Atlassian appoints Microsoft’s Joe Binz as CFO

Atlassian has appointed Joe Binz as its new chief financial officer (CFO), effective September 6 2022.

Binz moves from his role as corporate VP, finance at Microsoft Corporation, where he spent over 20 years in leadership positions.

Joe Binz, incoming CFO, Atlassian

In Atlassian’s shareholder briefing this morning, co-founder, co-CEO and interim CFO of Atlassian, Scott Farquhar said, “We're excited to get Joe on board. It's going to be a great addition to the team. I'm super excited about his ability to help us allocate capital across the amazing opportunities that we have in front of us. And that's really, really exciting given he's done extremely well in previous positions.”

Despite the change in leadership, Farquhar insisted that there will be no significant cultural changes in the business.

“Whilst each individual CFO coming into Atlassian brings a whole bunch of their experience and their opinions around how we should work, the philosophy about how we run the business and how we set guidance and how we interact with you, our shareholders in an open and transparent way, that is really set from Mike and I at the top,” he said.

“I don't expect there to be any material changes to the way we guide, to the way we invest and the way we interact with you our shareholders as a result of that.”

FY2022 Q4 results

Atlassian’s FY2022 Q4 results reveal a total revenue growth of $759.8 million this quarter, up 36 percent year on year. The company has added 2,300 employees in the fiscal year 2022, which represents more than a quarter of the team.

The customer count has also grown to bring an additional 8048 net new customers in the quarter, to 242,623 in total.

The shareholder letter revealed, however, that Atlassian has experienced a slower conversion of free customers to paying customers this quarter.

While Atlassian’s revenue is largely reliant on existing customers, the business brings on all net new customers via free plans.

According to Atlassian chief revenue officer Cameron Deatsch, “The one thing that's worth pointing out that we've seen literally just in the last month is that the cohort of customers that came in in the April, May and June timeframe is converting to those paid plans at a slightly slower rate than what we've seen in previous quarters.

“Now I'd love to say that's specific to a product or geography or industry. There's no specific customer segment there. It just seems that in general, those quarter customers that signed up in the last quarter are using the product, they're activating, they're getting value, but they simply just haven’t input those credit cards in those paywalls yet.”