A 40-year-old storage company just beat Mike Cannon-Brookes’ Atlassian

April 20, 2026 — 3:56pm

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When Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar rang the Nasdaq bell in December 2015, it looked like the start of something inevitable.

Their company, Atlassian, wasn’t just another software float, it was a proof point for Australia: a company built in Sydney could sit at the same table as Silicon Valley’s best.

Its business model selling subscriptions to software looked like the future at a time when manufacturing things looked a bit like the past.

Ten years later, and the world is in reverse. Atlassian is being removed from the Nasdaq 100 – a list of the 100 largest companies on the premier exchange for tech companies – to be replaced by Sandisk, a hardware manufacturer known for its memory cards and flash drives that long predates the dotcom bubble and the iPhone.

The ejection is a symbolic handover and an illustration of just how brutally AI is tearing through the software sector.

Sandisk enters with a market cap around $US100 billion ($140 billion); Atlassian exits at roughly $US17 billion. Just a year ago, Sandisk shares traded near $US33. They’re now around $US905, a 2700 per cent run that would have turned a $35,000 punt into $1 million.........

© Brisbane Times