Tanguy Crusson: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Thanks for sharing all that context. What are some of the things that you learned from going through this experience? It sounds like basically it was really painful when you were a part of it and then it ended up being really successful. What are some lessons from the pain? My learnings from it were on the acquisition side. So big company, we've got cash, we can buy a company, it will make us go faster, is not always the case. In my case, there were quite a few things that were not as easy as I would've thought. The first one is the culture shock of a startup that joins your company. So imagine you're a startup, you've got, I don't know, 20, 30 staff or something and things are going well, and you are in full control of your destiny. And then a company buys you to accelerate you, but then you stop owning all the decisions. So the CEO, maybe you become a product person. The person who was running GTM but was also doing a bunch of product stuff, and was also doing a bunch of maybe engineering stuff, all of a sudden is just working in marketing. There are decisions that are made above your head. For example, portfolio fit, which should be part of your product, which is things that should be used from the platform that we've got. So there's a lot of decisions that we're able to make on the day-to-day basis, that start to escape you. Big companies look much further out in the future. So Atlassian would look at the long game. And so I remember with Statuspage when they first joined, we asked about the roadmaps and they were like, well, for the next three months we're working on that and for the following three months we're thinking about potentially X, Y or Z. And so when we're like, "Okay, so what's the three-year plan?" They're like, "What do you mean the three-year plan? I don't know, we'll survive, I guess." Which is what startups do. And they were very penciled ideas about the future, but not to the extent of what a big company would expect. And so that's a really big culture shock. And what you end up with as well, and that's for companies who are looking to get acquired out there or buying other companies, before, you had a startup and everyone was one team, depending on how the buying company is organized, you might land with silos from within your team. So the way Atlassian is organized is like many Atlassian companies, we've got a product organization, we've got an engineering organization, we've got a marketing organization, design organization, and they each roll up to a different leader which may then roll up to the same person, but still by and large different organizations that are then assembled into squads and those squads operate together. But there are rituals that are part of the squad and there are rituals that ladder up to where you are in terms of craft. So I do remember how daunting it was for the Statuspage team when they joined, to understand how to navigate that. If I want to hire a new designer, I'm not talking to the Statuspage CEO anymore, I need to talk to the head of design for this area, which has pretty much nothing to do with the Statuspage business up until the acquisition. designer, I'm not talking to the Statuspage CEO anymore, I need to talk to the head of design for this area, which has pretty much nothing to do with the Statuspage business up until the acquisition. So that is the things that people told me when I started working on the integration, which is, hey, remember, you don't know yet, but integrations are mostly about people. They're not about technology as much or product vision. All of that stuff is the easy stuff. The hard part is the people. And I didn't quite understand at first and then I really got it by the end of it. Because what we tell those companies is we can accelerate by buying, but in reality they are going to be faced with more internal processes around how they manage staff, performance reviews, this concept of engineering allocation, revenue forecasts, OKRs, long-term roadmaps, all that stuff comes in very new to them. So one part of the company top-down says, we bought you because you are successful, keep doing what you're doing. While many other teams without meaning to, basically end up constantly interacting so that the right processes are followed, so that the right things are done.…

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