Atlassian Acquires Loom

They're not necessarily buying it just for the tech; I have no doubt that Atlassian could build their own version of Loom.

I'd guess that a big part of it is customer acquisition and then raising prices or ramping customers to other Atlassian products.

The startup system is pretty rigged against accidentally making anyone rich who is a mere employee. That money is for the investors, not the working class. The days of the office assistant making millions on stock are long gone. There's options with huge tax implications, long vesting periods, the investors get preferred stock, they get guaranteed multiples, if there's a down round there's a carve-out that you won't be part of.

Not only do the investors have priority shares over employees, each investor can negotiate a guaranteed multiple. For example if they put in 100 million for 10% ownership but also had a 5X multiple guarantee and a sale price of 1 billion then the 500 million they walk away with ends up being 50% of the sale price. That part of the agreement isn't made public as far as I know.

I've been using Peek for this for years and never thought it was a billion dollar feature

Can Atlassian just for once first go and stabilize their existing product lineup before trying to shoehorn yet another thing into their offering?

I mean, it's basic stuff that just isn't possible on JIRA Cloud for example, like setting a global sender address for notification emails - something perfectly possible on on-premise installations, but on Cloud you have to do that for each project and you can't even set it up as a default for new projects.

Or maybe what about a first-party Terraform provider. Or a support that's actually worth the name instead of underpaid callcenter employees that seem to have to strictly follow some sort of script instead of actually being allowed to use their brains or to properly read what customers write them.

That billion $ they just dumped out on this acquisition could have been invested into their existing products.

Loom is an excellent piece of software, but from my perspective in IT I've never been able to justify it's ROI.

I've been always pushing for it to go away as soon as had to start looking at SaaS spend. Looking at the analytics only a few power users really made use of it while the biggest majority of users never used to record or maybe only recorded 1-2 videos a quarter. It was too expensive and video is very expensive to run on the cloud.

Zoom released a competitor recently and that must be killing them. Other companies are also offering cheaper alternatives and egress traffic for video-centric businesses is crazy expensive.

They had layoffs not so long ago, like many companies, and during my last negotiations with them they were very aggressive with pricing. Aggressive to the point of their executive team asking what amount we wanted to pay, and they actually committed to the price we offered...

Glassdoor reviews and Blind comments weren't good at that time either, but that is true for most companies. I think they couldn't keep the revenue curve up-to-the-right to offer a decent return to their investors and it was turning more into an OK business. Time to sell, stay there for a year and move on to start their next thing. For Atlassian is a relevant acquisition, especially as they are also focusing more into chasing freshdesk or zendesk as a customer support platform.

I wish them the best, as I said, the product itself was very well designed and engineered compared to any other alternatives out there. I think they missed to make it relevant and a must have for companies, maybe focusing more to sale to sales and customer experience/support teams which tend to have big budgets compared to other teams.