MoForever Alumni News - Summer 2018

5 | MoForever Tell us a little about Atlassian. Atlassian is a publicly traded enterprise software company, aimed at making work better for all types of teams—but especially software teams. Our most famous products include Jira, our software project management tool; Confluence, our content collaboration wiki; and Stride, our team communication platform, with group chat/messaging and voice/video conferencing. Atlassian has grown rapidly, is poised to break $1 billion in annual revenue, and recently surpassed 2,500 employees worldwide. Our presence in the United States is now larger than our presence in Sydney, Australia, where the company was founded, with major U.S. offices in San Francisco, Mountain View, New York, and Austin. What is your typical day at Atlassian? As Head of IP, I cover patent litigation, our patent program, open-source, trademarks and copyrights, and all manner of IP issues that come up with contracts and negotiations around our products and vendors. I have to say it is a little crazy. While it is incredibly busy, it’s also exhilarating in terms of being on the ground floor of a company that’s poised to grow by leaps and bounds. I get to work with all levels of the company, depending on the task: For IP strategy, I’m involved with our C-suite; for the patent program and open-source issues, I’m immersed in the engineering and product teams; for trademarks, I work closely with the marketing and brand folks; and for litigation, I jump around the company interviewing potential custodians of documents and witnesses. I also spend a lot of time with outside counsel, budgets, and our finance folks. How does IP at Atlassian differ from that of your previous IP corporate roles? Before Atlassian, I worked at Rovi Corporation as VP of IP Strategy and at Technicolor as VP of Patent Strategy and Head of Litigation. Both companies were early innovators in the entertainment space with large, complicated patent portfolios. At those positions, I worked to renew and grow patent licensing programs that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. For example, I helped develop and steer the patent portfolio at Rovi to support once-a-decade license renewals with the largest North American cable