A decade after co-founding Pledge 1%, Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar is back at the helm—rallying unicorns and founders to bake giving into business from day one.
Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar is returning to lead the global philanthropic movement he helped launch a decade ago, becoming chair at Pledge 1%.
Pledge 1% made the announcement today as part of a bid to re-energise the movement which has 19,000 companies signed up to give US$3 billion in equity to social causes.
Australia ranks second globally among the pledgors, with over 1,800 companies—including Canva and Culture Amp—among the 19,000 participants, which also include more than 60 unicorns worldwide.
Farquhar’s appointment comes as Pledge 1% launches a year-long celebration of its 10th anniversary, bringing together founders, investors, accelerators, banks, and ecosystem leaders to champion the future of business-led impact..
The announcement was made in Sydney at an event attended by more than 100 people from across the ecosystem.
“Twilio has these incredible heart-wrenching stories about people they’ve saved from human trafficking.”
Pledge 1% chair Scott Farquhar
Pledge 1% started in 2015, and is now in more than 130 countries where companies have committed to set aside 1% of equity, profit, product, and/or employee time to drive social impact.
Farquhar told Forbes Australia that he and Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes had “probably read an article” about Salesforce founder Marc Benioff establishing the 1% model at Salesforce in 2000.
“We effectively took the pledge in the first couple of years of Atlassian … But we were one of very few companies that decided to bake giving back into what we did. You’re busy, heads down, actually building. 1% of product isn’t worth anything when you don’t have any product to give away, and we didn’t have profit for a long time.”
A decade later, however, the company that is credited with starting Australia’s 21st century tech industry was taking off. “It [giving 1%] was really humming and baked into what we did … then, about 2014, I looked around and it was still just Salesforce, us, and a smattering of companies that had done this.”
Farquhar started asking why no one else was doing it. “People loved the idea, but it just wasn’t front and centre in their thinking. Even though Salesforce had pioneered it, that was as far as they’d got. They hadn’t evangelized it to anyone else.
“So I formed a group of people and really started Pledge 1% 10 years ago with the idea of like, ‘why don’t we evangelise this incredible idea?’”
He found some people in his own company and some at Salesforce, plus Colorado investor Seth Levine to drive it and set up the not-for-profit. “Our original goal was to get 500 people signed up. We would do all the startup hustle stuff. We’d turn up to conferences, we’d pack growth-hack stuff to get people to hear about this organisation.
“It was on an oily rag. We had no budget – a little bit of money out of Salesforce, but most of it out of Atlassian. And it’s grown from there.”
“I’m super blessed to be moving into the next phase of life beyond working 80 hours a week.”
Scott Farquhar
Telecommunications company Twilio is an example of a company that “brings it all together”, says Farquhar. “Twilio.org went heavily into preventing human trafficking. A lot of these people are in situations where they might be able to steal a phone for 10 minutes and do something about it. And so Twilio had this SMS hotline where people could text if they were in trouble.
“Twilio had donated the products to make that happen. They’d also funded the hotline and the people staffing it. And then their employees had helped build out some of the systems involved. So Twilio has these incredible heart-wrenching stories about people they’ve saved from human trafficking as a result.
“There’s Atlassian, there’s Twilio, and there’s 18,998 more stories like that.”
Farquhar, whose fortune is valued by Forbes at US$13.1 billion, also runs the charitable Skip Foundation and Skip Ventures with wife Kim Jackson. They have invested in a who’s who of Australian success stories, including Canva, Culture Amp, Safety Culture and Air Wallex, all of whom have joined Pledge 1%.
Airwallex was the latest, pledging last November $84 million in shares and three days a week from all its 1,600 employees.
Farquhar says “cajoling” is too strong a word to describe his efforts to bring them on board.
“People need to prioritise. There are a lot of other things those founders could be doing. Look at Mel [Perkins] and Cliff [Obrecht] from Canva. They’ve always wanted to give back. Mel was like, ‘Job 1, build the most valuable company in the world. Job 2, give it all away’. But if you talk to Mel and Cliff, they’ll say that without Pledge 1% they would have done those two things in that order. It was Pledge 1% that encouraged them to give money away now. They’ve given away tens of millions of dollars that they wouldn’t have otherwise given away for a long time.”
Obrecht, co-founder and COO of Canva said in a statement: “Pledge 1% is a force multiplier. What started as a simple idea has become a global framework for impact. We’ve proven that you don’t have to wait to be successful to start giving – you can build it into your organisation from day one.”
Amy Lesnick, CEO of Pledge 1%, credited Farquhar’s vision with helping to shape the organisation’s global impact and is excited to celebrate this milestone by welcoming more companies and founders to the movement.
“Ten years ago, Scott helped spark a movement that transformed how businesses do good,” Lesnick said in a statement. “With Scott stepping in as Board Chair, we are doubling down on our mission to equip and empower companies across ecosystems, industries, and borders to unlock even greater impact in the decade ahead.”
Farquhar also stepped up to take on the chair of the Tech Council of Australia in March after stepping down as co-CEO of Atlassian in August 2024.
He says Pledge 1% will now be taking up about a half day a week of his time. “I’m just so blessed I can have such a successful corporate career and have a great family life and be fit and healthy and being able to give back in civic life, through the Tech Council, philanthropically through Pledge 1% and our foundations. I’m super blessed to be moving into the next phase of life beyond working 80 hours a week.”
