ENT201: Entrepreneurial Analysis of Mike Cannon-Brookes Report

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Mike Cannon-Brookes, the Australian entrepreneur and co-founder of Atlassian, a leading software company. The report delves into Cannon-Brookes's background, exploring factors that influenced his entrepreneurial journey, including his education and early career. It examines his entrepreneurial traits and characteristics, such as risk-taking, effective communication, and continuous learning, and how these contributed to his success. The report further investigates Atlassian's opportunity recognition and idea development process, highlighting how Cannon-Brookes identified market needs and developed innovative software solutions. Additionally, it analyzes the competitive advantages of Atlassian, including its focus on user-friendly design, integration options, and wide range of products. The report concludes with recommendations for Cannon-Brookes to further enhance Atlassian's growth and sustainability, emphasizing collaboration, strategic infrastructure upgrades, and a continued focus on customer needs and social responsibility. References are provided for all the statements made in the report.

eNTREPRENEURSHIP

Entrepreneurship 1
Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
Background to the entrepreneur.............................................................................................................2
Entrepreneurial traits/characteristics......................................................................................................3
Opportunity recognition and idea development process........................................................................4
Competitive advantages.........................................................................................................................4
Recommendations.................................................................................................................................5
References.............................................................................................................................................6

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Introduction
Entrepreneurship is the actual procedure of initiating a new business. The entrepreneur is a
person having an idea and works to form a product or service which people purchase by
constructing an organization to assist those sales. The entrepreneur is identified to be a person
setting up a business with the aim of generating a profit. An entrepreneur is a person starting
a side propel which can eventually form a full time and sustainable business with the
employees. A person is having an entrepreneurial mindset is likely to create a profitable
business. The entrepreneurs are even identified to be some of the globe’s most powerful
transformers. They view possibilities and solutions whereas an average person just views
annoyances and problems. The entrepreneurs assist more people in identifying value and
contribute to the world.
Entrepreneurship has been the procedure of designing, launching and initiating a new
business which is generally a small business. This report comprises the analysis of Mike
Cannon-Brookes as an entrepreneur. Cannon-Brookes is a successful Australian entrepreneur
and running a software company named as Atlassian. The company advances products for
software development, project management, and content management.
Background to the entrepreneur
Cannon-Brookes was born on 17 November 1979 and is an Australian billionaire. Mike
Cannon-Brookes is co-founder and co-CEO of software company Atlassian Software
Systems. Atlassian is an innovative and rapidly growing software company exerting to upset
the software market by offering high quality and low-price offerings. Cannon-Brookes’s
father was an international banking executive. Cannon-Brookes was graduated from the
University of New South Wales and has a bachelor’s degree in information systems
(Mahroum, 2016). Cannon-Brookes has attained Australian IT professional of the year award
in 2004 and ‘entrepreneur of the year award’ in 2006. Cannon-Brookes even debuted on 2007
BRW young rich list of richest Australians aged under 40 and on BRW rich 200 in 2013.
Other than being entrepreneur Cannon-Brookes is a technology investor a passionate clean
energy evangelist. Cannon-Brookes invests in areas like fintech, software, energy, and
agriculture. He even sits on the board of Zoox, a company that advances technology for self-
driving cars. Cannon-Brookes is always concerned with giving back and always keep the
room to read. Cannon-Brookes is devoted to enhancing literacy and gender equality. As a
passionate clean energy evangelist, Cannon-Brookes has a significant role in the efforts of

