Scott Farquhar

I'm really loving it.

It's about the Atlassian co-founders, Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquhar.

Brilliant.

And I reread Brave New World this year.

Um, and you sort of say, you know, why, what are you going to ask me? Blah, blah, blah.

Um, I once messaged, uh, Scott Farquhar, the founder of Atlassian on Twitter.

And, um, I did the, you know, I talked about what I'd done in the past.

I said, I wanted to meet him and bring him in to talk at my school.

We've always been able to just talk to each other and share whatever's going on that day or that week, and that's been really good.

Scott Farquhar played a big role early on and took an interest and mentored and helped.

The people that we'd meet in the circles we're in, you'd come across other founders, you'd go to some of the founder events and things like that, and you'd only need to meet one or two people probably a year.

who you really connect with.

Atlassian is one of Australia's great business success stories.

Two university friends, Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquhar, started out with $10,000 in credit card debt and then went on to build a global software empire worth more than $100 billion.

But behind the extraordinary wealth the Nasdaq listing and the friendship, the rise of two of Australia's most recognisable billionaires, there's another story about ambition, about ego and what happens when enormous success starts to pull a partnership apart.

It's the subject of a new book called Tech Bros, perfect name, by senior business journalists John Stenhold and Perry Williams from the Australian newspaper, who spent months investigating the private relationship behind the public success, including a year the founders reportedly stopped speaking to each other altogether and the corporate counselling that followed.

Congratulations on the book.

Months and months in the making, no doubt.

You know, a lot of people know the Atlassian origin story of two bootstrapping young guns, university buddies in Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquhar, who had a shared goal of modest incomes and no suits in the office, funded, as I said, by $10,000 in credit card debt.

How much of that story is true, John? Well,

Atlassian is one of Australia's great business success stories.

Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar met at university and built a software company that at one point was worth more than $115 billion US.

But behind the extraordinary success is the story of a friendship and business partnership that started to fracture.

Business journalist John Stensholt is the co-author with Perry Williams of the new book Tech Bros, which tells the inside story of Atlassian and its founders.

John, welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A.

Thank you, Shaun.

John, how long have you known Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes for? Let's establish your credibility on this, because you've known them for longer than most of us.

[laughs] Well, the...