 Okay, we're back here live at Stanford University for the Excel Stanford Symposium, the 17th annual. We're here with Michael Cannon Brooks, last dean's software, CEO, co-founder. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we're here with Jeff Kelly, my co-host, and okay, so you're down under Sydney, Australia. Tell us your story. I just find it so fascinating and I personally love being an entrepreneur myself having started a company and raising venture capital and watching it fail and starting a company with no venture capital, self-funding it and watching it succeed is a good thing. And then, you know, ultimately, funding may come and you have a very successful story about you guys bootstrapped this company for multiple years, Excel partners put in $60 million. Take us through that quickly, that story, take us back to those early days. Sure. Yeah, John, we started in 2002, just two of us out of university and made a few different software products and one of them took off, which is now Jira's largest application for project management and put a lot of time and effort in. A little blur flew by and before we knew it, we were profitable and growing fast and continued to accelerate. So we bootstrapped for eight years, took a $60 million series A round from Excel in 2010 and now we have about 700 staff in seven or eight different countries around the world. 25,000 enterprise customers and it's sort of onward and upward. It's all going very well. So one of the things we always talk about on SiliconANGLE, especially in the queue when we have tech athletes, guys like you who have been successful is, you know, it's always, you know, oh, it's a great time to do a startup, doesn't cost that much, not a lot of tax. It is truly disruptive. Can you just share with the folks how you guys went to market? I mean, Bootstrap is lean in me. I mean, it's not like you're just swimming in dough. You have to be careful. Talk about how you guys scaled and how did you hit the tipping point? Sure. I mean, you've got to remember we started in 2002, which is nuclear winter for tech. There was no funding. There was nothing going on. So we really had to find a model that worked for us. If you're not going to get any money, the only way to get it is from customers and that's usually by selling them a good product. So we're lucky enough to have some good products early, some very smart, early engineering folk, managed to, you know, always keep the revenue line above the cost line. It's sort of traditional. We like to think we're customer funded. And, yeah, I mean, we've just been growing up since then. We have a very unusual model that came from that. So we're sort of renowned as having no salespeople. We're well north of $100 million in revenue now. And we still don't have any salespeople. So at $1 million, we were told we'd need to get it. How do you sell the product? So we just make really, really good products. We put them online. We do marketing. So it's download or SaaS driven, depending on your choice of deployment model. Sign up online, very reasonable pricing. So we keep them very affordable. And then they get into your organization. It works really well. We get a second team, a third team, and it just grows from there. So you guys have a service organization. Obviously, you have customers. So you have to service those guys. So no sales guys. We have a support organization. So we do technical support running in five GOs around the world. So 24 seven technical support. But, yeah, I mean, a support organization is like 120, 140 people now. So that's what you've done. Is there anything else you want to add on what you guys have done? And then we'll talk about what you guys are doing right now. You guys, you innovate on the sales model, made great software. What are you guys doing right now that's compelling you like to share with the audience that you want to share with them? Sure. I mean, we're kind of different to anybody else and that we really target the holistic product team. So we're often incorrectly labeled as selling development tools. Developers are probably 25, maybe 30 percent of our audience. Most of our audience is in the broader product team. The whole team of people that has to come together to make a piece of software successful. And that's our focus is just empowering the product teams around the world to unleash the potential they already have. We always say we don't make the product team any smarter. We just help them work together better so they can get something out the door. What do you guys see as the biggest demand point to fueling your business? What drivers really forcing you guys to continue to run fast? I mean, the biggest driver of fueling us is just software is just exploding. It seems ironic. People like hasn't been exploding for years and years in a way it has. But as a true sort of strategic competitive advantage for big business, it's only, you know, a relatively recent phenomenon. And so every single company in the world, you know, becoming a software company, which is sort of one of our models. And it's, you know, it's true. We sell a lot to the big, you know, the Twitters and Facebooks of the world. But we also sell, you know, we have far more customers that are insurance companies, banks, manufacturers, car companies that are increasingly using software as a different. Pure SAS products. Pure SAS. No, no, we are behind the firewall and on demand. It's totally customer choice. We actually don't push customers either way. So you're targeting developers. Those guys take it that they work on top of it or not? I mean, the developers write their code in normal places. So we tend to target the whole product team, not specifically the developer. We have about a third of our business. A third of our product line is in the development tool space. A third is in the project management space. And a third is in the pure collaboration space. Awesome. So what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs out there who are