Scott Farquhar’s next chapter
In his first public appearance since leaving Atlassian, Farquhar shared his investment strategy, thoughts on AI and some surprising relationship advice.
It’s been nearly three months since Scott Farquhar stepped down as co-CEO of Atlassian, and since then he’s been brushing up on his investing. That has led to a purchase which may surprise: airports.
Skip Capital, the fund run by Farquhar’s wife Kim Jackson, recently bought four airports, he explained during a talk at the National Tech Summit on Tuesday. The decision was prompted by new transparency laws around superannuation funds, which he predicts will drive these funds to prioritise reliable infrastructure bets.
The purchase is part of Farquhar’s “barbell investment strategy”, a concept popularised by Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The strategy involves building a portfolio made up solely of low- and high-risk assets, ignoring everything in the middle. He also gave hints as to what future high-risk investments might look like for him. AI is top of the list.
“When I look at a lot of the [AI] startups at the moment in this space, a lot of them just get obviated by the next release for ChatGPT or Claude,” Farquhar said, referring to frontier AI models and chat interfaces from OpenAI and Anthropic. “So it’s not yet clear where the AI startups are going to have a decisive lead.”
