tech council that I'm chair of shows AI adoption could add up to $115 billion a year in addition to our economy by 2030.”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)

“When some jobs become more productive, you need less of them and some jobs become more productive and you need more of them. If we could make data centers cheaper than other countries in the world, we would need more people to create data centers. If we make call center staff more productive, people aren't going to cal...”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)

“Australia is really uniquely positioned despite our high labor costs to build data centers well. Nations that maybe have a lower cost of labor aren't as good at building big projects.”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)

“I think copyright is the fundamental reason a lot of protections, whether it's patents or other protections of intellectual property, that's the foundation by which our entire knowledge economy depends. What I'm saying is that there are no exceptions for text and data mining in Australia, and so there is no fair use ex...”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)

“Australia has huge advantages to build a company here. The talent density has grown from when I started 25 years ago. My advice for entrepreneurs is to build something you're passionate about and go do something that really lights you up.”

— From IN FULL: Scott Farquhar Addresses the National Press Club of Australia, National Press Club of Australia (August 01, 2025)