In 2011 I went on a trip with my parents and sister to Cairns, in Far North Queensland. It was the middle of winter, which is the only reasonable time to visit if you don’t like 100% humidity and 100 degree (F) heat. We were there to enjoy the sun and check out the Daintree Rainforest, but I had an extra motive - I was going to meet up with this weird guy I’d met at the university bar a few weeks earlier.
Jake picked me up in his ute. We went across the ferry to where the roads aren’t sealed, met some of the local supermarket operators from his time growing up, swam in a creek that’s usually full of crocs (but on this day was full of dogs), and helped lay some tiles on the house his parents were building.
A few weeks later, back in Brisbane and desperate to get out of my parents home and begin real life, I moved into the spare room he and Tasmin were trying to rent out.
A year later, in a slightly nicer apartment, and desperate to get out of my 9-5 job, I started learning Ruby on Rails. I needed a project to apply it to, and Jake kept complaining that everyone was trying to sell him overpriced offline fingerprint scanners for attendance tracking at the bar he was operating. I figured if I made a way to see a record of someone clocking in and out of work in a browser, I could kill two birds with one stone: learn Rails and shut Jake up.
Turns out it’s impossible to shut Jake up, but my educational project kept going and kept growing. A few months later, we were using it at the bar. A few months after that, Jake had convinced a friend to use our little Rails app. Another few months, and this friend paid his first invoice.1
I don’t think it really sunk in that this was going to be my life now until Tasmin called one day to tell us that he’d just sold our little Rails app to a chain of 15 pizza shops.2 Just one thing… they’d asked if they could use it to do their rosters too. “Of course”, he’d said, as in “of course Alex will spend the next week building a rostering feature”.
Fast forward a few months, this rostering feature was getting rolled out to stores within minutes of being built and deployed,3 and we got a call asking whether our product would export timesheet data into a payroll product so people could get paid. “Yes”, I said, as in “yes, I suppose we should figure that out”. None of us had a copy of this payroll product, but Josh found a computer lab at uni that had it installed and, through a lot of trial and error, figured out a file format we could use to import data into it. I think it was the longest he spent in a computer lab, ever.
A few months later, we were approaching product market fit. We started to pay ourselves. Over 1,000 people were getting paid correctly thanks to our little Rails app, which was becoming a real SaaS product. There was a long way to go (we had no idea how long), but it felt like we were on top of the world.
Why did we go into business together? Nobody ever talks about it when it happens, and now it’s been so long that it’s impossible to say. Founding stories tend to grow in glamour as time passes - the real reason things started become more inspirational and less true. Did Atlassian really start because the founders didn’t want to wear a suit? Maybe that’s true, but it feels like marketing to me.
I think the more real reason is because they liked working together, liked spending all their time together, liked being challenged by each other, liked lifting each other up, and once they’d got a taste of working together, felt like the rest of the world was just a little bit dry by comparison.
I think that’s why we did it, and I think that’s why we keep doing it.
There are very few people you’ll ever work with whose mind you feel like you can read. And even fewer who you know can always cash the check they’re writing. Those synergies aren’t the same for everyone - I’m sure lots of people find me confusing and frustrating and unreliable to work with.
But when it clicks, it’s the most powerful force in the world and you should hold onto it forever.
Thanks to Jill for encouraging me to write this, and reading drafts.
He’s still a customer 10 years later. Thanks mate - you know who you are.
Not Domino’s, for those who know a bit about our history. This was way before that.
One time I asked Tasmin to test a new feature I’d built. He looked at my laptop screen, said “looks good”, and we shipped it. It worked well enough, but more importantly, we built the right feature.