KEY POINTS:
It's a cool, clear day in Waitangi, where the annual Morgo innovation summit organised by venture capitalist Jenny Morel is well under way.
There are six Segways lined up in the lobby of the Copthorne Hotel, a predominance of Apple laptops and two coffee machines churning out dark streams of real coffee. The place must be filled with techy types.
As it happens, some of the tech sectors major players are here - Trade Me founder Sam Morgan, serial entrepreneur and Xero chief executive Rod Drury and Seeby Woodhouse, who just sold his internet provider Orcon for $24.3 million, among them.
I've been to one other Morgo, a couple of years ago in Taupo and it turned out to be one of the best tech talkfests I've ever attended. The event serves to remind us of just how innovative our small technology sector really is.
But it's an Australian businessman, Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, who has been centre of attention today. That's because his Sydney-based software company is one of the fastest growing in Australasia and a really good example of how to scale quickly for global expansion in every aspect - people, marketing, software development and revenue.
Formed in 2001 by 21 year olds Cannon-Brookes and his friend Scott Farquhar with $10,000 in capital, care of a couple of credit cards, Atlassian makes work-flow management software for businesses and now has 7500 customers in 88 countries and 104 staff spread across the world. He wants to add 6500 more customers this year alone. Revenue last year was A$24 million.
The company's growth has been funded from revenue, something Cannon-Brookes says is not about to change.
"We didn't have any money to hire a sales team so the software had to sell itself. It also had to be low cost."
What's striking about this businessman, who with Farquhar won the Australian Entrepreneur of the Year award last year, is his bluntness and clarity of thinking.
When he founded the company he wasn't even sure what product he would be selling, he just knew how he would sell it - using new technologies and the internet to make it easier for people to use enterprise software. His grand goal was to have 50,000 customers, a target he is still aiming for and well on the way to reaching. His client list is littered with blue chip customers who use his software tools to organise projects within their own businesses.
While Atlassian has gone global exceptionally quickly, Cannon-Brookes cautioned against entering new markets too quickly.
"We had a thousand customers in the US before we turned up," he says.
His advice is also to "build the right product, not the first one," pointing to Google's success as the most popular of internet search engines, but by no means the first one to emerge.
He said finding the people required to grow a business was the hardest part of scaling up, as well as winning the confidence of prospective clients as a small company.
"Trust is hard to scale. We were struggling to get banks over the line [with products] until we put up customer testimonials [on the website]," he says.
Cannon-Brookes got a laugh when he puut up a Powerpoint slide showing off Atlassian's company values. Chief among them, "create useful products people lust over" and "don't f*** the customer".