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Australia to attain the globe’s greatest lithium-ion battery. Moreover, Cannon-Brookes
endures advocating for the technology benefitting to the environment (Frederick, O'Connor
and Kuratko, 2018).
Cannon-Brookes is identified to be extremely down to earth, devoted to hard work and
recognized for trademark cap. Cannon-Brookes is experiencing success since the formation
of Atlassian in 2005. He was graduated at the age of 22 and soon started a venture that led
him to be labeled as an ‘accidental billionaire’. Initially, Atlassian was found with credit
cards to earn the minimum wage. Cannon-Brookes with co-founder Scott Farquhar created a
business with more than $3.5 billion which is deliberated to be one of Australia’s most
innovative and fast progressing organizations. Both Cannon-Brookes and Scott are even
known to be two of the nation’s richest and self-made billionaires (Carroll, 2019).
Entrepreneurial traits/characteristics
The top skills of Mike Cannon-Brookes are listed as ‘enterprise software’ and start-ups.
Being an entrepreneur Mike is admitted to two things, outstanding product and outstanding
team. Mike believes in spending substantial time with the parties making contracts and only
then finalizes a deal. This trait has a great role in making 18 acquisitions by Atlassian. Mike
is always ready to take a greater amount of risks in the form of career risk, financial risk,
emotional risk or overall business risk (Light, et al. 2017). He is always ready to
communicate effectively along with selling, focusing, learning and strategizing. Cannon-
Brookes communicates with the customers, employees, stakeholders, creditors, and peers. It
has even assisted Cannon-Brookes in making successful contracts along with the acquisitions.
Cannon-Brookes believes in constant learning which is a valuable life skill. The sound
strategy has been inherited by Cannon-Brookes in growing Atlantis. Moreover, Cannon-
Brookes has attained the capability to sell the business idea to the latent investors along with
the products and services to the customers (Hardy and Maguire, 2017). The entrepreneurial
characteristic which makes Mike attain success is the ability to learn. He believes in learning
in any situation with the skills required to become a successful entrepreneur. Moreover, the
business strategy is one of the effective entrepreneurial characteristics inherited by Cannon-
Brookes in attaining success. The application of effective communication skills, sales skills, a
thorough focus and a great capability to learn has enabled entrepreneurial spirit in Cannon-
Brookes. Cannon-Brookes has even developed an enterprise software that is used to manage
projects, track progress and substitute collaboration among the employees. Cannon-Brookes
has used innovation theory and believes in introducing new combinations (Eckhardt, Ciuchta

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and Carpenter, 2018). He comes up with ideas and products which are not yet popular in the
market. It assists Atlassian in the opening of a new market.
Opportunity recognition and idea development process
Opportunity recognition has been a critical procedure of venture formation. In this phase,
entrepreneurs remark the prospect of initiating a new business. The major steps of the
opportunity recognition are such as perception, discovery, and creation in which
entrepreneurs attain the possibility of creating a new business concept as per the resources
and recognized market needs. Atlantis was established by Cannon-Brookes and co-founder
for offering credit cards on an initial basis. The company was formed in 2002. Cannon-
Brookes credits the growth of the company relied on its sales model. Cannon-Brookes sells
business software directly to the customers (Knowles, 2018).
Cannon-Brookes later innovated products such as Jira service desk, Jira core, Jira software,
confluence, bitbucket, opsgenie, statuspage and more. The appropriate business knowledge is
enabled by Cannon-Brookes to identify problems and source venture ideas. The problems
faced by the businesses were sensed by Cannon-Brookes and acted within the dynamic
environments. In the domain of experience, Cannon-Brookes has always evaluated business
opportunities with the intricacy of skills. Cannon-Brookes is a better-informed entrepreneur
and attained greater chances to identify emerging opportunities worldwide (Leigh and Triggs,
2016).
Competitive advantages
Cannon-Brookes has been competitive in producing products in the world of software
collaboration and advancement tools. The options offered are wide ranging from integration
to the solutions. Cannon-Brookes has attained a competitive advantage for Atlassian software
companies for emerging products for software developers, project managers, and content
management (Zaheer, et al. 2019). Cannon-Brookes is a leader, offers various products and
regularly advancing more offerings. The wide range offerings of Atlassian are integrated with
various plug-ins. When it comes to versatility and integration options, Cannon-Brookes has
been potential as one of the best entrepreneurs in the Australian industry. Cannon-Brookes
regularly improves software enhancements with further expanding plug-in potential (Barry
and You, 2018). As compared to the competitors, Cannon-Brookes offers technology
developer tools, enterprise software, performance management platform, and project
management. The competitors of Atlassian identified are Google, GitHub, Salesforce,