looking for to do the same success that you've had? What advice would you share with them? Well, that's a big question. Build something that you're really passionate about. I mean, we love what we do. I have the best job in the world. So if you don't love the product that you're doing, the space that you're in, et cetera, we never could have got into this with some sort of a spreadsheet like we're going to make a business and we had an opportunity and a model we're going to nail it with. I mean, we love what we do. We love talking to customers and making their lives better and building for ourselves. So, you know, have passion for what you're doing. And then, you know, the rest will take care of itself if you do the right things. So, Michael, so we talked a lot about kind of the entrepreneurial aspect of your business. Why don't we dig in a little bit in terms of the products? Tell us a little bit more about specifically how you guys help the entire product team. You mentioned it's about collaboration. It's about kind of tracking. I also notice on your website talks about analyzing data. Talk about a little bit of how the product actually works. Maybe if you could walk us through a use case of one of your clients and specifically how you've added value to their product development process. Sure, sure. I mean, JIRA is a sort of core application, if you like. It's an issue tracking project management tool. So, it handles everything from agile teams in terms of sprints and, you know, and epics and those sorts of things all the way through to, I mean, it's effectively a workflow engine. So, people start running all sorts of business processes through JIRA. But it's a very collaborative tool. So, it has all sorts of ways for people to collaborate over those issues, both at a project level, a sprint level, at an issue level, etc. And JIRA is very integrated with all our other tools, obviously. So, if you're in the code level, we have a series of tools for like a DVCS management. So, get a mercurial management in the enterprise. Now, getting mercurial are quite different to the old era we had of source control in that it's now a truly collaborative system. So, you get a lot more, you know, pull requests. You get people, you know, collaborating and commenting and discussing code. So, we handle that part of the collaboration. And then the rest of the team is obviously going to write documentation, blogs, textual information, share documents, presentations, mock-ups, all that sort of thing. So, confluences are, you know, a textual collaboration tool that enables the product manager, the project manager, the marketing team to get involved. And they all tie together to make a sort of holistic collaborative experience for the product team. Interesting. Now, how is that, maybe can you contrast that with kind of more of the more traditional approach that you've seen out there and kind of take us into kind of your why? Why do you do what you do? What's the value that you're adding there? And what this approach is compared to maybe the more traditional way, a little bit more disjointed in terms of the collaboration and being able to track the development process? Sure. I mean, software traditionally hasn't been a particularly collaborative field. You know, if you go back to the waterfall days, which for some people are still here, you know, it was much more a phased approach where someone would write a large specification that would basically be baked in an oven, fixed, handed to some developers who would code it, who would hand it to some, you know, quality assurance people who would test it and hand it to someone else who would then deploy it in a data center. That's all those phases of being merged together. And the only way to really make that work in an enterprise nowadays is to raise the bar on collaboration, to get people talking the whole time, to get people with a constant passive and active awareness of where all the different objects in the product or project they're up to. And we sort of help them tie all those different things together so they can jump in at whatever their home base tool is and be able to navigate and see what we're, what the whole team's trying to build and get everyone on the same page. So as we talked about before we went on, I covered the big data space and the analytics space and tell us about the analytics piece. So what role does kind of data and providing analytics as part of this process play in your product and kind of your product? Sure. I mean, we've been doing, I mean, inside the company, we've been doing big data since before. It had a name of big data. It was just smartly looking at metrics at massive scale. But in terms of what we provided to the customers, I mean, we have a number of analytics options in each tool. We're heavy on reporting and customers being able to build sort of real-time dashboards of what they're doing. Each tool has that capability in a different way, obviously, tailored to whatever it is that the tool is actually doing. So we can go really deep on source code analytics or obviously project analytics, sprints, burn downs, all that sort of thing. So the folks really want to know one thing, final question. What is your favorite beer? It's my favorite beer. I really like a beer called Little Creatures from a small town in Fremantle in Western Australia. You probably can't find it here. They make phenomenal beer and because it's Little Creatures, their marketing campaign is open up a little, which is what their beer helps you to do. So it's a great beer. Okay, Michael, thanks for coming on The Cube. Appreciate it. We'll be right back with our next guest live. This is the Cube, our flagship program. We've got the events extracted simply from the noise. We've got our next guest. We have the short break at the stand for Excel, Symposium, Excel Enterprises, the hashtag or tweet us. That's looking at you a lot for a year. Happy to answer your questions. We'll be right back with our next guest.