You Feel Like a Fraud. So Does the Co-Founder of Atlassian.

I struggled with imposter syndrome ever since high school.

That feeling that at some point someone would find out. That I got the job because I smiled at the interview. That I got a good grade because the teacher liked me. That I passed the exam because I was asked an easy question. That I managed to deliver the task because of a set of lucky circumstances. And every time I talked to someone smarter than me — which happened daily — that quiet voice: damn, they're so much smarter.

I still feel it. The difference now is I understand what it is.

Mike Cannon-Brookes built Atlassian

In a TED talk he gave a few years ago, Mike Cannon-Brookes — co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, billionaire — said this:

"Have you ever felt out of your depth, like a fraud? And just kind of bullshitted your way through? Petrified that, at any moment, someone was going to call you on it? Most days, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing. I've felt that way for fifteen years."

He said this running a company worth tens of billions of dollars.

I'm not a billionaire. Neither are you, probably (if you are feel free to reach out ;) ). But if you're a CTO and you recognise that feeling — you're in good company. Neil Gaiman wrote that maybe there aren't any grown-ups, "only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for". There he says Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter too.

At some point I stopped trying to argue myself out of the feeling and started asking why it exists at all. That turned out to be a more useful question.

The role is structurally designed to make you feel inadequate

The feeling doesn't go away when you get the title. For most people, it gets louder.

And it's not because they're not competent. It's structural.

Infrastructure, security, architecture, AI, hiring, board communication, product strategy, data — the CTO is expected to hold a view on all of it. No human being is an expert in all of it. The feeling that you don't know enough isn't weakness; it's an accurate reading of the situation. The question isn't whether you know everything. It's what "good enough" looks like at your level of the organisation.

And the nature of the role makes this worse. The decisions that matter most — what to build on, who to hire, where to invest engineering capacity — have feedback loops measured in years. You won't know if you were right until it's too late to course-correct easily. That ambiguity is permanent. Most people don't get comfortable with it; they just get better at acting despite it.

Then there's the comparison trap. The other CTOs you see at conferences, on LinkedIn, in investor meetings — they look certain. They have frameworks and opinions and they deliver them without visible hesitation. You're hearing their public performance and comparing it to your private experience. It's not a fair comparison. I know this because I've had the private conversations.

What I see in the room

As a CTO you might not come to me and say "I have imposter syndrome" in the first conversation. You might say things like:

"I feel like I'm one question away from being exposed."

"I keep waiting for someone to realise I don't actually know what I'm doing."

"Everyone else seems so certain. Why aren't I?"

You do not lack ability. You take your role very seriously. The doubt is often evidence of the right kind of self-awareness — the kind that makes you better at the job, if you can stop it from becoming paralysing.

The problem is never the feeling. The problem is what happens to it in the absence of anyone to talk to.

Isolation is where it compounds

You can't show doubt to your team. It undermines their confidence. You can't show it to the board. Your peer group from before you got the title has a different relationship with you now.

When there's nobody to think out loud with, the imposter feeling compounds in private. This is the part of the problem most people don't name — and it's the part that does the most damage. Not the feeling itself, but the silence around it.

Cannon-Brookes ended his TED talk with something worth sitting with. The most successful people he knows don't question themselves. But they do heavily question their ideas and their knowledge. They know when the water is too deep, and they're not afraid to ask for help. They don't see that as weakness.

That's the shift. Not be more confident. Not fake it till you make it. Build the habit of externalising the questions you're carrying alone.

Ok, but what helps in this situation?

Three things that move the needle, based on what I've seen work.

Stop hiding it from yourself. Name the feeling. Understand what's triggering it. Is it the knowledge surface? The lack of output metrics? A specific person or situation that activates it? The pattern matters. Imposter syndrome that says "I don't know everything" is different from "I'm performing a role I wasn't built for" — and they require different responses.

Get the private conversations. Find someone — a mentor, a peer, a trusted advisor — with whom you can think out loud without performing confidence. The effect is faster than you'd expect. The feeling doesn't disappear, but it stops compounding in the dark.

Distinguish self-doubt from knowledge gaps. The doubt that says "I can't do this" is usually about novelty, not competence. You haven't done it before. That's not a disqualification; it's a description of the role. The doubt that says "I actually don't know enough about X to make a good call here" is information. Act on it. Fill the gap. Ask the question. These are different things. Treating them the same is where most people go wrong.

What changed for me isn't that the feeling went away. It's that I stopped trying to make it disappear and started understanding what it was telling me.

Sometimes it's telling me I'm in the right room. Sometimes it's telling me I need to learn something. Sometimes it's just noise. Some other times I better go home.

Learning which is which — that's the work.