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ServiceNow and CA technologies. Other than this, Cannon-Brookes is having four
companies in the portfolio of Atlassian and Process Street is one of them. More competitive
advantages of Atlassian has been realized in the form of integration. Cannon-Brookes has
been successful in offering a user friendly environment through Atlassian. It impeccably
functions with integral features. When it is talked about the competitive options, the list is
moderately expensive. Atlassian offers not only user-friendly design but also free online
assistance and documentation (Leal, et al. 2019).
Recommendations
Cannon-Brookes is recommended to better collaborate with its teams. Atlassian needs to be
intensely collaborative and greatly specialized. As Atlassian growing bigger in size so
required to deliberate and infrastructure upgrade. More application notes should be grown
instance for improving performance. Cannon-Brookes is even recommended to focus more
on growth. As the company is already focused on the quality, therefore, need to focus on the
growth as well. The growth will lead to the prosperity of Atlassian. The company should
construct a sustainable business and concentrate on its customers. Atlassian also ned
implement the idea of transparency as most of the software companies put barriers among
themselves and customers (Lipset, 2018).
Other than this, Atlassian is recommended to form a socially liable company caring for the
communities. Atlassian should choose the right infrastructure with different data sets,
applications, traffic, and configuration. On the other side at the time of making acquisition
Cannon-Brookes should deliberate two things, outstanding product, and an outstanding team.
The parties should spend sufficient time with each other and make sure that the changes to be
adopted are potential before finalizing any deals.

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References
Barry, M. and You, K., 2018. Employer and employer association matters in Australia in
2017. Journal of Industrial Relations, 60(3), pp.358-377.
Carroll, T., 2019. Is your legal practice feeling uncomfortable?: Well, get used to
it. Australasian Law Management Journal, (Sep 2019), p.13.
Eckhardt, J.T., Ciuchta, M.P. and Carpenter, M., 2018. Open innovation, information, and
entrepreneurship within platform ecosystems. Strategic entrepreneurship journal, 12(3),
pp.369-391.
Frederick, H., O'Connor, A. and Kuratko, D.F., 2018. Entrepreneurship. Cengage AU.
Hardy, C. and Maguire, S., 2017. Institutional entrepreneurship and change in fields. The
Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism, pp.261-280.
Knowles, B., 2018. Aubrey Blanche Atlassian global head of diversity. XRDS: Crossroads,
The ACM Magazine for Students, 25(1), pp.66-67.
Leal, G.C.L., Prikladnicki, R., Ebert, C., Balancieri, R. and Pompermaier, L.B., 2019.
Practices and Tools for Software Start-Ups. IEEE Software, 37(1), pp.72-77.
Leigh, A. and Triggs, A., 2016. Markets, monopolies and moguls: The relationship between
inequality and competition. Australian Economic Review, 49(4), pp.389-412.
Light, I., Bhachu, P. and Karageorgis, S., 2017. Migration networks and immigrant
entrepreneurship. In Immigration and entrepreneurship (pp. 25-50). Routledge.
Lipset, S.M., 2018. Values, education, and entrepreneurship. In Promise of development (pp.
39-75). Routledge.
Mahroum, S., 2016. Atlassian in Sydney: Beating the Tyranny of Distance. In Black Swan
Start-ups (pp. 215-231). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Zaheer, H., Breyer, Y., Dumay, J. and Enjeti, M., 2019. Straight from the horse's mouth:
Founders' perspectives on achieving ‘traction’in digital start-ups. Computers in Human
Behavior, 95, pp.262-274.